Everyday

Anthropologists use this word a great deal. The everyday must not be segregated from the episodic or the eventful, as I see them in the Braj region. They merge into each other as the decoration of the everyday becomes a small gesture toward the grand register of the eventful; the eventful becomes regular, repetitive in the cyclical time of the Braj. The everyday in my travels in the Braj reveals itself in fragmented forms - flower petals, struggling flame of camphor, faint voice of a night song.

Anne Carson writes in the Introduction to her masterful If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Virago, 2002), that there are two sources of Sappho - the papyrii, and the quotations of Sappho in texts of the ancient Greeks including Aristotle. Carson talks at length about the papyrii, justifying her brackets to indicate the parts of the mansucripts that are illegible, saying that the reader shouldn’t be robbed of the “drama” of papyrii-reading. Like a girl on a sea beach, Carson goes out collecting seashells of Sappho. A Sappho here. A bit of Sappho there. Sappho the poet, lyrisicist, singer, woman, most likely lesbian.

Much of the fragments are mysterious and incomprehensible. There are ancient Greek warriors and their worlds alluded to - Hektor, Aphrodite and so on. There is the “salted sea”; there are roses and hawthorns and dew drops. All kinds of allusions to a pristine world. One, that I read as being, regularly wrecked by the force of desire. Who is Sappho? Why does she write? What is her peculiar story of heartbreak?

Like Sappho, I encounter Surdas, Meera, and unknown poets wafting in the Braj air. I walk around the ghats in the evening searching for Krishna in fragmented forms.

[Lightly edited excerpt from my Substack, August 2025.]