Book Title: When You Whirl Round and Round
Author: Perundevi
Translator: N. Kalyan Raman
Publisher: Harper Perennial India
Number of Pages: 176
ISBN: 9373074180
Date Published: Oct. 27, 2026
Book Excerpt
(Pages 23-27)
Hands up!
They let a toy baby
made of greeting-card phrases
crawl inside the poem
Those accustomed to greeting cards
lift the baby and coo at him
I shout:
It’s a toy, it’s a toy
To their shock
I am holding a gun
to the baby’s head
Hands up!
It’s a toy gun
I like this game
To young poets
Even if you are tied
to the last one or two trees left in the town
and thrashed
you must stand firm
The great poet Parra says
we can write poetry any way we want
and it is enough
if we improve the blank page
To this day
it is courage more than poetry
that has saved poetry
In history
what more do we need
than a bridge to cross
and a few skulls to banter with?
The room’s guises
When I hear ‘Ah! Ah!’
from the bedroom next door
my room turns into one
in a sleazy lodge
When furniture
is moved for hours on end
in the apartment above
it shifts
to a mental hospital
When cardinals and weaver birds
tap the glass window with a scowl
it becomes
a cage in a zoo
Sometimes
when none of this happens
it pretends to be
a familiar room
in a normal house
Appa
Long nose
Thick calluses from wearing glasses
Broken hearing aid
Varicose veins
For him
good health meant the capacity to eat well
courage meant chatting casually with the landlord
intelligence meant the one and only Kalaignar*
*Kalaignar (meaning: artist) refers to M. Karunanidhi, a towering political leader and five-time chief minister of Tamil Nadu.
Calendars of gods from the 1960s
Transistor radio of the 1970s
Diaries of the 1980s used for writing accounts
Unused postcards, yellow cloth bags
Naphthalene balls
A daughter with greying hair
The only advice he ever gave her:
‘Never ask god for anything.
What you get will bring you trouble.’
Suppose there is a heaven
and he made it there—
with his body shrunk like a packet
with his twig-like arms
he would try his best to hold back
the hands that rarely reach out from there
‘Don’t give her anything
Let the poor fool survive.’
Excerpted with permission from “When You Whirl Round and Round” by Perundevi & N. Kalyan Raman, published by Harper Perennial India.
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