On most days, my Facebook news feed resembles a kavi sammelan, a congregation of poets, a poetry festival. Sometimes I join in, adding to the wah-wah with 'likes'. When moved enough to make a comment, I often find myself at a loss: university education has only taught me to appreciate dead poets, without claps and whistles. I am as untrained in paying compliments to makers of verses as I am in receiving them. For a few moments, I type and delete, all the while speculating on the need for a new subject in the school curriculum, 'How to Pay Compliments on Facebook', something that would be honest, a word or phrase that would go beyond the awesome-lovely-gorgeous-brilliant standard fare. Like most fellow Facebookers, I most often fail. I copy the line that has affected me the most and put it in inverted commas. I know that it looks like a recycled gift, this return gift for a 'nice' poem, but my shyness and what now seems an incompetent vocabulary leave me helpless. And so I move on to the next post, the next poem.
Living in a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal, one without reading groups and 'intellectual communities' (that last one always in scare-quotes in my mind) I see Facebook as a virtual Bloomsbury Group for people like me. There's a Forster, and there's a Woolf, and there's a Keynes and we are their descendants, even if without their inheritance. Suddenly, the joy and the empathy of this self-contained universe leave me with inconsequential, PMS-like emotions, and I begin drafting my next Facebook update.
I take Zuckerberg's 'What's on your mind?' quite seriously, in a teenager-ish way, and so my updates are almost inevitably about what affected me three seconds ago. But there must be something magical about that rectangular box that turns snot-like verbiage and pimply catharsis into the likeness of a poem, for I've begun to notice how Facebook turns my pillow whispers and bathroom confessions, which no one in my family would pay any kind of attention to, into what friends call 'poetic'.
A few days ago, perhaps because of the monsoon, our bedroom door began to creak. Being timid and easily prone to imagining ghosts, I began to wonder whether it was the spirit of the dead tree trapped inside the wood of the door. Where else was I to share my fear except on Facebook? And so I wrote: 'When the door creaks, it's the tree speaking. Hear?' There were numerous likes and three comments, two telling me that it was indeed the tree 'wailing', another reminding me that even the leather in shoes sometimes 'cries'. In my inbox were several messages reminding me – even trying to convince me – why I was a 'poet': I heard things which few people did, they said. While these words made me happy, they could not cure me of the fear of the ghost of the tree in the door. So much for likes.