A Poet’s Introduction to the works of Adil Jussawalla

Yesterday, Adil Jussawalla’s collection of poems Trying to Say Goodbye (2012) was one of eight books of poetry conferred the Sahitya Akademi Award 2014. In our April 2014 issue, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra wrote about Jussawalla’s prose and how it was imbued with poetry. In this excerpt from that story, Mehrotra tells of his introduction to Jussawalla as a young poet in Bombay in 1966.

When in the summer of 1966 I arrived in Bombay from Allahabad to enrol at Bombay University, there was hardly a soul I knew in the city. … Someone, I don’t remember who, had mentioned Coral Chatterji to me. She belonged to the well-known Caleb family of Muir Road, Allahabad, and worked for Imprint, a literary magazine of current fiction and non-fiction books in condensed form. One day I turned up at her office in Colaba. She was a tall, striking-looking woman, who to me appeared taller and more striking because of her job at Imprint. She didn’t quite know what to do with her young visitor and quickly introduced me to her two co-editors. One of them was Qurratulain Hyder, and the other was Nissim Ezekiel. When told that I wrote poetry, Ezekiel gave me a friendly look and invited me to a reading he was giving in Worli in a few days’ time. It was to be held at the house of Piloo Pochkhanawala, and he gave me directions on how to get there. Pochkhanawala, I discovered when I reached her place, was a sculptor. Her modernist works were on display both inside her large house and on the lawns, where the reading was to be held. Since I was among the first to arrive, I had plenty of time to observe the audience as it drifted in. Everyone who came seemed to know everyone else. I had hoped Coral would be there, but she wasn’t.

That evening, Ezekiel read the poems of Adil Jussawalla. He read from Land’s End (1962), Jussawalla’s first book, which had been published by Writers Workshop. One of the poems that struck me sounded like a shopping list: “toothpaste/ toothpowder/ beetroots/ hairsoftener ...” Ezekiel I had known by reputation before, but not Jussawalla, who then lived in England. He was some years older than me, but his formally accomplished poems, and the fact that he could turn a shopping list into verse, seemed way beyond anything I was capable of. To me, he and Ezekiel were like two unscalable peaks, shining in the distance. The Pochkhanawala house and lawns were brightly lit.

In Adil Jussawalla’s Trying to Say Goodbye (2012), there is a tribute to Pochkhanawala. The poem, ‘Materials,’ is in five sections, each titled after a material that sculptors use: clay, cloth, wood, iron, marble. A couple of lines in the poem, in the section called “Clay,” could serve as an epigraph to everything that Jussawalla has written: “When whole, art./ When broken, man.” Art, the creative spirit, is what gives wholeness to the human clay. But the wholeness is vulnerable. It can break any minute for many reasons, reducing us again to the fragments we are. Jussawalla is a poet of the vulnerable.

I thought of those two lines when I read ‘Notes Towards a Portrait of Nissim Ezekiel’ in Maps for a Mortal Moon, a wide-ranging selection of Jussawalla’s essays, written over five decades, and the first one we have by him. The essay describes a visit that Jussawalla, along with Ezekiel’s future biographer R Raj Rao and the novelist Cyrus Mistry, makes to the nursing home in Bandra where Ezekiel, an Alzheimer’s patient, had been living. This is how it begins:

The house: ochre. Trees behind it and along its side: deep green, lemon-yellow, Vandyke brown. Grass leading to door: bushy, leaf green, undersides of leaves lined with kohl.

The door: blue-grey. Wrong door. We are told to enter by the side. Grill covering entrance: rust-brown with a lock on it.

The essay was written for a Sunday paper, but we already know that this is no journalistic account that we are reading. Instead of a realistic picture of the house, as one would expect, Jussawalla gives us a painting, slightly abstract, whose colours are “deep green, lemon yellow, Vandyke brown.” The portrait of Ezekiel, when we come to it, is done in similar style. In it, too, the things being described are itemised, their colours mentioned against them:

He’s suddenly there, right in front of me, sitting on a chair, his hands folded on his lap. Hair: close-cropped, grey-brown. Eyes: spectacled, greyish. Smile: gentle; when broad: with a black hole punched in it. Shirt: blue-grey, like the wrong door.

This could be a shorthand description of a painting by Francis Bacon. Later in the essay Ezekiel “comes back to his chair to sit for his portrait again,” but though physically present, the sitter is for all purposes missing from the scene. He can see his visitors, but does not recognise them. “He asks: ‘You are all from the same place?’” And then, “You’re sure you want to be with me?”

But if the Alzheimer’s-stricken Ezekiel is not the Ezekiel of old that his visitors knew, then the visitors too are not who they seem. Might they not be performers in a comedy act?

In the meantime, my left foot has developed an itch. I calm it, but drawing hand back from foot, my elbow jogs Cyrus’ side. He lets out a grunt, his left knee jumping reflexively. It narrowly misses Raj’s face, since, just a moment before, Raj has decided to bend down to tie his bootlace. I sigh. I think it’s going to be one of those afternoons. A projected portrait of Nissim turning into a visit by the Three Stooges.

Faced with human brokenness, a writer can do only what a writer can. He brings to it the wholeness of art. On this occasion, it is the art of the essay, but with flashes of the other arts, those of painting (Vandyke brown) and comedy (the Three Stooges). Threaded through the essay, “Against the wrackful siege of battering days,” are lines from Ezekiel’s poems:

Three times the crow has cawed

At the window, baleful eyes fixed

On mine ...

The ordinariness of most events.

I prefer the company of spiders.

What makes the essay so moving is that not once does Jussawalla say that the house they’re visiting is a nursing home, or that the person they’re visiting has Alzheimer’s. By leaving this unsaid, Jussawalla touches on our common human fate, our common humanity. After all, what’s there to say? We visit the old and the ill; we grow old ourselves. As for sadness, there are moments when comedy does just as well. “Gaiety transfiguring all that dread,” WB Yeats called it. But this is Jussawalla, not Yeats, and the essay ends with the visitors in tears, the last nine words forming a one-line paragraph: “The kohl starts running, the buildings start breaking up.”

Jussawalla’s paragraphs, even the shortest, are not to be hurried through.

An extract from ‘Being Here’ published in The Caravan’s April 2014 issue. Read the story in full here.