The poems in Vyatheeth span a period of ten years from 1964 to 1974, and are arranged both thematically and chronologically. The poet begins by expressing the knowledge that she has begun on a journey. She does not know where exactly this journey has begun, or where it will end. Sometimes, not only the foreknowledge of destination but the purpose of the journey itself escapes her:

Even now the people I meet
Suggest I turn back.
And I do meet them—people, trees, birds.
… I gave up believing long ago
That someone would show me the right path.
Besides, how would they know
Where I want to go?
I don’t know this,
Myself. (19)

She feels rootless, alienated, and empty. Similarly, in "All Around Me This Crushing Crowd":

All around me,
this crushing crowd, gaudy,
lurid voices, explosions of colour.
… A grieving, sinking evening and I
wander through purposeless pathways—
Now stumbling like an Arab picking his way
through a desert night.
My feet sink into cold, cold sand,
Come up, sink again.
… But the real question is—am I cold and dry
or is it this never-ending desert? (4)

Self-doubt begins to creep into her consciousness. Is she alienated from her loved ones and familiar surroundings, or do they seem alien because she does not know who she is any more? Form and content are skilfully intertwined in these poems, with bleakness in content often mirrored in and enhanced by the pared down, ‘bare bones’ quality of the words:

Some new, blue, alien sky
Slowly flickers in the corner of your eye.
Evening is oozing everywhere
And a forlorn piece of sunlight
Tries to outrun the darkening sky. (1)

We see here an extension of the theme of alienation that Ganorkar introduces in ‘Journey’: ‘Where will I have come from?/Where have I gone?/At midnight the train reveals only/An unknown town’ (2). There is a play on the known and the unknown throughout this collection. The questions that Ganorkar asks repeatedly, almost obsessively—along with the existential ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I?’—include questions regarding what is ours and what is alien, what is ‘self’ and what is ‘other’. She explores what it is to be a woman who does not belong on a multiplicity of levels. This search for a female selfhood through a painful negotiation amongst assigned and situational subjectivities, despite the prescriptions of culture and history, marks the central concern of this writer’s attempts to dismantle existing stereotypes of Indian (Maharashtrian) womanhood and to politicise female experience within the enclosures set up by Hindu-Indian patriarchy.

    There is a recurring use of pathetic fallacy to support this dismantling, but also an ironic awareness of this usage. The speaking voice in these poems is painfully aware of its ‘difference’ and somehow resigned to the loneliness that accompanies this difference. This is a recurring motif right through her work. Self-doubt and loneliness are emphasised by the poet’s choice of words and structure. The words are sparse, bleak and to the point. There is very little ornamentation in terms of imagery or conventional Marathi poetic ‘beauty’. In fact, Ganorkar’s nature imagery is often deliberately cruel, even ugly, in keeping with her anti-Romantic stance. This is where her poetic voice diverges noticeably from many of her contemporaries such as Rajni Parulekar.[i]

    Her anti-Romantic approach is evident in ‘Excuse Me’, in which the speaker asserts:

Excuse me, but this is not a sapling that you can just uproot and plant elsewhere! As if the mere promise of rain is enough! These roots go very deep indeed, all the way to the core of the earth itself. Shake them this roughly and they hurt, you know! They break, too, deep inside. Not that you’d see the fractures. But you could see how the leaves are dying. If you looked very carefully. (32)

    This speaking voice is that of an ‘outsider’—alienated from her natural surroundings, social and cultural ethos. She prefers passivity, resignation, isolation, and silence to engaging in a material world devoid of meaning and fulfilment. Silence is, however, shown to be an involuntary state of being as well. The poetic voice calls into question the traditional silencing of women’s views and desires within a culture that regards them as objects rather than as subjects. Simultaneously, the poet subverts a silencing tradition by presenting poetic personae as choosing to be outwardly silent, possessing an intensely subjective, and articulate, imagination and consciousness. She tends to think or brood, rather than address others. The poet seems to posit that speech can hide or mask what is really being said, or alternatively, make her vulnerable by revealing too much. The deliberate irony of suggesting this in poetic words is not lost on the careful reader. Silence on the other hand, can become (and often does, in Ganorkar’s poetry) much more eloquent—a form of protest, ‘a different kind of speech’ (Huggan, 16). This paradox can be seen in ‘The End’:

We talked far too much.
Frankly speaking,
much more than was wise.
It was ok to go on about the present,
I suppose. Or even the past.
But to keep coming back to the future?
Not really good in the long run.
And we just kept talking.
Kept nothing to ourselves
No secrets, nothing private.
We forgot
That one should stop at some point.
Now the inevitable end of our dialogue can only be
Silence. (30)

The writing is restrained and taut, with rare dramatic moments erupting, as we see in the following poem:

Where do these birds go?
Where do they live?
What brings them home everyday
After their soaring flight? motherfatherchildrensisterbrotherwife?
Just one more question:
Are they too allowed to die
Only after their lives have ended? (18)

The structure of the poem sets us up perfectly for the twist in the last two lines. The seemingly harmless, even banal questions leave us unprepared for the end, which is disturbing in its casual, yet powerful articulation of intense despair. We also see here, perhaps, what the poet posits as the meaninglessness of the conventional dichotomy of life and death.

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