to go. Suresh has promised to take us
for dhansak to the Paradise Café. Here, by the entrance
near the Kodak Studio on the main road, is the shrine,
already wet with religious dousings and drownings,
and a small driveway where Suresh’s scooter
is parked. He lives on the second floor; on the third
is a guest house where Iranians and Arabs put up.
Below, in the compound, is a detached room
which, for five years, has been a Shiv Sena office. Tonight
it wears a lit and festive air. Two policemen
have been posted by the gates, as if to say
“We’re taking no chances.” When one of them, corpulent
and whiskered, smiles at my daughter (she, at a year
and a half, is a veteran talker and walker, and
wanders near him), I feel a disquiet.
She smiles back at him, as if it’s possible
to make friends with the intractable. He relaxes;
glances at me. Is he guarding the Sena
or against it? We go to the building, conferring,
making sure not to look back over our shoulders.
Chasing a Poet: Epilogue
“He hangs out at the Wayside Inn till four.”
Thus, Adil, whose eye, looking away,
promises, says a young poet, to conceal something.
Leave this watering hole behind, Bombay Gym,
and take my wife and half-sleeping child
in a taxi towards Jehangir Art Gallery.
Installations this week in Kala Ghoda.
“You’d better move fast, if you want to catch him,” Adil
says, consulting, in his squinty, alien way,
my watch. In the Inn, I don’t see him at first,
Kolatkar, his face youthful, his eyes
baleful, like a student’s, his hair and moustache
grey-white, as if they were made of cotton wool, a prankster’s
disguise. He’s concealed in the shadows, open
to strangers, but forewarned of me.
The Inn’s semi-deserted; the famous smell
of fish and chips has disappeared; some of the chairs
and tables have been enlisted for a reading
tonight. I go up, to introduce myself
before Thursday ends, and this man melts away.
He’s about seventy years old; he
appraises me as a college boy would a teacher
who’s interrupted him smoking marijuana.
He says he’s heard of me; invites
me to sit down. “I saw your poster
in Crossroads yesterday. You’re reading day after,
aren’t you?” (All these new bookshops
and shopping malls — Crossroads, Crosswords—
where books and CDs and stationery and toys
are sold in busy neighbourliness. And exhortations
to go to Lotus. “Have you been to Lotus? It’s quite
far away, but it’s a real bookshop. The books
are fantastic!”) I’ve been trying to track down this
man to persuade him to let my publishers
reissue his first book of poems, Jejuri,
a sequence, published in ’76, about a visit
to the obscure, eponymous pilgrimage town
in Maharashtra. Arvind Mehrotra says it’s
“the best-loved book of poems by an Indian writer
in English,” or words to similar effect, with good
reason. He confesses his shyness of contracts
while ordering me a coffee. We’re joined
by a bespectacled itinerant from the ad world, who
has an omelette and toast. “But if you’re involved …
I don’t mind.” I try not to interrupt as he
drifts lazily into conversation with the spectacled man,
but ask him to keep a signed copy of
Freedom Song: Three Novels rather shamefacedly.
He does not demur; he studies its cover.
I tell him I must retrieve wife and daughter
from Rhythm House, and brave the traffic
to Mahim, to take part in a “live chat”
on rediff.com. “I’ve never done this sort
of thing before.” He suggests I protest
too much. “I think Amitabh and Jaya
Bachchan were on it the other day,” he says, smiling
smokily; I see myself in a mirror,
dishevelled, late. What is it exactly
that I want from him? Neither he nor I
quite know, and we know that we don’t know,
and this lack of certainty, in which he has the mild
upper hand, this bogus talk about
contracts, I suppose, gives us some
leverage with each other, or is that only my
fancifulness? We agree to meet for lunch
on Monday, a day before I fly
back to Calcutta. For twenty-five years
he’s published nothing, or little. This doesn’t mean
he’s not been writing. In fact, for many years,
he’s been composing poems about the Kala Ghoda
he sees from his window at the Wayside Inn,
the parking lot now cleared of cars for the ten-day
festival. He writes about the woman
who washes herself and her children, and cooks
on the pavement, or the homeless stringing their string cots,
or odd-job men and their paramours
and quick lunches. As I discover on Monday,
when the Wayside Inn’s full, and we crowd
round a single table, lunch is a great
unspoken theme. People enter, leave,
sated or still in search of satiation;
Arvind will send me some poems a couple
of months later, by Kolatkar, describing the slop
eaten by the odd-job man on the pavement.
We are united by orders of dhansak and fish
and chips, and kachumbar, drowned out by cries of “Waiter!”
and “Arrey, Udwadia?” I think of Frank O’Hara,
like Kolatkar, between the painter’s world and the poet’s
(Kolatkar is a well-known commercial artist),
writing his “lunch poems,” crossing the streets
from Times Square to Sixth Avenue in New York
on weekdays, a cheeseburger in one hand,
Poems by Pierre Reverdy in one pocket.
Kala Ghoda, in those poems I’ve still
to read, is no less beautiful in its journey
between the Jehangir Art Gallery and the Wayside Inn.
“Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure,” says O’Hara
as he discovers its useless radiance around mid-day.
Kolatkar notes a different flame. “They’re burning
Valentine cards today,” gravely
in his deep Bombay accent, musical
with irony. And “Arvind’s begun
to look like Gurudev Tagore.” Pauses. “By
the way, will your daughter have ice cream?” My wife
gratefully accepts. Our mealtime’s not
quite over; while a half a lifetime’s work is almost
done, and remains concealed, as if it were
ingested, and coursing in the veins; and another’s
half a lifetime’s work still to begin;
no hunger, before or after lunch, is complete.
Note
Two stories here are retellings — and quite personal interpretations — of episodes from the Hindu mythologies. “An Infatuation” is a retelling of an episode from the Ramayana, in which Lord Ram (often spelt Rama) is exiled to the forest for fourteen years because of a curse; he is accompanied by his brother Lakshman and his wife, Sita. Here, a rakkhoshi (the Bengali word for female rakkhosh, or rakshas in Hindi — a powerful demon), Surpanakha, falls in love with him and tries to seduce him. Ram plays along with her and then humiliates her, as the episode shows. She rushes to her brother Ravan, the king of demons, who will avenge her by abducting Ram’s wife, Sita — thus setting into motion the main action of the Ramayana. “The Wedding” is a retelling of the story of Lord Shiv’s (often spelt Shiva) wedding.