By David Fedo

The Bearded Chameleon
Chris Mooney-Singh
Black Pepper [Australia]/red wheelbarrow books [Singapore] (2011) / 86 pages / SGD20

Chris Mooney-Singh's new collection of poetry, The Bearded Chameleon, may be the first adult book of published verse in any language whose title poem refers to a lizard (more on that curiosity later). Yet, the best poems in this handsomely produced book are about those creatures at the upper end of the Great Chain of Being—you and me.

Singaporeans have known the affable Mooney-Singh, now in his mid-50s, as the burly, bearded and turbaned Australian convert to Sikhism (he resided for some years in India, and is part of what one reviewer has characterized as the 'reverse' diaspora), as well as the indefatigable organizer of and participant in regional poetry slams; the head of the Writers Centre, Singapore and of the now-defunct Writers Connect; a devotee of the ancient musical instrument called the rabab; an anthologizer of Christmas poetry; a widower, now married again; and, most recently, a doctoral student back in his native Australia. However, he has retained his ties to Singapore and launched his new book at the 2011 Singapore Writers Festival. Admirers will recall that Mooney-Singh's first major work of poetry, The Laughing Buddha Cab Company, was published in 2007.

The Bearded Chameleon, co-published in both Singapore and Australia, is a mostly entertaining and engrossing collection, divided into three parts and comprising 36 poems of varying lengths. Almost all are set entirely in India; Singapore is completely absent. The poems range widely, from sketches of individuals ('Apartment of a Bombay Millionaire', 'Mrs. Pritima Devi', 'Advice from an Uncle', 'Mr. Chopra'), to landscape portraits ('Punjab Pastoral', 'Abstract Studies with Monsoon Green', 'Aubade with Marshland'), and to urban impressions ('Indian City', 'Indian-Made Foreign Liquor', 'Indian Standard Time'). Many are relatively short, and readers can hear Mooney-Singh's colloquial and at times playful voice throughout. Although his subjects are often serious, he seems to be having fun with much of his work, just as I have been told he did in his poetry slam readings. In fact, in the very first poem in his collection, 'Punjab Pastoral', we find the poet defecating beside an irrigation canal, where "no mermaid [is] singing". Undoubtedly, in this anti-pastoral, the mermaid has a good reason to stay away.

Despite the overlay of Sikhism, the religion founded by Guru Nanak Dev in the 15th century—it is the faith of some 26 million people, 75 percent of whom live in Northern India's Punjab region—The Bearded Chameleon touches only lightly on the core Sikh issues of belief and justice. What occupies Mooney-Singh's overriding interest in Part 1 of the collection is, instead, death, which is the jumping- off point for six of the 14 poems. Most of these concern the sudden passing of Mooney-Singh's first wife, Peggy Kaur, to whom the book is dedicated. 'Casualty' (which the poet says is "after Federico García Lorca," the great, martyred Spanish writer), is the first, and Mooney-Singh thrusts us immediately into the surreal scene:

At 8 a.m. in the morning,
at exactly 8 in the morning,
they wheel her through swing doors
, banging like a poltergeist.
The irritated doctor in a white coat says:
'Why you came late. Too bad. Sorry.'
. . . . . . .
The clerk asks: 'Name, age, passport number.'
The attendants are ripping off her wedding ring—
a bangle, a steel watch, a shawl.
They are cutting her dress down the middle with shears.
You see through a slit in the curtains
at the shock of 8 in the morning.

The opening passage, in its in medias res bluntness and repetitions, is typical of Mooney-Singh. He gives us very little of the woman's character or circumstances of her death, except that it seems to have occurred unexpectedly in a taxi. Only in the penultimate stanza does the poet bring himself into a relationship with the woman, who we now assume must be his wife:

and now, you know, with headache clarity
that you are alone, and again, alone.
Her dove-soft spirit flying up has left you
for some other place,
somewhere, where it is forever
8 o'clock in the morning.

The beauty of the language (I especially admired the "dove-soft spirit flying up") and the restrained emotion of 'Casualty' (was it some accident, or perhaps a stroke?) is sustained in 'After the Taxi Halted', one of the best poems in the book, where Mooney-Singh elaborates in the opening stanzas:

I was helpless, a passenger
during the final act of her breathing

that slipped beyond even its coma
as the taxi halted at the traffic light.

