Toward the end of his strikingly melancholic memory play The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’s protagonist Tom Wingfield, himself an aspiring poet, voices a soliloquy where he makes an intriguing observation: “I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further–for time is the longest distance between two places” (Williams 96). Wingfield’s conjoining of disparate quantifiable measures – of time and space – renders possible, perhaps, an understanding of how desire might structure both. It takes time to traverse the distance between, say, the long-departed past, the instantly annulled now of the always already dying present, and a sense of the future to come, always to come, in the throes of arriving yet never fully arriving. Is this not how memory works where what we remember and forget of the time of the past – for the purposes of present living, to prepare for a future to come – speaks to the desire that precisely informs this very “what” of that which is remembered and forgotten of our delicate, oft-times faulty memory?

Desire, here, might lay the necessary groundwork for the very traversal of that impossible-to-discern distance between “two places” marked by time. Is it accurate, then, to suggest that time could be a stand-in, a metonym, for desire itself? What, for instance, might be meant by what appears to be a kind of throwaway colloquial utterance, “all we have is time…”? Could it mean that all we have, truly, is our desire? Similarly, what might it mean to state affectively, even emphatically, if we have the privilege to do so, still yet another utterance we are often exposed to, or prone to making ourselves, “I have no time…”? Might it mean that the privileged “I” of that proclamation lacks desire? Between the seeming liberal hope inscribed in a statement such as “all we have is time…” (to traverse the distance between “two places”) and the looming dread of loss and absence in a statement like “I have no time…” (to traverse that very distance), perhaps substituting “time” with “desire” opens up that distance between those “two places” – making room for a more thoughtful, ethical sort of engagement with oneself and one’s own sense of time, space, and the desires that inform both these parameters upon which life is lived and experienced.

Akhil Katyal’s stunning collection of poems, Night Charge Extra, feels very much like a collection of such thoughtful soliloquies, engaged and engaging remembrances more like it, that allow for this opening to be carved out, that allow for the longest distance between two places to be traversed. Night Charge Extra might very well signify the distances we travel in our lives, quite possibly perhaps between self-estrangement and self-awareness, the varying lengths of psychical and material time it takes for distances to be traversed, the personal and historical times in which those distances become covered, and the desires, acting as catalysts at the core of our subjectivities, that sustain those journeys. Quite literally, we know that night charge extra signifies that extra bit – in monetary cost – that it takes to travel a distance late at night. Katyal’s breathtakingly written and curated collection accounts for other costs as well; these, here, being tenderly affective and emotional, vulnerably psychical, and evocatively both historical and socio-political.

Take, for instance, the tenderness with which he opens the collection with the poem My grandfather. A poem that might be interpreted, at its heart, as being about memory, historicity, loss, and inheritance, could also be about how Katyal attempts to cover a distance between his grandfather and him in their shared experience – the queer art historian John Paul Ricco would call it a scene of shared-separation – of the loss of language. An Urdu-reading grandfather, displaced from Lahore as a result of history’s weighty attempt at redrawing the map of the subcontinent, a byproduct of the aftermath of partition, finds himself speaking a language familiar to him in his new home in Delhi whose new script, in Devanagri, remains unknown, elusive, foreign, distant. He harboured, still, no desire in learning the new script, as the language that he spoke, an old, familiar, intimate language, remained the same. He asks his grandchildren to read the script for him – an inheritance in the opposite direction, he possesses the script vis-à-vis his grandchildren reading it for him. As the poet notes, years later, on his part as he attempts to read Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s letters in their Urdu original, what he did not inherit from his grandfather – the knowledge and ease with which to read and grasp the Urdu script – is palpable. One could ask, at this conjecture, as this reader did, what might the “after” in aftermath, here of partition, mean? As the poem comes to a close, the poet responds to this aftermath of such a loss of the script of each other’s tongues, which while being lost in the form of script remains, nonetheless, the same in speech:

What grandfather and I
do not know – Urdu, Hindi –
lie in each other’s glass, in
each other’s loss, in their
remaining on our tongue, and yet,
as we try, in their flying from our eye. (Katyal 12)

