Lost and Found: AK Ramanujan’s Poem, Small Scale Reflections on a Great House

This week in Daak:

1. Lost and Found: AK Ramanujan’s Poem, Small Scale Reflections on a Great House

2. Want to Surround Yourself with Art?

3. Daak Recommends

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1. Lost and Found: AK Ramanujan’s Poem, Small Scale Reflections on a Great House

For those of us who were fortunate enough to grow up in a large family home, or at least have a distant memory of such a home constructed from the stories of our parents and grandparents, A. K. Ramanujan’s 1971 poem, “Small-scale Reflections on a Great House” is a reminder of all things lost and found, and absorbed and transformed in these homes.

The generative, burgeoning home of this poem has branches that extend across time and spaces, inviting, accepting, and nurturing a bustling family of sons, daughters, husbands, wives, grandchildren, servants, animals, and an endless stream of objects that give birth to memories; as Ramanujan says, “anything that goes out / will come back”, reminding us of our immutable connection with our roots.

Enjoy a short excerpt below:

Sometimes I think that nothing
that ever comes into this house
goes out. Things that come in everyday
to lose themselves among other things
lost long ago among
other things lost long ago;

lame wandering cows from nowhere
have been known to be tethered,
given a name, encouraged

to get pregnant in the broad daylight
of the street under the elders'
supervision, the girls hiding

behind windows with holes in them.

Unread library books
usually mature in two weeks
and begin to lay a row

of little eggs in the ledgers
for fines, as silverfish
in the old man's office room

breed dynasties among long legal words
in the succulence
of Victorian parchment.

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2. Want to Surround Yourself with Art?

Check out our art prints with stunning depictions of the most iconic places from the subcontinent, including the ghats of Benaras pictured below.

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3. Daak Recommends

Check out this archival interview with Ramanujan to learn more about his take on poetry, his view on the politics of language and the process of creation.

Read another Daak on his love poem for his wife, “The Namelessness of Childhood”.