by Jeet Thayil
the Comeback Kid; of Colaba,
undisputed master;
patron of pi-dogs, disaster,
kittens & ogresses; of gulab, a
scholar; economical with pages;
advertising man; joined no schools;
wrote in two languages,
bhakti & the blues; did not suffer fools.
from The Book of Chocolate Saints: Poems (Unpublished)
Rama Raoer, former professor of English Literature, Bombay University, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Dolly Mansions, near Dadar Station, March 2005
I’m sorry, I forgot. Give me a moment. Yes, yes, coconut oil, I cover myself with it and leave it on for a few hours. Old age is an indignity. That’s the main thing. Indignity and humiliation and the stripping away of everything that makes for individual personality. It is as if you’re part of a psychological experiment by the CIA and the KGB working together. And on that happy note I will take your leave. I’m going to have my bath and then we’ll have tea on the balcony in the heat. Fine? See you in a minute, meaning half an hour. You can dip into the books; you can dip but you can’t borrow.
Right then, let’s start. I don’t mean to be a diva but what to do, I am what I is. Doss and I went drinking one day, first to Turquoise, the dance bar on Grant Road, and then to White Horse in Tardeo and finally we landed up at Café Royal opposite the Regal. You must know the place. Now it’s all respectable tablecloths and subdued lighting but back then it was a dive. It was rough and rumble tumble and the quiet fellow at the next table could have been a hit man for the Dongri mafia or a real estate tycoon or an accounts executive with a Nariman Point ad agency. I ordered the Mahim Creek, which is a big mug of strong beer, Khajuraho or Cannon or even Gurkha if you can get it, and into the beer you drop a shot glass of DSP or Solan or some other whisky, any whisky so long as it’s cheap. A bunch of those and you’re killed. You’re gone. You’re maroed. It’s the old three-step. Ao. Bajao. Jao. That day I introduced him to the Mahim Creek and soon he made it part of his image as you know. Those pictures of him at the Casbah with a shot and a beer, that was me, I taught him how to do that. And it was thanks to me he came up with the name for the anthology. Not that I’m expecting any credit, however delayed and denied and deserved. I’m letting you know and that’s all.
I liked him, Doss, and it’s possible I was trying to impress him. I’ve always liked the awkward young men and I’m no casteist, god no. I like boys, circumcised, uncircumcised, washed, unwashed, touchable, untouchable, straight, bent, curved, I mean, it’s all love, isn’t it, in the end?
After a while I told Doss my Allen Ginsberg story. I met Allen when he read on a terrace in Cumballa Hill with Gary Snyder and Peter Orlovsky. Afterwards we walked to Nissim Ezekiel’s flat and some of us Bombay poets read our work, Ezekiel and Adil Jussawalla and R. Parthasarathy and Lancelot Ribeiro and yours truly. We read our poems – in English, what else? – and then it all went to hell. Ginsberg and his company of Beats thought we were terrible. Conventional and derivative, they said. Harsh words and untrue, for what work of art is not derived from another? Which Ginsberg is not derived from some Whitman? Allen – I think I can call him that, after all he did make a pass – was visibly unimpressed by our efforts and this disappointed us no end. Especially because after us some of the Urdu poets read and that was another story entirely. Allen and Peter, his lovely boy, they sat at the feet of the Urduwallahs, oohing and aahing, ready to kiss the hems of their pyjamas. Of course they didn’t understand a word of Urdu. Except maybe for, Wah! Oh, and the references to Marx and Chaplin, references our Beat judge and jury did not approve of either. Not exotic enough for them. This was the secret of the Beats. Inside the scruffy lazy bullshit bohemianism they were blatant Orientalists. Hypocrite moralists. The western gaze at its creepiest and most wide-eyed! They were full of compliments for the Urduwallahs and for us they had only insults. Peter leaned toward me and said, if we was gangster poets we’d shoot you dead, man! Allen took me aside and said the world had changed too much to be writing old-fashioned colonial pomes in English. Then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, he took me back to the lavish Malabar Hill apartment he was living in. The King of the Beats living in the lap of luxury! I use the word ‘lap’ advisedly. For a long time after that night I considered making a T-shirt with the slogan, ‘ALLEN GINSBERG SUCKED MY COCK, AH!’ But I decided against it. Somebody in the university would have objected. Not the students, obviously, any mention of sex pleases them no end. I’m talking about the administration and the teachers, repressed homophobic cocksuckers, all of them. Anyway, so much for the Beats in Bombay. Some accounts will have you believe it was a watershed moment for Indian poetry, while others will insist it was a low point that set us back. These are fabricated reports by people who weren’t there. The truth is the Beats were irrelevant. They had nothing to do with us. They were nothing more than a passing entertainment. Some months later I bumped into Allen and Peter in Calcutta. They’d just run into the Bengali poets who were so excited to be meeting the Beats they wanted to start a new movement. Allen suggested a name, the Hung Realists, because he thought those boys were real well hung. He was making a joke, is all it was, but they misheard. They thought he said the Hungryalists and that’s how a movement was born. Of course it died almost immediately and was forgotten until Narayan Doss came to Bombay and started a poetry group that met once or twice a week in some bar or other and then one afternoon at Café Royal I told him the story about Allen and he said, the Hung Realists, that’s a grand name! And it became the name of the anthology he and Xavier put together. When the Bengali Brahmins heard that their name – and it was never theirs to begin with – had been corrupted to the Hung Realists by some low-caste Bombaywallah, they raised a godawful clamour. They told Doss the name belonged to them, both names belonged to them, the true and the corrupted, and they started the hungry movement and now there are the websites and books and the name is everywhere. Do you see what I’m saying? The Bengalis know how to validate their history. Why don’t we? Hum kisse se kum hain!
Would you like more tea? Or a glass of wine? I can’t drink it any more. The acid reflux destroys me but I can certainly offer you some.
You must imagine if you can. A beautiful young man arrives in Bombay with a beautiful book of poems. Imagine. He’s an untouchable. His grandfather cleaned toilets in the village, but he has an impossible wish. He wants to be friends with the beautiful people of the city. He wants to know the glamorous women with their fair skin (his skin is dark), their silky hair (his hair is like coir), and their beautiful clothes (his own clothes are cheap and faded). They are beautiful but so is he and unlike them he is talented and he knows it. He wants to dazzle the editors and proprietors of the television stations and news services. He wants money, enough money so he never again has to worry about paying for a meal or buying books. He wants the entire city to be in thrall to his talent and ambition and beauty. He knows it is audacious to have a name like Doss and want these things, to be so dark and want these things, to want what a Brahmin wants. He knows it is audacious, irresponsible, unrealistic, but this is what he wants and he wants it so badly it is a hole in the pit of his stomach. It will not let him sleep at night and it fills his days with schemes and emptiness. How do I know this? Because he told me and I’m telling you, against my better judgement I’m telling you. He said to me, this is the open secret of Bombay. Whoever you are you can come here as long as you have talent or money or beauty. Bombay will take you and make you. He made no mention of the other side of the equation, that the city will chew you up and spit you out while you are still getting your bearings.
And where did young Doss come from in any case? Don’t you want to know? Kuch to bol, yaar.
The name of the town hardly matters. It was a town divided by a river and the river was also divided. A place of endless division. I visited it recently. Nothing has changed for a thousand years. On one side of the river live the castes. On the o
ther side the untouchables live, if you can call it living. They are only allowed to take water from a specified place downriver. After they collect the water they are only allowed to take a specified route back. They cannot go upriver, for that would pollute the water for the Brahmins and other castes. They cannot walk home past the homes of the Brahmins, lest their shadow falls where it must not. These are strict immovable specs. Everything is specified and that is the meaning of caste. Each profession, each article of clothing, each item of food, each action and thought, each name is specified by the great books and the law of the true gods. And none of it can be changed or only at great danger to those who wish to question the old specifications. As you’ve guessed by now Narayan Doss’s intention was to interrogate. You could take it a step further and say Doss was an interrogation, a question with no answer. Jawab hum denge.
