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Sati Mookherjee, Eye, Ravenna Press, 2022. 67 pgs.

Sati Mookherjee’s lyrical Eye is a moving testament to her grandfather, Sri Anil Hari Chatterjee, who was exiled from India at the age of 17. Drawing on his memoirs, Mookherjee masterfully plays with time and affect, weaving together themes of yesterday, tomorrow, and sorrow. Eye is attuned to the diasporic placemaking of the emigrant and the displaced, bringing history and memory into the visceral realm of the personal, through kinship both longed for and in the making.

The collection opens and closes with Kal, which she translates as “yesterday/tomorrow” in Bengali. Between the collection’s two sections of Kal, she writes of Dukkho or sorrow. Dukkho follows a chronological narrative of her grandfather from the time he “climbed into exile” from Kolkata, to getting on the train to Manchester, to his subsequent sojourns in Europe, and to his eventual return to India before the Second World War in 1939.

Kal, yesterday/tomorrow, unfolds in the poet’s childhood home. The poem’s speaker spins a globe, blending the textures of her childhood memories with that of her subsequent scientific studies:

Of solar winds, raking grains of solar dust
into the moon’s native soil. I learned to read

what that polished globe spinning under my hand

(tomorrow / yesterday / tomorrow) told:
a story of travelers and immigrants.

Time’s linearity is disturbed, folding into itself. Tomorrow goes into yesterday and blends into tomorrow, going in circles, a cycle. These temporal rhythms illuminate her story and that of her grandfather’s—of travelling, movement, immigration, and palimpsests. Through this excerpt, Mookherjee also sets up the celestial tropes of the sun and moon that recur throughout the collection, especially in relation to one’s native soil.

The collection’s use of sun, moon, and soil elements can be read through the figure of Durga, as her three eyes correspond to fire/knowledge (Agni), the sun (Surya), and the moon (Chandra). Durga is a much-venerated deity on native soil (Kolkata) and is often depicted as a motherly figure, riding a lion, and with her many arms carrying weapons to defeat demons. She is associated with strength, motherhood, and destruction—a force of good combating the evils that threaten dharma.

In Mookherjee’s poetry, the notion that time does not cease with exile is especially pronounced. The death of loved ones during one’s absence forms the core of her poem “Dukkho #7”, which declares, “He was already practiced in grief.” The poem, about the speaker’s grandfather’s father’s death, proceeds:

fatherless. Grandmother had been mother
to him, and Durga also mother
—but immortal, and perfect—

the boyhood festivals of the goddess
colored with an acute grace; he sought and found

tenderness in everything—the boisterous pageantry—
drums, gongs—and the beauty—
three hundred butter lamps

studded the path to his home, streamed down the path
to the river, gilding the meager current.
He loved best the preparations
in the days before, ordinary things turned holy.

The poem evokes Chatterjee’s memories of his childhood rootedness, one that contrasts a present uprootedness and intense grief of a loved one passing away. Every year in Kolkata, the Durga Puja takes place over a period of 10 days, commemorating Durga’s return home with her children. The butter (ghee) lamps from the poem signify light and darkness being cast on the path towards “the river”, towards home. Prior to the festivities, a time that her grandfather “loved best”, the eyes of Durga images are painted in a ritual called Chokkudaan.” This ritual is an invitation for the goddess to descend to earth—the moment when “ordinary things turned holy”, when life is breathed in, not taken away.

Yet the line distinguishing home/away, here/there, or native/foreign is not so clear. Chatterjee began seeing “motherhood in any manifestation” in “Dukkho #14,” recasting his exile in a benevolent light. Such romanticism provokes the ire of his professor:

who stuffed his pipe’s meerschaum bowl
in rough fury before replying: Make no mistake,

Britain is a tigress:
a gentle mother within her den, but beyond it,
predator and carnivore, nothing less.

But he was no stranger to mother-warriors,
reared by Durga, by Kali, by his own mother,

Having relocated to Manchester, Chatterjee feels the draw of the motherland by virtue of his growing up there. Though the act of claiming these tender manifestations of motherhood for himself deeply disturbed his professor. It was almost as if his professor was insistent on reimposing imperialism, as he reminds Chatterjee of Britain’s predatorial nature towards those who were not British. The meerschaum material of the professor’s bowl is also likely composed of sepiolite from Turkish villages, further emphasising the imperial domination of early-20^th century Britain.

Yet, in this instance, Mookherjee reinforces her grandfather’s agency by bringing up his familiarity with mother-warriors from home, instead of pandering to colonial supremacy. Kali, like Durga, is another manifestation of the goddess Shakti, albeit an even more ferocious figure.According to some traditions, during a battle with the buffalo demon Mahishasura, Durga was so infuriated that her anger erupted from her forehead in the form of Kali. The goddess then consumed all the demons she encountered, attaching their heads to the chain around her neck. Kali has been associated is associated with time, death, destruction, darkness, and rebirth. Yet in that, there is a maternal quality that Chatterjee worships with Maa Durga and Maa Kali, in contrast to and alongside the tigress of Britain.

Chatterjee’s agency is made even more acute given the extent of grief and hardship that extended to the level of the everyday. “On a clear Saturday in Manchester,” in “Dukkho #18,” Chatterjee

meditates from a park bench:
bring me a mustard seed
from a home that has not known death, a Hindu prince

commanded a grieving woman, it was said,
and the beggar widow’s son, there under the screw-palm
—what became of him? Schoolmaster? Tailor?

