Treasurer of Piggy Banks

In the confusion of leaving home,
I leave it so far behind that everywhere I go
I’m seen as an infiltrator.
Infiltrator or inhabitant?

Infiltrator or inhabitant? In Treasurer of Piggy Banks, Indian poet Vinod Kumar Shukla sees the world through both lenses at once. All details are local yet canonical, and when inside his lyric mind, we are rooted, and the roots are spreading far and wide. Shukla’s ability to see things through their opposite illuminates what is hardest to comprehend with aphoristic yet surreal clarity, from environmental collapse to the way our own deaths are snug inside our lives.

These poems are translated from Hindi with deft humor and acrobatic muscle by poet and essayist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who writes in his introduction that Shukla’s lines are so unique to him, “you could put them on a check, and it will be honored at any literary bank.” You can’t hoard or even spend the wealth of the lines in this collection, but the shiny, slippery, and threatened value of the world accrues through them.

Shukla was born in Rajnandgaon, in central India, in 1937 and has published more than a dozen books that include both poetry and fiction. He was recently awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. His writing was described by Amit Chaudhuri as “a compelling combination of strangeness, acute observation, love of life, unexpected thinking, and an air of normality that adds to the strangeness.” Mehrotra lives in Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas. He is the author of seven­ previous books of poetry and two collections of essays.