This is Prakash Kona's first novel. Although he has brought out only two collections of poetry, he is already an acclaimed Indian poet writing in English. That he has worked on Noam Chomsky, Jacques Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, makes him all the more noteworthy. And it raises, naturally, high hopes about his first fiction.

STREETS THAT SMELL OF DYING ROSES By Prakash Kona Yeti Books Price: Rs 250 Pages: 227 Beat Poetry

The novel is about the streets of Hyderabad. So if you are searching for the mouth-watering aroma of Hyderabadi biryani, you are at the wrong place. What you get is the "smell of a boy's body in your nostrils" and the odour of washed clothes and shoes. You also get a disquieting vision of the poet "waking up in the arms of God after masturbating".

Kona's streets have no names; they "refuse to be encapsulated in words". The street is "a voyeur". The writer's Hyderabadi streets, however, can be anywhere in the world. Nor is he preoccupied with giving the streets a body. Here is a key to the countless doors of the novel: "I might dilute the essences of my body in order to tell a story." This is exactly what Kona does. He dilutes the bodies of the streets to tell you about their souls.

However, the transition from a poet to a novelist is a non-starter. Though he tries to write a novel, what cascades from his pen is only poetry: "I was the street that kissed the feet of boy and girl who walked upon it." The novel has hardly any characters in flesh and blood, let alone heroes and heroines. Thus, you cannot call it a novel in the conventional mould. It is not even a novel. But then, does the genre matter? Forget the genre and enjoy reading.

Enjoy? That may not be easy either, given the kind of narratives the writer employs. Here is one: "Snakes that resemble dreams that resemble streets that resemble snakes." And one more: "The image of the image was not an image" (Hey, you Umberto Eco there). There is an entire chapter of 20 pages without punctuation marks or full stops (Hey, you Georges Perec there). Prakash Kona's novel is a labyrinth of diffused imagery. Indeed, going through this endless stream of ideas is a cerebral stimuli, though, a trifle tiring.

AUTHORSPEAK TEJDEEP KAUR MENON

Beat Poetry

These are police poems," says Tejdeep Kaur Menon, 43, wryly, opening her latest collection Oysters in Pain (Yeti Books) at random. Truth is ugly here-it is a woman raped in her hospital bed, a prostitute dreading the smell of jasmines, a mother searching for her daughter last seen in an intensive care unit four years ago. Events on Menon's beat as the inspector-general of police, Andhra Pradesh, and news that screamed at her from the inside pages of a newspaper have turned to asymmetrical sentences of pain and indignation. For young Tejdeep, the eldest daughter of two refugees from Pakistan who settled down to doing business in Hyderabad "and never discussed poetry", there were two ways "of changing the world". Become like her grandfather, an officer in the Punjab Police. And write poetry like Kabir did-a doha that couples an image and a message. The doha's hold is visible in Menon's poems that tackle a plethora of social issues without frills. But the most poignant ones are her agonised screams of consciousness of losing her 10-year-old daughter to cancer. As she narrates the many stories between the lines, you wonder at her indignation that has not numbed into apathy even after 20 years in service and learn a little more of the officer who almost anachronistically romanticises fireflies ("My eternal image," she says) that "live in the dark but light up a hundred lives". One day she visits a 200-year-old red-light street in Hyderabad as a philanthropist, the next day she storms the place as a police officer and evacuates the women from there. The third day she sits down to write of them-so that it will not be a news item dumped with yesterday's newspaper. Even as Menon researches on crimes against women, the data hard to get, the indifference harder to cope with, her poetry tries "to touch the four corners of a desolate woman's home". "Policing gave me metaphors. I saw the best and worst of human acts," she says. But can poetry do what law cannot? "It can," she says. "It can irrevocably sensitise you to events." Then she should be a happy person. Poetry and power form a rare combination-and she carries the insignia of both. — Charmy Harikrishnan