You have a question too, I know. Why did I appoint myself the historian of Doss and the Hung Realists and the other poets who dominated those times, Ezekiel and Moraes, Kolatkar and Ramanujan, all dead now, every single one of them, but particularly, of all of them, why Doss and Xavier? The answer is obvious but only to someone like me. I am the historian of the outcaste poets because I am a homosexual Indian man. I know how it feels to be an outcaste. I have lived here all my life and before I became a Hindu activist I was a gay activist.
My question is this: what happened to Narayan Doss’s last book? I hear that a Swiss woman is translating some of the poems but is this not too little too late? Why did it take so long? How did the painter Xavier write two books of poems in such a prolific burst? How did these poems by a neophyte author become an international phenomenon and how did they make their author so much fame and money? Did no one notice that the friendship between Doss and Xavier resulted in oblivion for one and glory for the other? Did no one see their friendship for what it was, a play of caste and class, the latter a result of the former? Doss, outcaste, was not translated or celebrated while Xavier who was from a prominent family found fame and riches. What does this say about our literary culture? Why has nobody asked these questions? Is it that such a mode of questioning is not relevant? Or is it that such questions are inconvenient to certain powers that be, certain powers that would do anything to prevent an untouchable author from receiving his due in the world? These are questions to which I expect no answers because there are no answers, which is a reason, perhaps the only reason, to believe in God.
Farzana Amanella Kaur, arts activist, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Lado Sarai, New Delhi, October 2005
We all know how crazy it is now that the right-wing and the capitalists are running the world. But we forget how it was when we were in charge. Let me tell you it was crazier! Everything was ideology and ideology was everything. Words swam around us like phosphorescent deep-sea fish glimpsed for a moment and gone. We lived with a constant sense of obligation. But how can you be obligated to abstraction? That’s the question I want to pose to my younger self. How can you let yourself be hypnotised by those whose loyalty is not to language but to the party? The one-point agendas that dominated every student meeting and coffee house discussion from Calcutta to Mysore. The idea that all language was ideological in nature and therefore poets and novelists had to ensure their work had a discernible revolutionary moral. A childish idea lacking in complexity and nuance, but it affected everyone, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and journalists included.
I tell you what, the genius of the Hung Realist anthology was the way its editors used ideology against ideologues on both ends of the spectrum. The right and the left both got played. They had no idea that the anthologists’ only loyalty was to the anthology. They should have known. Players only love you when they’re playing.
Do you know the painter J. Swaminathan? I worked for him when he was running Bharat Bhavan. Swami was a crazy man, absolutely stoic and tortured and he drank himself comatose every night. Always in a lungi and smoking a beedi. He was showing in Bombay and he wanted poetry at the opening and I asked Newton and Narayan if they’d be interested. Narayan said yes and Newton said maybe. Maybe, I said, why maybe? Swaminathan is the real thing, I said. Xavier said he was real but only in a topical sense. Narayan said, come on, Newton, don’t be difficult. You don’t have to be difficult about every little thing. Just say yes. So Newton said yes and they read some poems in Marathi and English and Swami made a speech and later we all piled into a rented car that would drop us to our respective homes. Narayan was in front and Swami and Newton were in the back with me. The talk for some reason was about whether or not it was morally correct to produce art and poetry when just a few feet away was someone who did not have enough to eat and could not afford to buy medicine and in any case the nation was made up of peasants who could not be saved by art. Swami said it was not morally defensible to be an artist in a country like India. Doss in the front seat laughed. He said Swami only said such things because he was privileged in every way but most of all in his caste. He was a Brahmin and could afford to talk about art, whereas the hungry and the illiterate could afford only to labour for their daily bread. Swami said he had seen enough difficulty in his life to feel a kinship with the peasant. His art, he said, was anything but elitist. It drew from the soil and the air of rural India. Again Narayan laughed. When he was drunk his laugh became high-pitched and manic. It was the kind of laugh that put your teeth on edge. He laughed for a long time and then he said, Swamiji, you will forgive me if I take your savarna pronouncement with a pinch or two of sea salt. And the high-pitched laugh issued again, but it was cut abruptly short because Swami reached over from the back seat and slapped Narayan so hard that the sunglasses went flying off his head into a corner of the taxi. Narayan said, when the upper caste resorts to violence that is when you know you have won the argument. Then he started to laugh again, and again Swami raised his hand but this time Newton grabbed his wrist. He sat calmly in the back seat, looking straight ahead, with Swami in a death grip. But it ended there. He let him go and the rest of the ride passed in silence.