Perhaps, at that instant, she heard a call
Like the muezzin in the mosque
And flew out through the mouth like a dove
Over the morning rooftops.

Who can say? It is quite possible.

There is that dove once again—perhaps the soul being called up. Again, we are in the middle of dying, of death, but this time the poet is present. The stark and haunting image of his presumed wife dying in a stalled taxi, unnoticed by those in the surrounding traffic, reminds me of Auden's great poem, 'Musée des Beaux Arts', after Brueghel's magnificent painting, where Icarus falls from the sky in an open seascape, the 'splash' going unseen and unheard by the indifferent ploughman and everyone else.

Yet Mooney-Singh struggles to find a sunnier conclusion:

And maybe she is sitting now
in a garden where white peacocks roam
among jamun tree and mango:
a place with no trouble or shadow.

She is arm in arm with those
who need not talk with their lips,
their faces, each, with a fine patina,
a portrait done by an old master.

Although the poet says he "would like to confirm this", yet the best he can dole out "is some wishful thinking." And the last line:

What else on earth is left to us?

The vividness of the poem—his wife, now imagined to be on the "Other Side" (the poet's description of heaven), strolling about with those "who need not talk with their lips"—combined with the sadness of the loss but the hope for something else, make this a work of uncommon poignancy and, ultimately, beauty.

This loss is sustained in 'Steel Kiss' and 'Pink Silk from Punjab', where the memories of the poet's late wife are almost overwhelming: in the former it is an old cup taken from her suitcase, with her lipstick mark ("two firm petal prints") remaining; in the latter it is the "scent of her [now] gone from my hair", at the same time the poet is "sweating her at night through my pores", with thoughts of their last vigorous lovemaking:

The last time before she left, we wallowed
like buffaloes for one hour. I am left with only
the memory of our bodies, wet as fish.

Finally, there is the exquisite 38-line 'Gone', with Kaur once again the subject. In the work's last six stanzas, the poet wonders where his lost wife was from, why she had come to the earth, and where she now has gone:

Now I recall her saying
she lived elsewhere
other than earth
and only came for a brief visit
to lend her hand.

To where she has returned
like a dried puddle
between monsoon showers
is beyond me.

Why did she chose
this foreign country
of humid moods and fevers
for her departure.

What is her true age?

How and by what route
she slipped
out of her body
like a coat thrown aside,
or was taken, so quickly—
as if a letter from a slit envelope
is an unsolved mystery.

In these brief stanzas, colloquial and quietly dramatic, Mooney-Singh probes the mystery—call it the melancholy 'unknowingness'—of death, which Shakespeare's Hamlet in his most famous soliloquy calls "The undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveller returns." There are no religious answers, for Sikhs or, presumably, for anyone. How does death come? Where do the dead go? The poet concludes his poem no closer to a resolution, which remains elusive to the end:

This was her vanishing act
and the only fact
I know for certain.

Part 2 is made up of 'profile' poems, and 'Mrs. Pritima Devi', a 133-line cry from a woman damaged by her cruel husband and a victim of India's indifference to a suffering wife, is one of the most powerful works in The Bearded Chameleon—a dramatic soliloquy of anger. Mrs. Devi, made sick by a bad marriage, has run away from the abusive Mr. Devi and her home in Delhi, leaving her young boy behind; she is now a public school teacher, one of many who "slog like peons", and is confessing her sad story to another teacher, "a modern Western person—/someone from abroad," who can understand her plight:

The law is twisted in this land, I tell you.
A woman has no rights. If trouble comes
like ten-headed Ravan upon poor Sita,
the children stay in Father-in-Law's house.
Only a wanton woman leaves her husband.
Mom and Daddy got a nasty shock

when I returned. So well-married off
to a nice Delhi boy, their final weight
lifted from aged shoulders; they were free.
I was the youngest of four daughters.

Mrs. Devi's mother and father have warned her: "Learn submission—it is still First Lesson/for an Indian wife", but she will have none of it: "It is not over, Biba, struggle, fight!" Yet the road is far from easy:

Six months have passed, and yes, I have recovered.
I wish I could tell you—all is well.
What happened? What do you think? I have no proof
and my little boy is living there without me.
I'm now a question mark, my parents doubt me
more and more. Life would be simple
if I touched their feet and said: "It was all
just in my mind. . . ."
. . . . .
Though tired and angry, I cannot submit.

