To the Chinese Restaurant- Anjum Hasan (Poem with Explanation)

Hi Friends,

This blog is an attempt to help you understand the poem. I hope you read and enjoy.

To The Chinese Restaurant

We come in here from the long afternoon
stretched over the town’s sloping roofs,
its greasy garages and ice-cream parlours,
its melancholic second-hand bookshops
with their many missing pages.

Life’s not moving.

We sit at a red table, among the dragons,
near the curtained-off street-facing windows
with their months’ old orangeade.
Out in the streets there are schoolboys with
their ties askew and the garish fruit-sellers.

We eat more than we need to. We eat
so that our boredom’s no longer dangerous,
so that from the comfort of soup,
with the minor pleasures of chopsuey,
we can fend off the memory of cities unvisited,
unknown and unknowable affairs,
people with never-fading lipstick and
confident gestures who we will never be.

One day soon we’ll be running,
our lives will be like the blur seen from a bus,
and we won’t read each other’s letters thrice.
But right there we’re young, we count
our money carefully, we laugh so hard
and drop our forks.

We are plucked from sadness there
in that little plastic place with the lights
turned low, the waiters stoned from doing nothing,
the smells of ketchup and eternally frying onions.

© 2006, Anjum Hasan
From: Street on the Hill
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi

About the Poet:

Anjum Hasan is an Indian novelist, short story writer, poet, and editor. She graduated in philosophy from North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya. She currently lives in Bangalore, Karnataka, India.

Anjum Hasan's first book was a collection of poems Street on the Hill, published by Sahitya Akademi in 2006.

Her debut novel Lunatic in my Head (Zubaan-Penguin, 2007) was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award 2007. Set in Shillong in the early 1990s, it weaves together the stories of its three main characters, and has been described by Siddhartha Deb as 'haunting and lyrical'.

Her second novel titled Neti, Neti (Roli Books, 2009) was longlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and shortlisted for The Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010. It told the story of 25-year old Sophie Das, a dreamy character from Shillong, looking for fulfilment in Bangalore. The novel was described as painting "an empathetic portrait of the unusually liberated—and unexpectedly lost—middle-class youth of the brave new India."

Her short-story collection, Difficult Pleasures (Penguin/Viking 2012), was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize and the Crossword Book Award.[9] Lunatic in my Head, Neti, Neti (as Big Girl Now) and Difficult Pleasures have all appeared in Australia from Brass Monkey Books.

Her third novel The Cosmopolitans was published by Penguin Books India in 2015 and Brio Books Australia in 2016. It was described as “that rare thing: a novel of ideas”

In 2018 she published the short story collection A Day in the Life. It won the Valley of Words award 2019. 

In 2022, Hasan's latest novel, History's Angel, was acquired by Bloomsbury India for publication.

About the Poem:

This is a short e-content video presentation of the poem To the Chinese Restaurant created by me.

Watch it to understand the poem. 

Tamil Explanation of the poem:

Watch this You tube video https://youtu.be/Lllj-JOvXac 

Quiz Time

Quiz on Anjum Hasan's- To The Chinese Restaurant - Google Forms

 Congratulations! I am sure you have understood the poem by now. 

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