Living in coffins

Satchidanandan

We are living in coffins, according to prominent bilingual Indian poet K Satchidanandan, former secretary of Sahitya Akademi. His recent poem (in Malayalam) titled ‘Man who lives in a coffin’ is the monologue of a man who is shut in a coffin that has a hole which lets in air for him to breathe. He can see a blade of grass or a flower when he looks out through that hole. Occasionally he hears the chirp of a bird or the cry of a calf. He is habituated to lying in the coffin. Even if someone opens the coffin he is not sure whether he will be able to walk outside. He has learnt certain discipline lying in there. He doesn’t know who lies in the coffin next to his. They say that all the coffins together form a nation. [Who are ‘they’? The poet doesn’t tell us.] The man in the coffin can hear one person walking outside. That person carries a painting brush. The man in the coffin can hear that person with brush chanting ‘saffron, saffron.’ With the brush he writes “Vande Mataram” on the coffin. That gives the man in the coffin goosebumps.

Sanjiv Bhatt IPS was put in a coffin long ago. Now Teesta Setalvad and R B Sreekumar are also in coffins. The painter outside is writing Vande Mataram on their coffins letting out saffron guffaws. A thousand corpses rotted in coffins in that place exactly two decades ago. There are 1.5 billion coffins constituting a nation. Coffins carrying live corpses.

The Poem