Kita Gotami is evoked as the grieving woman in this poem. According to the parable, she refused to believe her son had died. When she consults the Buddha, he suggested finding a mustard seed from a house where no one had ever lost a family member—an impossible task. As Chatterjee conjured images of Kita Gotami’s situation, he conjectures about what her son would have become. He further ponders:

does the mother hear the husband’s voice soar
out of the throat of the chanting son?—Durga  Durga  Durga!

The poem grapples with the finitude of mortality, substantively spilling beyond what is commonly thought of as a one-time moral lesson. The return at the end of the poem to Chatterjee on the park bench, “on a clear Saturday in Manchester,” where it started, makes the reader consider the lasting echoes and reverberations of grief into the site of the everyday.

As Chatterjee ages through the Dukkho sequence, in “Dukkho #20,” he reaches for a lamp to illuminate a prayer book. Light then shines:

upon the face of Durga.
The light gathered
in a corona about her head, transforming her
into a Mary painted in oils, haloed,
or pieced in coloured glass in a church window.

He stared
at the hybrid God he had made.

Some sort of transfiguration takes place, one of religious hybridity on British soil that combines Durga and Mary. Durga had followed Chatterjee to Manchester and lingered throughout his life there. The couplet repeats the subject “he” twice, further emphasising Chatterjee’s agency in the making of his hybrid God. Here, he is shown to not be able to afford the purity of tradition and religion, having to make do with what he had, given his existing circumstances. Instead of succumbing to British imperial xenophobia and the grief of distance loved ones lost, he clings to and creates his own way of living in through acts of creative hybridity.

The last sequence, Kal, consists of a series of lyrical meditations, much on the future, but also on the past. The poet writes about her “grandfather’s daughter’s daughter’s son” and unborn daughter as part of tomorrow, deeply and intimately tied to yesterday. In “Kal #5,” she writes of afternoon worship with her grandfather, two years before his death:

Cello-taped to the pocked wall
a poster of the Mother Durga
garlanded in hibiscus.

[…]

My gaze follows his, returns
to Durga’s face, to her third eye, upright
as a spear of candle flame,

vanishing point.

The vanishing point is the point on a two-dimensional projection where mutually parallel lines in a three-dimensional space appear to converge. All things and all perspectives seem to lead back to Mother Durga—the deity from home, hybridised through diasporic travels, yet central to kin and self. She is the central point onto which all things converge, from Chatterjee’s experiences of Durga Puja and his life abroad in Manchester to Mookherjee and her family’s experiences and futures. Though, one might suspect why a hibiscus is used in this scene, as the hibiscus is normally used to worship Kali and lotus flowers are used to venerate Durga. Perhaps, this is part of the practice of making do, of hybridising one’s beliefs, having lived on many soils.

Not long after his death, in “Kal #8,” Mookherjee reads her grandfather’s memoirs about his own grandmother’s death:

At dawn we bathed her body

in the river. I almost fainted

from a grief that seemed to weight

my every limb.
The Bengali script, in the pale blue ink

of his fountain pen, dripped from the ledger lines,
much as the roots of a banyan tree stream

from its outstretched branches. I washed her face,
I translated. I thought I would shatter.

Grief is an intrinsic, intense human experience. It is one that Chatterjee, Mookherjee, and many have experienced and become practiced in. Following the banyan tree’s roots streaming across centuries, through the family tree, grief permeates through the generations—something deeply painful yet worth holding on to.

The collection’s start and end of Kal are like temporal circles with the linear chronological sequence of Dukkho in the middle. If lines of sight in vanishing points and lined connections in family trees connect Durga and kin, so does the circle. Revolutions of solar and lunar orbits, circles of light and shadow, the ring, the corona, the globe, and the eye’s circularity ripple throughout the collection. The affinities and relationships between these various circles felt like looking through a microscope and turning the adjustment knobs without ever settling an object into precise focus. While there is a clear pairing of physical and spiritual orbits through these circular motifs, I wonder what situating the circle amid other geometric forms, or more explicit surfacing of certain kinds of circles would do. How does the volume of the sphere interfere with two-dimensional vanishing points? Or what does opening the circle to its elliptical, conic, and ocular cousins do to circular perfection? Or what might the role of the circular argument be, for instance? Perhaps though, to precisely sharpen the mystery of the circle might also be to lose its allure.

Eye is a contemporarily divine assemblage. The lyric turns the everyday into the sacred, as a musical experience that points to ever-important questions at the core of being human, of living, and of dying. At once, Eye is a treatise on mortality, a celebrating of making kin in the present, and an interrogation of the past and futures of diasporic selves. And at once, I find myself meditating on my own trajectories, histories, family, and home, and how home is “an always-young and always-dying thing.”

How to cite: Lim, Al. “Under Mother Durga’s Watchful Eyes: Sati Mookherjee’s Eye.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 26 May 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/05/26/sati-mookherjee-eye.

Al Lim is an anthropologist and poet. He is currently doing fieldwork in Bangkok, as part of his PhD program in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Yale University. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in OF ZOOS, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and Tupelo Quarterly. [All contributions by Al Lim.]

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