If My Grandfather took account of the temporal distances that delineate how inheritance does or does not occur between two subjects, there a grandfather and a grandson, at the site of language experienced simultaneously as both uncannily familiar and intimately other to oneself, then Indus, 3180, materialises in the manner of a physical distance traversed by the river and the poem’s reader the dissonant horrors of partition’s historical legacies. The poem opens with the following scene: school’s out for the summer and a young boy, Umair, of schoolgoing age,

strolling aimlessly in the Giddu Park,
walks down the banks
of the Indus

and lowers his feet into the water
and finds, half-lodged in sand

a fruit, small and dark,
like a custard apple

under the water,
interfering with sunshine. (16)

From where the above scene occurs, Hyderabad, {“no, the other one, in Sindh, Pakistan” (16), as Katyal is quick to identify}, the poem effectually and necessarily forces the reader to traverse both time and space, to another time, to another location, Siachen {“no, not in Pakistan, not in any country, but in snow where borders fall through crevasses” (17)}, where we meet Vijay, a soldier for the Indian army. After a day of training, we find Vijay walking back to camp, looking longingly at a photograph of him and Reema, achingly remembering the lover he left behind in Bareilly. On this walk, he also remembers a now-ill friend, “long since gone back to the plains” (18) who Vijay recalls as remarking once, “all this staying here, this air, causes damage to the brain...I will carry the mountains back to the plains as a kind of inability” (18). Attempting, now, to understand the causes of his friend’s illness, acquired during the conflict, Vijay ponders, “why are the battles of the people of the plains always fought in the mountains” (19)?

This state of remembering and wondering amidst this scene of seeming relative calmness is suddenly disrupted, is turned within moments into a scene of war, “the colour…of hell…is burning sulphur” (19). In his haste, he starts unloading his backpack and as he slowly empties his bag, “save Reema and him, rose-like, in the studio in Bareilly he threw at last…like a custard apple, small and dark, one grenade” (20). Just as suddenly as Vijay’s languid pondering came to a halting stop, Katyal halts the poem itself at this precise juncture, and the reader, without any capacity to contain where her/his thoughts might go, is forced, again necessarily, to traverse that river’s distance back to that scene in Giddu Park to find Umair picking at and picking up from the river’s bed what would be that very “custard apple”. The river, that serves as a sort of lifeline for both fertility and fecundity for the distance that it travels brings with it, in the poem, the horror of death. Time, here, becomes the longest distance between life and death.

In You alleged of your absence in my poetry, Katyal turns his keen eye for words upon the intimate site of the text. A lover alleges their absence in the poet’s work and the poet goes to great lengths to painstakingly address the anxious tone implicit in this accusation. The distances being traversed here are the lines of the work itself. The text is sifted through; its textuality given over to intense, meticulous scrutiny by the poet himself to prove the lover wrong and otherwise, to show that the lover is (and was perhaps always already), indeed, present “where the sense alters…where one meaning falters into another…where a word spurns another” (64). Katyal goes further when he suggests that the scorned lover was even present “in the pauses where [the poet] halted for breath…the words were warmer by [them]” (64). Not to be bested by the allegation of this absence, Katyal closes the poem by suggesting, “sometimes you were the comma” (64), signifying in the tenuous punctuation a rupture, a break, a parting (perhaps from), an ambivalence within the feeling itself that structures the poet’s desire for their lover and perhaps for the act of writing itself. To stay true to the demands of the lover, to write the lover into the very body of his text would also mean that the poet take account of these wild ruptures that present themselves, appear as such, in the space of desire itself.

