Memories and the City: A Review of Nikita Parik’s My City is a Murder of Crows

Dhee Sankar

Some poetic voices flourish in prolixity and loftiness, while for some others, brevity is the soul of poetry. Nikita Parik’s latest collection of poems, My City is a Murder of Crows, published by Hawakal, is a remarkable exemplum of the latter kind of poetics. Effortlessly traversing through the visceral to the spiritual, the book brings together the poet’s travails and travels through motley mindscapes over a period of approximately two years. As evident from the title, the body and its crises play a central role in the book’s ideational structure. The word “murder” inevitably invokes connotations more sinister than
that of a collective noun. In her Introduction, Nikita trenchantly describes the book as a body, and the reader as its consciousness — negotiating the writer’s language to reach their individual truths. According to her, “the book becomes the body, and you begin with the heart—the heart of the city.” The four parts into which the book is divided are said to correspond to the heart, the mouth, the abdomen, and finally, the nerve channels that disperse the “feverish words” to the rest of the body. Accordingly, the four parts are named: “My City is a Murder of Crows,” “This Mouth is an Ocean,” “Daylight Furrows in my Abdomen,” and “Vignettes of Nerve-rush.” As in an organic body, these motifs intersect on many instances, such as the epigrammatic first poem of the book:

My mouth is a prayer
waiting
to be translated.
. . .
in its warmth,
a city happens. (pg. 19)

The city becomes “my city” owing to its intimate and seamless symbiosis with the book’s (and presumably the author’s) body politic, outlined in the Introduction. A city inhabits us as much as we inhabit a city, but in the end, since human lives are lived in the transience of transits, a city belongs to us as little as we belong to it. Nikita writes of cities rather than a city; “Cityscapes,” her poem on Hyderabad, laments or simply observes the futility of her own efforts to hold on to a city and its memories, through the voice of an Uber bike driver:

‘Oh, but you don’t
love cities like that’
. . .
‘They are not for possessing’. (pg. 20)

Desire drowns in dispossession; affective fragmentariness becomes a theme which pertains to the poet’s perception of cities as well as bodies, including that of her own.

Three cities are explicitly mentioned: Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Kolkata.
Fragmentariness characterizes all of them:
I cut my city
into a vertical slice:
. . .
This city, a pastiche
of scraps across eons . . . (“Kalkatta”; pg. 22)

The body and the city intersect, interact, and hold a dialogue over the division of desire, the splicing of feelings. In a powerful short poem, “Skyscraper,” an aspect of the modern cityscape turns into a metaphor for someone’s strand of silver hair, as the urban skyline of the book segues into the difficult subject of love. Another notable feature in these early poems is the comparison of a certain part of the city with a certain body part:

Wrapped in the fabric
of my pink dupatta,
Begum Bazaar is
the fabled navel
in the eye of antiquity. (pg. 24)

The taste of chai, the fragrance of itr, the sadness of old Hyderabadi mosques, and the historicity of the Charminar mingle in a synaesthetic, sensual perception of history. Melancholy haunts these historicized vignettes, as evident from the poem “Want”: “In your absence, this city / is a monsoon puddle.” Orhan Pamuk has worked elaborately on this theme of melancholy vis-à-vis the city, using the Turkish word hüzün to designate it. A spiritual dimension of selfhood finds expression in the intersection of urban architecture and personal relationships. The “prayer” mentioned in the first poem is realized on the premises of a mosque, in the company of a friend wearing an other-coloured dupatta: “the pink of my dupatta / touching the blue of yours” (pg. 27). The mystic heritage of Rumi and Ghalib are invoked in a couple of simple, enigmatic lines on intoxication: “In your reality, it’s really the drink / that drinks you” (pg. 28). Colours, drinks, and melancholic desire are juxtaposed in the setting of the cozy urban café, which — as we millennial city-dwellers know all too well — em-bodies emotional aspirations in a unique way:

You see the yellow of longing
in my eyes, and you say those
three words, measured and exact,
‘Please Move On.’ (pg. 32)

The poem that contains the line from the title follows suit: “Post-jab, my city / is a murder of crows” (pg. 29). A single word, “post-jab,” is enough for Nikita to invoke the traumatic, corvine bleakness of post-Covid life, haunted by the spectre of death and decay.

Politics also finds a place in the dance of death that the book goes on to portray. “Unreal City,” written in the context of the 2020 Delhi riots, vividly contrasts the violent reality of communalism to the innocence of a child’s Instagram artwork. The poet’s irony bites bitter:
“I hear they are live-streaming the revolution” (pg. 34). 

The city, like the post-Covid body, emerges as a site of fatal conflict. In the prose poem “The City Reacts to News about the War,” war is compared with fractures, swellings, and eruptions in the body. The wilting of a flower heralds “perennial beginnings”:

. . . We let nothing
really die, you see. Things end, then begin
into something else: A wilt is a waltz is a weltschmerz. (pg. 39)

The themes of spirituality and disease — two extremities that often occur together — return in different forms in each of the four parts of the book. In another titular poem, “This Mouth is an Ocean, we find a line that walks the thin line between love and disease, or to be more precise, between love and Covid: “all of existence is / a gasping for air” (pg. 48). Quotidian subjects, such as a visit to the dentist’s and the poet's mother reading poetry during the pandemic, are transformed into revelatory moments. A spliced piece of skin from a kitchen accident becomes a metaphor for the hurt of “some kinds of absences” (pg. 57). Love itself is a tear or a glitch in the matrix of the body/city, which, once wounded, never heals but only closes — we never heal from our loss, but only find closure.

I stole and stole until I
became a salient
museum of your youness.
Now this museum is
just another brick
and mortar in a city
learning to steal differently. (pg. 62)

Vivid autobiographical poems emerge from the poet’s experiences of battling Covid, hospitalization, and personal losses. Notably, these poems are written in sparse prose rather than in the aesthetic verse form — a testimony to the life-threatening exigencies that brought them to life. In the penultimate poem of the book, Nikita urgently asks:

There’s some life
in the act of dying too,
but what becomes
of a thought that needs
anaesthesia to be? (pg. 94)

Unlike bodies beset with disease, some thoughts have to be buried before they are dead —
and that is the greatest source of pain in this poignant book, as well as the greatest source of
its power.

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