Ganorkar seems to say throughout Vyatheeth that women are wounded and killed many times over in a patriarchal society. Another one of her overriding concerns is also broached in this poem: namely, the futility of blood ties, and irreparable damage caused by relationships, especially those within the framework of patriarchal heterosexuality and the institution of marriage. The poem ‘Touch’ broaches what I interpret as the issue of forcible sex in marriage, or marital rape:

That my body would be numb to touch.
Strangled sobs in the silent night
That dissolve before they emerge.
Breaths. Hot as the midday sun
At the height of summer,
Spreading like a wildfire
… My body is a burnt, smoking cinder…
Touch.
That my body would disintegrate
Like a leper’s limbs. (7)

This poem could also be read as an expression of pain and disgust for a middle-class woman’s conjugal ‘duties’ and for the belief that the female body is property for male use. We also see hate for a body which she would have ‘disintegrate/Like a leper’s limbs’, a body that makes her vulnerable to violation.

This is where Ganorkar’s work diverges from many of her better-known contemporaries writing in English, such as Shashi Deshpande. Deshpande’s women struggle to achieve an identity and marriage acceptable to themselves; Ganorkar’s voices embrace the pain of isolation and ‘not belonging’, finding that male-female relationships exact too high a price. We see this explored in ‘Gaze’, where the woman is framed and ultimately violated by the male gaze. That the man blinds himself, only serves to underscore the bitterness:

He could look at her only as long as her eyes
Sparkled with life, like the blue of sapphires.
Then her eyes turned into burnt-out coal,
Her storm-tasting lips dulled to a dirty foam-white,
Her body grew numb as a block of wood.
And still his gaze crept over her
fungus-like.
And so, he plucked out his own eyes. (31)

Again, characteristically, the twist in the last line points to a deliberate ambiguity. One is unsure as to whether the man has blinded himself out of guilt and horror at what he has done, or whether the woman has ceased to be beautiful.

The other most striking difference between Deshpande and Ganorkar’s work is that Deshpande’s women are usually rejected or denigrated by their mothers and older female relatives for being female, and they usually reject their mothers as role models. Ganorkar’s persona in ‘For My Mother’, on the other hand, writes with love and tenderness about her mother, explores her mother’s past through the mother’s poetry, and expresses regret at not trying to know her mother as a woman:

Your book of poems sits here on the table. A strange exhaustion has come over me while wandering through your words, while travelling through your lines … I have wrung your experiences out of every word on the page and they sit humming and heavy in my bones, like the air just before a lightning storm … I want to learn you. The woman hidden inside you, the one I didn’t know. I want to have known you. (Pratishthan, 5-7)

This technique provides a deliberate counterpoint to the subdued tone of most of the poems, revealing the undercurrent of passionately felt emotions. Thus, Ganorkar is able to foreground the emotionally charged poetic persona behind the seeming transparency and coolly ironic distance of the poems. This is very clearly seen in ‘Funeral Pyre’:

You smell it, don’t you? The stench of burning flesh?
I can tell by the way your nostrils flare.
You’ve guessed correctly, it is the smell of a burning
corpse.
Quite surprising, I suppose—
This stench pervading an affluent suburb—
Or is it?
… I light quite a few funeral pyres when I can, you know
… For myself, killed in some forgotten past.
This pyre is for a dead woman. See, it’s like this,
Her body lay unattended in the street
For three days and finally the smell ...
What’s that? You’re in a hurry?
Oh well, hold on just a minute, will you,
I’ll join you as soon as her skull
shatters. (26)

There are two motifs that stand out most clearly within the journey in Vyatheeth. One is the heightened awareness of the isolated and fragmented self of the poet. Simultaneously there is an exploration, through Ganorkar’s sensibility, of the double standards and limits Indian society imposes on women, even those from the middle-class and those highly educated (Leard, 58). The loneliness and isolation that arises from breaking away from these limitations, or at least confronting these constructs, is never romanticised. Rather, the poet’s emphasis shows how this erodes her sense of worth and adds to her fragmentation:

Since yesterday, this rain has poured
down endlessly.
… The life that sprouts in our veins
Must be uprooted so it withers and dies.
Since yesterday, this rain has poured
down endlessly.
So be it.
Who cares, when shoots will be destroyed
Even before they peep from the mud. (10)

She sometimes sees herself as prey being hunted by ‘them’—patriarchal, violent beings wishing to uphold the status quo, to efface any signs of a strong female self. This is evident in ‘Search’, one of her most direct, starkly simple, and effective poems:

They killed me
But did not let me bleed.
They hacked at me
But smothered my screams
Then smeared their bodies
With my ashes
And bellowed their grief—
Now that I am reborn,
My eyes search for them
Unceasingly. (8)

Again, here is a questioning of the birth/death binary. In this poem, ‘killed’ and ‘wounded’ could be the literal or symbolic violence inflicted upon women in patriarchal cultures, as mentioned earlier. But Ganorkar’s deliberate ambiguity comes through here once more. The last two lines could be interpreted in two ways: the woman seeks revenge on those who inflicted pain and suffering on her in the past, or, it could be that after rebirth as an emergent feminist consciousness ‘They’ have run away. But the lines could also be seen as a masochistic longing to be hurt again.

A similar masochistic relish, albeit self-reflexive, emerges in ‘Dutiful Blood’. The blatantly sarcastic, even flippant tone is unusual. What comes through strongly is contempt for herself as victim. Her attitude also implicates all the other women encouraged to be masochistic, because assuming martyrdom allows them a modicum of power in what is otherwise a powerless life. This contempt is seen repeatedly. In an act of interesting ambiguity, she flagellates herself even as she expresses disgust at her self-flagellation:

I will not say that you betrayed me.
What for?
I have nursed my wounds fastidiously.
Why bother?
This blood leaks continuously
A congealed moment is illusory ...
It has forgotten how to stop, this blood.
Its duty is to flow and flood. (9)

But these lines could be read, too, as expressing an assertive revolutionary vision—one that sees femaleness, after oppression, impersonally ‘flooding’ the world and changing it.

In reading Ganorkar’s work as a whole, I posit that she, through her poetic persona, asserts that it is possible to suffer tremendously, even to be destroyed, but that one can reinvent oneself by actively inscribing resistance to essentialist constructs and traditions. In other words, one can empower oneself through self-analysis and political acts of agency. This is suggested by the reiteration of the metaphor of rebirth and Ganorkar’s frequent use of the phoenix image throughout the collection. Reading her work in this way, it does not matter how much of the poetic persona is autobiographical and how much a poetic construct. Whether or not the work is ‘genuinely’ confessional, the poetic voice that comes through is convincing.

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