I thought to myself, in vino veritas. Narayan when drunk became reckless to the point of suicide. When Swaminathan was drunk all his lungi-wearing peasant-loving speechifying fell away and he became a patriarchal upper-caste landlord. And Newton? In vino caritas. The more he drank the nicer he became: wine revealed his charity. The curmudgeon’s mask slipped and the true face was revealed.
Rama Raoer, former professor of English Literature, Bombay University, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Dolly Mansions, near Dadar Station, March 2005
Do you know why I drink vodka in the daytime? Because it mixes with everything including hot milk tea and it doesn’t smell, or it doesn’t smell much. That’s why it’s the choice of professional drinkers and melancholic alcoholics like me. Did you catch that? Joke maara, main! When a man makes light of his alcoholism as I just did most likely he is not one. Sabko maloom hai main sharabi nahin. It is the silent solitary ones you must watch out for.
I met Doss in interesting circumstances to say the least. According to my mother, a goonda-type fellow rang the bell first thing in the morning. She thought it was the milkman or the pauwallah but it was a roadside Romeo with his collars turned up. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He didn’t introduce himself to my mother when she opened, just glared at her with the most ferocious scowl on his face. She said she wrapped her housecoat around herself and glared back at him. She isn’t intimidated easily. After all she’s my mother, but the fact is she’d never seen the man before in her life and she was not reassured by the expression on his face, which was an expression of hostility or suspicion. I’m looking for the poet Rama Raoer, the man said in English. Is he here or not? And now my mother smelled the alcohol on him, a powerful reek of stale liquor and beedis, and she noticed that his shirt was bright green and a red hankie had been positioned between collar and neck and on top of the shirt was another, a khaki cabbie’s shirt, and she saw that he hadn’t shaved or bathed and though he was short, or at le
ast no taller than she, the hallway had become dim and claustrophobic. It was as if his presence had blocked out the light. My son is not home, she said, he’s out on some work. Tell him this, the man had said, tell him Narayan Doss called and will call again. Then he turned and left without another word. My mother was hoping he would not return and that I would not entertain him if he did. When she told me the name I recognised it just as he knew I would. I knew it from poems that had appeared here and there in Marathi journals, poems you could not ignore, strange beasts full of defecation and sex and caste rage. I hadn’t decided whether they were any good or whether I liked them, but I had read them with interest because they were unlike anything I’d seen in Marathi or Hindi or English. And my mother’s description of the man sounded nothing if not promising. I told her the usual thing. Don’t worry, Ma, I can take care of myself and anyway he probably won’t be back. But I wanted to meet the ruffian and when the doorbell rang that evening I opened it and before I’d properly looked at my visitor’s face I made my famous proclamation. I said, from those to whom much is given, much will be taken away. Narayan Doss said, and those to whom nothing is given, what will be taken from them? Only then did we shake hands and only then did Doss enter the house and take his seat in the visitor’s chair (there was only one) by the balcony where the sparrows are fed daily, the feeding of birds being my only gesture at the correct life. Jaisi karni vaisi bharni.
Doss looked around the room, which was tiny, at the paintings, which were numerous, at the books stacked in uneven towers on the floor against the wall, and his gaze came to rest on his host, who asked if he wanted tea. Doss didn’t reply or he took so long to consider his reply that I went to the kitchen and returned in some time with two cups and a pot of strong Assam chai. I poured the tea and added sugar and apologised for the fact that there was no milk and that was when Doss said, look, thanks for the tea, but do you have something stronger? I said that I did not, that I lived with my mother who was out at the moment and didn’t take kindly to alcohol in the house. Doss said this was understandable. After all it was a woman’s duty to position herself against those substances and ideas and persons to which her son was drawn, because she knew these were the things that would take him from her one day. He said he had come by the house earlier and met my mother and liked her and I would do well to obey her and keep no liquor within easy reach. But since we were in fact two young poets in need of refreshment, he had an idea. Chalo dost, he said, come with me. I’ll show you where I live.
