India, Nov. 22 -- As you read The Gallery of Upside Down Women, it might occur to you that, line by line, it is the world that is upside down, and that the women in question mostly stand straight, and often smile. That their smile is like a knife's gleam in the dark is what turns them murderously maven; maven in the original Yiddish sense of the word, mevin, one who understands. The women are smiling not just at the inversion of the world, but also at their own isolation of posture and space. It is in this sense that Arundhathi Subramaniam's women are feminist. They are not a part of the collective. If it is a sisterhood at all, it is one of subversion. The errant, as they migrate from flesh to the far shore of spirit, are on the whole reconciled to their fated and often sainted marginality. In her prefatory note, Subramaniam says, "They (the women she writes about) are my improvised family, my upside-down tribe, happy, I think, to belong to anyone who stakes a claim to them." "Happy" is a rather unusual word to use in this context. But it is a declaration of a disposition whose essence seems to be that the errant will not change. The world must come around. In The Women No Longer Wait, addressed to the "Painted Lady, long-distance migrant butterfly", it is news to her that "some women never flew". The poem ends: "Painted lady, / tell the bards / the women no longer wait for spring. / Or nectar. Or home." They are done with the future, in the sense that they are another world that has arrived in the now. Promises are vacant of the power to seduce them. The narrative voices here mostly seek the redemption of the here and now. A moment later would be too late, it would be death: ". that a woman walking back / to her village from Telangana / died of starvation / in a Chhattisgarh forest. / Her news / is that we're always eleven miles / away from home" (The Breaking News Lullaby). Which is why it must be now. That Subramaniam can turn a quotidian Indian news item to poetry - the eternally present 11 miles from home - is one of her strengths. The volume has more than its share of her old Bhakti-themed poems, where the war between the spirit and flesh rages, and attempts sublimation in the ecstatic tears of erotica: ". I . danced/detonated, peacock delirium, / desert rain" (Meera). There seems, to my tainted eye, a Vasavadatta-like echo of one lover in Meera, anticipated in one of Subramaniam's earlier poems, included in the present work: God's Forgotten Nickname, a poem on Sule Sankavva. Subramaniam's poetry is not one of abstractions. Almost always, it is about something: a woman, a man, a god, a girl, a fruit, a tailor. They are narratives of a search. The drama enlivening the journey is that the conclusions, while not encouraging, are also quietly rebellious. The lines are short, even clipped, and clear, and they end often in striking images - as if their discovery, in the end, is the only reasonable resolution for what cannot be fully grasped: "What's left? / Just me, she says, as large finally / as my longing / shining down on myself / like star fire. / Just me / riding time like a stallion / into the sky" (What Stories Are Left?). There is a unique, focused facticity about her poetic world; her imagination is anchored to the body. Subramaniam's poems are a ground where desire meets devotion. In A Woman Speaks to Her Guru, the authorial voice asks, "Do you see me, or only the part that prostrates?" Why would you want the Guru, a representative of the divine, to see the burdens of the form in you when his/her presence is the resolution of the burden of form in you? Because even in the prostate position, even in surrender, the body, the physicality of her existence, cannot be ignored. The poetry here is the process of sacralising the sinning flesh - a gesture that echoes the raw, confessional fusion in Kamala Das, who declares, "I am sinner, I am saint. I am the beloved and the betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no aches which are not yours. I too call myself I," where desire is not exiled, but exalted as the site of sanctity. We meet our gods in our flesh....