Sharanya Manivannan

The Altar of the Only World

Deepika Ramesh

“How do I tell you, except by telling you —

How because of longing I almost died.

How because of language I lived.”
  

I am not going to tell you about the verses and the metaphors. Not about the themes and the imagery. But I want to tell you about how I received Sharanya Manivannan’s The Altar of The Only World and how I feel after reading her poems.

The book reached me on the day when my breath was uneven and when I could feel something throbbing in my throat. Anxiety. An unexpected guest. A painful one at that. It was hard to do anything on that kind of a day. I only wanted to wait for the nightfall and answer the call of darkness.

But against the beam of light that escaped the orange curtains in my bedroom, the cover glittered. Gold and black. It drank the evening light. Its thirst was not greedy, but graceful like a cat’s. When I held the book, it looked like a lantern in my hand. I read a poem randomly and it called me a light-bearer. Love.

I began from the beginning, picked up a pen, and started having a conversation with the poems. I wrote in the sides, over the words, beneath the poems:

That aches!

Where are these goddesses?

You are not alone.

I hear your lament.

Drink that ocean.

Make me a fire-eater.

I hear your music.

Give me those flowers.

Pure pleasure.

Oh! Dear Venus!

Delirious. Delirious. Delirious

My father would have held my hand and saved the book from the assault. But some books have to be read that way. I need to talk, tell the book that it’s causing a maelstrom, and still surrender to it. Love.

I intend to read The Altar of The Only World in other ways too — I want to read it to a friend who is nursing a broken heart, send it to a friend who wants to crawl out of an abyss, leave it in a temple, hide it in a chest, and read it along with a friend who wouldn’t cure my feverish love with cynicism.

Above all, I wish to treat the book like it’s a soothsayer. I want to walk to my bookshelf, pick up the book, open a page, and receive my word. Bibliomancy.

The Altar of the Only World

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