Say, the poet accounts for ruptures within the space of desire itself, then what might be the relationship between desire and hindsight? Years before we thought attempts an answer to this very question. A poem, at its core, perhaps about the traversal of temporal distances – “Years before we thought that years later, if nothing else, we will have hindsight” (85) – here the poet looks back while simultaneously not resisting to look at the present. He suggests that “[years] before we thought…we will have years to look back on with wonder and regret, we will have friends and more, we will have love” (85). Life, in its unpredictability, in its unwieldy ebb and flow, however, seems to have had other plans for us:

Now years have passed,
and we know that with
each year gone, we knew
a little less of the game,
we still had things wrong,
just less people to blame,
and we still had love, only
it went as it came, and we
knew one thing, to be sure,
about wanting to scream,
if you keep it in, quietly,
it comes out as a dream. (85)

It would appear – rehearsing what seems to be something akin to Sigmund Freud’s provocation in The Interpretation of Dreams where the progenitor of psychoanalysis suggested that dreams are a form of “wish-fulfillment” – the poet draws a line to mark the distance between the past and present life, between lost time and present awareness, between that which was repressed (in life, in memory, in the decisions we made or did not make) and what inevitably finds their release, their escape, as hindsight, perhaps in the space of a dream. Nothing is left to chance, all distances become covered in the time between the past and the present as desires, even repressed ones, both those known and those that remain unknown, find their way out. Hindsight is not merely 20/20; it is what dreams are made of.

If the prior poems examined here were about virtual distances being covered in time and space, the poem that closes the collection, Lie down in the park, appears to be about stillness. Or rather, it appears to be about movement or moving while maintaining a sort of stillness. To bring this collection to an end with this elegantly poignant poem, Katyal stages what resembles a meditation on embodiment, on the body, and on the gestural. As Katyal paints his tender portrait of a body at rest, the reader will discover a body starkly aware of its own movements, its capacity for what appear to be meaningless gestures that may be astoundingly infused with so much profound meaning. One does not have to “go to the moon…[or] much further,” as The Glass Menagerie’s Wingfield suggested; rather, as Katyal makes beautifully clear, one can experience desire in the stillness of one’s body, in the stillness that is reflected in the very gestures and movements that that body is capable of, of the short distances the body itself covers. An intimate series of poems, thus, concludes with a poem about a body aware of its own capacity for an intimate relationship with itself and with the world exterior to and around it:

then turn around
a little for ease,
sinking in the green,
your shirt slipping
on your waist, an’
through your fingers
sunshine tripping in. (90)

Time, distance, desire – all get covered in Katyal’s work. The maturity with which Katyal writes showcases a commitment to observing the world as a profoundly meaningful space. In such a space of meaning and meaning-making, the weight of the affect, emotion, and feeling he intends to produce in his readers is measured by the weight of the words he chooses so seemingly effortlessly yet so undeniably thoughtfully. Through these considered and measured efforts at bringing the world to life with words, such a world is seen as a place where subjects travel great psychical distances over time to bridge the gap between circuitous desires that make us, both the figures in his poems and his willing readers, feel all the more human, composed all the more by the matter of both flesh and blood. As suggested earlier, there is a provocative tenderness that is evoked in each poem, sometimes mournful, at other times playful, at all times deeply humane and ethical, and what is provoked is this very notion that there exists in his poems “two places,” so to speak – the place of the intensely human and humane, as such, and the very place of each poem conceived of as the world writ large. It would appear that the task of the poet is to sensually bridge the distance between these “two places” and keep time, account for the pulse beating, as the distance closes in. Night Charge Extra stands uniquely as both witness and testimony to that most urgent of all of a poet’s tasks, to write the world as they see it, to suture the abundant distances that leave the world in ruins, ruptured, fragmented, impossibly fragile.

Works Cited:
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon Books, 1965.
Katyal, Akhil. Night Charge Extra. Kolkata: Writers Workshop Kolkata, 2015.
Ricco, John Paul. The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions Books, 1999.

End Notes:

(1) To garner a greater understanding of this sense of shared-separation, check out John Paul Ricco’s The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes. Ricco suggests there that, “separation is the spacing of existence, and is, by definition, never solitary but always shared. It is what affirms that for anything to exist, there must be more than one thing, each one separated from each other one, together partaking in the spacing between that is opened up by separation. Existence, therefore, is relational and shared, and hence is always to be understood as coexistence. Not the coming together of solitary and autonomous beings, but existence as sharing or partaking in separation as the there is of existence – the spacing (there) of being (is) together. If separation is the spacing of existence, and if existence is always relational and shared, then sharing in separation is the praxis of coexistence – of being-together” (3).