Author Note: Archana Sridhar
Archana Sridhar is the author of the poem “The Ring,” which appeared in The Ex-Puritan Issue 44: Winter 2019. As part of our Author Note series, she explains some of the influences behind the work.
Does your poem have an origin story you’d like to share?
I had been wanting to write a poem for a long time about my late grandmother, or Ajji, as she was called in my parents’ native language of Kannada. She died about twenty years ago, but I have so many childhood memories of spending summers in Bangalore, India, following her around the joint family home as she silently tended to the large household—she would cook meals for dozens on a traditional indoor fire cook stove, such a curiosity to this suburban Floridian kid! Over the years, I never really got to know my Ajji very well. She believed it was a mortal sin to cross the ocean, so she never visited us in America; my contact with her was limited to visits every few years (before the advent of the internet and Skype). I often reflect on the sheer magnitude of the distance between our lives—how she might have found my life unrecognizable. Every morning, I try to meditate—anywhere from ten to thirty minutes or so. And every year in the fall, as Hindus, we honour our elders during the period of Pitr Paksha. Over a two-week period, we reflect on our ancestors and heritage, pray to them for blessings, and dedicate our daily practices to the never-ending cycle of birth and death. It was during Pitr Paksha last year that the line, “We are deities are we / revered” came up for me in meditation, as if my Ajji was sending me a message: What is the meaning of revering our elders? How are we connected to them through space and time? From that one line, I was inspired to write this poem.
What other influences came into play?
This poem was definitely influenced by two physical objects that I kept close by over the months that I wrote and revised it. The first is a photo of my Ajji in my son’s room—it shows her carrying me on her hip on my first birthday. She was a tiny woman with white hair and one glass eye, and she always wore a nine-yard sari wrapped in the traditional South Indian way, around her whole body and between her legs, almost like pants. I love that photo as a reminder to my son of where and who we came from. The second object is a diamond ring that was left to me when my Ajji died. It was originally her nose ring, one piece of a suite of wedding jewelry that would have been given to her when she married at a very young age. Wedding jewelry in our culture holds outsized significance—it is a source of independent wealth, sort of an insurance policy for a woman to make choices within a confined family setting. The ring became a sort of talisman for me, a symbol of my Ajji’s blessings and inter-generational strength.
Tell us the best thing you’ve read lately, or a poet/fiction writer you’re jealous of, or a poetry/short story collection you wish you wrote.
I don’t think I can narrow it down to just one! I recently finished Phoebe Wang’s poetry collection Admission Requirements and loved it for its crystal-clear imagery about the connection between land/place and our histories. I’ve been returning to the Beat Poets lately, especially Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac since I am working on a project using Ginsberg’s 17-syllable “American Sentences.” I find their irreverence and humour refreshing, especially combined with their heart-tugging images of the humdrum of daily life. I devour all of Patti Smith’s writing, and am so jealous of the way she can so vividly describe the talismanic power of physical objects. And any time I’m struggling for inspiration, I turn to some of the same writers— like Terrance Hayes for sound inspiration and how to transmit rage in poetic form; or Jonathan Franzen for his brilliant and hilarious observations about our secret human feelings.
Archana Sridhar is a poet and university administrator living in Toronto. A graduate of Bard College, Harvard Law School, and a former Fulbright Scholar, Archana focuses on themes of meditation, race, motherhood, and trauma in her poetry. Her work has been featured in The Brown Orient, The /tƐmz/ Review, The Hellebore, The Blake-Jones Review, and elsewhere.
