This year’s gathering for our annual year-end Humorous Poems session had many invitees, among them past readers Geeta Joseph; and Gopa Joseph with her husband Michael. We also had visitors – Joe and KumKum’s daughters, Michal and Rachel; and Rachel’s friend, Amy Cotter, who was visiting Kochi after attending COP28 in Dubai. Arundhaty’s kind neighbours, Ramesh Tharakan and his wife Rani, were also there to participate. Another neighbour, a Sri Lankan named Shirani, also came to enjoy.
People arrived in all sorts of costumes to give everyone a peek at literature lovers during playtime. At one end was the spooky garb of ghosts in white, at the other end the formal fashion of young college girls in olden days dressed in colourful half sarees. In between were those who dressed in pyjamas with unmatched legs and odd slippers as though in search of their missing half. We had queens – the Queen of Hearts and the Queen of the Nagas; odd guys dressed in keffiyehs (to commiserate with the devastated Palestinians) and dapper men dressed in dark suits wearing fedoras like gangsters.
The poems were bright, nonsensical and witty ranging from the whimsical lines of Ogden Nash to the lyrics of a Cole Porter song from one of his shows, Kiss Me Kate, a 1948 show that had over 1,000 performances on Broadway. Of course, one could not miss Edward Lear represented at this session by The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo with its memorable opening lines:
On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
Lewis Carroll could not be missed either; we had an unusually long poem of his called Phantasmagoria. And nobody had heard of Andrew Jefferson until we encountered his One-Eyed Love:
She’s charming and witty and jolly and jocular
Not what you’d expect from a girl who’s monocular.
Wit could also inform the minds of poets seven centuries ago as we learned from the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym who tells a good one on himself, when he made an assignation with a bar-maid at an inn and came a cropper because other hostellers at the inn sent him packing from bed.
After the merry evening of poetry we had lively conversations among friends and a wonderful contributed dinner with Arundhaty playing the generous host at her house, a magnificent abode designed by her with her late husband, Reggie.
