Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout, a Fever With a Book Of Poems Attached 

Before the fever could be diagnosed, it had already begun to write.

In that brief, incandescent interval when illness suspends routine yet sharpens attention to a strange, ruthless clarity, renowned editor R. Rajagopal found himself reading without distance or defence. What fell into his hands was “Window With a Train Attached” by C. P. Surendran; a book of poems that cut rather than console, that flare, bruise, and refuse repose.

This is not a review composed at a desk, but one written from within a fever’s intermission, where reading becomes a bodily event and criticism registers as pulse rather than judgement. ‘Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout, a Fever With a Book of Poems Attached’ begins in that charged space between heat and lucidity, as the train races on and the knife flashes briefly, unforgivingly, in the light.

The furies of fever have often lent a helping hand, if not a healing touch. The fire, before it burns itself out, offers an escape from the everyday rituals and a guiltless excuse to take a break without endangering the gross domestic product.

So it was last week when the fever dropped in like a bosom buddy who can come calling unannounced. Prose and paracetamol do not mix well, neither do music and mercury.

It takes fire to fight fire. That’s how “Window With a Train Attached”, a collection of new and selected poems by C.P. Surendran, leaped from the shelf to the bed. Surendran’s ego would probably be hurt but the hook for the bed-hopping was the cover photograph taken by Karl Hedin, the Stockholm-based urban designer and photographer who follows “the light of the sun”. Light plays a stunning role in the cover, adding a haunting edge to a corridor in a coach. The light explodes in the foreground, softens down the pathway and trickles to a whisper with a dramatic dash at the far end. The picture indeed is of a “Window With a Train Attached”. Not clear who chose the picture, Surendran or Renuka Chatterjee at Speaking Tiger? Some readers do judge a book by its cover. So, the credit for making the right choice should also be given, says the subeditor who plodded through acres of pictures in photo libraries with unkind martinets who breathed down shoulders drooping because of bad chairs and worse habits unrelated to ergonomics.

SWISH, SLASH, RIP AND SQUELCH! Didn’t see it coming — the blade. Surendran strikes without mercy. The very first line takes no prisoners: “A line in my head swims, hooked through chin and eye….”

Does Surendran yank the blade to the other end like a Corsican knife-fighter who is trained to show no mercy with the curved Navaja? Yes, he does. After slaughtering “the mango tree that my father planted and nursed”, “the men lit a smoke”. “One said: ‘Now that the roots are dead,/ Your house is safe. This wood’s all fire:/ It’s too young, too light”.

Surendran was an editor but he goes against the garrulous grain and chronicles Kashmir’s sorrow in four devastating lines, flagging what “those who shoot and those who seek must wonder”.

“Options for an Old Man in a Far Room” has a more agreeable choice after a frightening reference to “step off the ledge”: “Or watch the river cluck against the long-snouted rocks sunning/ Like crocodiles…”.

What could Surendran be referring to when he writes “In Sunday’s placid light, annihilation of bread and wine?” Go figure.

The poem “Lazarus” has the line “No one wept”. Many consider the shortest verse in the Bible to be “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). It’s believed to be the shortest recorded sentence spoken by Jesus in the New Testament, highlighting his humanity and sorrow at Lazarus’s death. Was Surendran referring to that with his three-word statement?

“The Bandaged Ear” leaves no such riddle. Vincent, brothel, Gabrielle and the mesmerising line: “And your blue eyes wondered what you had done for them — the bullet in the gut“.

The fever is raging but an infinite sadness is enveloping the body like a blanket.

The Victoria Terminus that is forever awaiting the queen with each train, the wayside Gulmohar that has outgrown “the guardian cage”, the children of Gaza “bathed in their fathers’ blood” and the noon that “slips down from the sofa to carpet inching to its end, where the window farms a verse…” and “a memory that wept”.

Surendran’s mastery is running amok and the knife keeps flashing by. The knife is a good companion when fever plays tricks on the reader. The imaginary steel offers cold comfort and you want to bite on something solid. Surendran’s poems recommended, if a knife is not to be found immediately to bite on.

There she blows, there she blows. It’s the title poem. On Page 31. “Window with a Train Attached” has “a knife sleeping/On the tray table“. Does it “draw blood from a sleep-walking thumb”? Go, buy the book.

Page 102 has Calcutta. “We sat on the black rocks/ heavy as seeds of time/enduring our silence/like punishment/for a prehistoric crime.” Then Calcutta began to taste more familiar: “It began to rain. we came to a halt./down from our head ran/little rivulets./those bit the lips like salt.”

“Renunciation” has the taste of beer, wine, mint tea, water and whiskey.

Then, “in the distance/A train blindfolded/By a tunnel/ Window by window/ Regained vision”.

The fever is breaking. How does Surendran write in such a spectacular fashion and flourish, like a train on fire? Was it the air in Minnesota, where the poet stayed to work on the volume?

In the same Minnesota, on January 7, multiple calls were received on 911 around 9.38am.

In one call, a caller told the dispatcher that there were “a bunch of ICE agents on 33rd and Portland, they just shot a lady point-blank range in her car”. Asked if the woman had been shot, the caller responded: “She’s fuckin’ dead. They fuckin’ shot her.”

The murdered woman was  Renée Good. She was 37.

Is this a review? No.

Then, what is it? A fever chart.