Terrarium by Urvashi Bahuguna is her debut poetry collection published by The Great Indian Poetry Collective. Her verses possess a singular and almost unnerving style of unraveling the magical from within the everyday. Terrarium’s poems touch upon the momentary motions of everyday life. Those motions may seem ephemeral but leave an immeasurable mark on all of us. For instance, the first part of the collection portrays how Bahuguna’s childhood experiences especially of moving to and living in Goa, shaped her perspectives.
In doing so, Bahuguna, vividly depicts her surroundings such that they come alive and remain etched in our minds. In The Heart of a Mango, she conjures up a much followed and cherished summer tradition in many parts of India: of devouring mangoes of all kinds. She evokes the feeling of richness a mango brought to her family particularly to her father.
In Last Ride before the Monsoon, she forges a primordial connection with water and how a part of us is lost to its infiniteness:
Listening to the weeping on the water,
some piece of us is lost too.
And for being unknown it slips
silvertailed below the still boat.
The complete primitive and hence pristine aura of the poems is possible because she weaves in imagery of nature as we never imagined it before. She has an eye for the minutest detail and recreates it in extraordinarily surreal metaphors. This is best exemplified in the poem Waiting for Movement. It begins with a strikingly colourful description:
The laburnum is late
with its lightening yolk.
An abundance of mulberries
stains bowls.
Thereafter, the tiniest movements that paradoxically encapsulate stillness, are described. Through this, she creates an apprehension that something is about to happen, only to end it with an anti climactic shattering of that tense stillness with a much-needed breeze.
Bahuguna’s attention to the physical uniqueness and elements of the environment around her possibly comes from Miss Fatima’s Geography class where, as she says in her poem, Ms. Fatima she learnt, “to love this bruised and bumpy earth.” It was there in class she traced the country’s physical features and “know the map of India like people supposed we knew the cuts and flat moles on our hands.”
The second part of the collection talks of love, growing apart, and trying to come to terms with the end of a relationship.  Here too, metaphors of geography seep in along with her beautiful skill of turning anything mundane into magic. For example, sleeping next to her lover like a child drooling is described as:
My mouth leaves a trail of moon drool,
tooth whisked, quiet as sugar melting off the tongue.
Such ordinariness and profundity of her verses create an intimacy between the reader and the writer. The rest of the book also captures the author’s various viewpoints and experiences. Terrarium can be called a slant autobiography. However, it is also one that speaks as much about the author as about the world around us from the societal fears a girl is taught to the greater environmental problems haunting the world that are blithely ignored.
It absorbs so much of the invisible things we miss out because of how we dismiss it as ordinary. Yet, they are a pulsating world of their own. Perhaps this is why the collection is titled Terrarium. A terrarium is a miniature garden enclosed in a glass container. It is minuscule but nurtures so much. Similarly, it is the quotidian living of our lives and experiencing the beating of our emotions that nurtures us and leaves such a deep impact on who we are. The theme of Identity is explored, not overtly, but subtly in the poems by mingling the little invisible influences of people, places, news and societal mores.
Terrarium is the perfect cosy read on a rainy day. It allows you to lose yourself to the leafy monsoon foliage of the verses. The lines leave you contemplating your role, connection, and identity with yourself and the world around you.
You can buy the book here.