Mrs. Devi has "met more women/also swept beneath the family carpet", but she is adamant:

Never shall we let them to make us feel
like wedding ornaments, like nose-rings
returned dishonoured to the jeweller's shop.

It would have been easy for Mooney-Singh to have allowed this poem to slip away into yet another routine feminist's screed, one of hundreds or even thousands thrown to the wind in an unfair world, but the poet has created in Mrs. Devi a feisty, glittering personality who we sense can match up to the injustices of husband, family and country. And her apology to the Westerner in the final stanza ("But you have heard enough on your first day./I humbly beg forgiveness from you, Sir.") also demonstrates both her sense of balance, and her humanity. She will survive.

I also admired the humorous 'Advice from an Uncle', about an "ironical" relative giving counsel to his "MBA-fresh, Harvard-hyped/nephew" about the ways of the real world, where bribes "are bad, dear boy,/but we must get our job done", and 'Mr Chopra', a portrait of a financial consultant just 35 years old, who employs "psychic forecasting" in making his deals, and whose success has brought him both wealth and admiration:

They all come to honour Mr Chopra
who wrinkles up his pencil-line moustache
while thrumming on the pocket calculator.
He is both compassionate and harsh—
the grandmaster of the numbers game.
He might uncoil a fortune in your palm.
It's difficult to know his perfect aim:
Yes, the song of money is a part of the thing.
Let mystery surround such expert calm.

But there is little mystery to the long poem, 'I Come in Winter to a City Without You', which constitutes all of Part 3, and which is written for Mooney-Singh's current wife, Savinder Kaur. This is a lament of longing, of a lover separated from his beloved, a delicate and deeply felt poem of passion, but not without a hint of uncertainty:

When I met and had you,
I was full, of myself
with nothing much to give.

Arriving empty in this winter city
I am filled again with your
more than virtual warmth.

Darling, I had let you grow dormant
until the winter sun rose.
This time I will not forget.

In this unnamed city, presumably Melbourne (Mooney-Singh is now studying at a university there), the poet-student elaborates:

For now, I sit in student rooms,
stare vacant at fluorescence
and burn above the walkways.

I look out into the darkness for you.
Rest is the wraith
that will not let me sleep.

What sustains the love is the couple's imagination; as the poet writes:

Distant intimacy
demands imaginings,
a new domicile of words

as the ocean swells
under galaxies, out of time zones.
When do we meet under stars?

As for 'The Bearded Chameleon', the aforementioned eponymous poem which appears as the twelfth selection back in Part 1, Mooney-Singh presents this jaunty autobiographical lyric in 40 two-line rhymed stanzas, but despite some of the cleverness, it is not, I am sorry to report, the shining light of what is otherwise an excellent collection. The poet equates himself with the bearded and mutable lizard, but neither creature really comes to life, and the lines seem, for the most part, static and surprisingly conventional:

Now turbaned like a maharajah,
I'd pass for Ranjit Singh, the Padshah--

a bit like you, a chameleon—
a colour-shifting charlatan.
. . . . . . .
You are a comfort on the branch

as I feel my oddness avalanche

into a vast primordial past
where man and lizard were one caste.

I've learned to stand, chameleon.
My feet, like yours can now stick on.

Although Mooney-Singh does provide the occasional footnote in this book, readers unfamiliar with Sikhism will want and, at times, need to keep Wikipedia on hand, and in the lizard poem there are no annotations. (As I discovered, the above-named Ranjit Singh [1780-1839] was the first padshah or maharajah of the Sikh Empire.) But the rhymes in this poem often feel awkward or forced, and the sentiments about the perceived clash of cultures ("I've learned your culture-blending knack./Have I moved up, or ten lives back?") which appears to be the theme, are not very convincing. In short, I liked the title but, regrettably, not the poem.

All in all, I believe that Mooney-Singh's talents are best demonstrated in his sharply drawn and vivid narratives of people, in good circumstances and bad. The Bearded Chameleon reminds us, notwithstanding the lizard poem, of just how compelling these talents are.

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