by Jeet Thayil
After some time Newton and Goody appeared and we had a financial conversation without the participation of the intended beneficiary of our scheme. It was a strange feeling to discuss the finances of a man who was passed out drunk in a corner of the room. I told Newton it wouldn’t be too difficult to invest an amount of money in his friend’s name, a nest egg that he’d be able to access from anywhere in the world. Newton’s questions were to the point and they painted a picture for me. Could I structure it so that his friend would not be able to access the capital but would receive a monthly income? Yes, I said. Could I structure it so the capital would grow for a certain period, say ten years, after which his friend would be able to withdraw the money if he wanted? Yes, I said, but how much money were we talking about? Newton glanced at Goody, who shrugged. I agreed to draw up a reasonable plan.
Before I left I used the bathroom in the hallway. Later I’d become familiar with the apartment but on that first day it seemed to me like something out of a movie, an old black-and-white movie about a pair of bohemians in New York City, artists who do not know how to separate work from life. I saw unfinished canvases and photographic equipment everywhere, in the bedroom, the corridors, even the bathroom. It was the opposite of my bathroom, which is uncluttered and full of natural light. I thought to myself that perhaps it was true what they said about artists, but it was still a surprise. I mean, this is the United States of America, you are part of the system whether you like it or not. You are scrutinised and boxed in a hundred ways. You’re taxed, insured, policed, controlled. I didn’t think it was possible to live a messy life in this country.
Zusi Krass, writer and translator, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Shamiana Coffee Shop, Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay, March 2005
We’d met only once, six years earlier.
I took a course called ‘The Internationalisation of English Literature’, taught by an American, a jazz drummer and professor who’d lived all over the world and written books on the drift-turned writers of the Caribbean and the Indies, the sundered writers of South East Asia and the United Kingdom, the water-locked writers of Africa, and the shipwrecked writers of New Zealand and the South Pacific, an American, in short, who had written about all the writers of the world except those from his own North American terrain. India was a subject he revisited periodically, particularly the unmapped world of Indian poetry, a world known only unto itself. In the late eighties he published a book that became a cult object, a kind of detective story or a piece of sustained investigative journalism about the Bombay poets. It was the first time anyone had compiled charts, birth dates, publication details, educational histories, romantic imbroglios and substantiated gossip, marital and family data, work experience, everything relevant to the topic and some things that were not. Late in the semester as an exercise he asked us to translate some of the Marathi poets into English. I chose Vilas Sarang, Arun Kolatkar, and Narayan Doss, poets who wrote in both Marathi and English, and once I’d translated a few poems, well, I got the bug. I couldn’t stop. I put together about fifty pages of material and sent it to an academic imprint that agreed to publish a book of translations when and if I finished. Bruce King, the professor who had caused the new turn in my life, suggested I visit Bombay and he gave me some names and addresses.
I bought a round-trip ticket and on Bruce’s advice I booked a room at the YWCA on Madame Cama Road in Colaba. I decided that of course I would try to meet the three writers I wished to translate but I would also attempt something more and less obvious. I would try to understand India by scrutinising the way it treated its dogs and poets. I like poets and I love dogs and I find it is a useful way to gauge the nature of a society – by marking the way it treats its marginalised figures. When looked at in that way, I’m not exaggerating, it will blow your mind, the number of stray dogs in that city and how precariously they live. I mean, it is astronomical, beyond computation, they’re everywhere and at night they take over. The poets are less organised. They are never in charge, not even at night, but they too are plentiful in number.
On Bruce’s advice the first person I met was Nissim Ezekiel at the PEN office in New Marine Lines. Ezekiel was the best known among the Indian poets who wrote in English. He knew everyone and everyone knew him. I spent an hour in his office and he gave me so much material, phone numbers and addresses and suggestions for reference books. The next day I got to work and made appointments with Sarang and Kolatkar who struck me as similar in some ways, solitary men not given to much conversation. They preferred their own company and I could tell they wished our business would be concluded as soon as possible. But they were polite to me and forthcoming enough once I mentioned Bruce and the book of translations I intended to publish.
Establishing contact with them was a walk in the park compared to Narayan Doss. He had no fixed address and no phone number. Every morning after breakfast at the YWCA – always the same breakfast, toast, milk tea, a dollop of jam, a dollop of butter, and two eggs scrambled, fried or made into an omelette – I would go to the reception area and use the phone to try to make appointments for the day. There was a woman called Mrs Sonalkar at the switchboard. She appointed herself my guide. She had the best advice, where to go for vegetarian food, where to find a tailor, where to buy silver jewellery and how much it should cost. One morning I was on the phone trying to track Doss as usual and she asked if I meant the poet Narayan Doss. I said I was surprised she had heard of him. Was he so well known? Mrs Sonalkar laughed. She was easily delighted. She said her son knew all the poets and he would be able to help me. Right there she dialled a number and said a few words in Marathi and gave me the phone. Her son sounded like he had just woken up but he gave me the number of a man who was an old friend of Doss’s. Mrs Sonalkar connected me to the man, whose name was Rama Raoer. I told him I was trying to get in touch with Narayan Doss and he said he would try to help. I was not hopeful. He seemed uninterested or reluctant and I was sure it was another dead end. Exhaustion was always with me in Bombay. I would eat breakfast, make some calls, take a little walk to the shops on the corner for fruit or toothpaste or bottled water, and I would be done for the morning. I would have to go back to my room to rest. It’s something about the air in that city, makes you old before your time. What a surprise when Raoer called me back a day later. He said Doss would meet me that evening at a school in Vile Parle where he was giving part-time language classes. I took a train to the suburbs and an auto from the station. It took two hours but I got there early. Hurry up and wait. There was no Doss, nowhere. The classrooms and grounds were empty. Nobody was around except for a woman sweeping the courtyard with a large broom. December, late evening, and there was that hushed feeling schools acquire after dark. I heard crows and the scratchy sound of the woman’s broom. I sat on a bench and watched odd joyous movement in the trees above me, feral shadows that melted like dreams. Bats! Immediately I gathered my hair into my hands because I knew baby bats are easily entangled in a girl’s hair. As I sat there with my curls in my fingers I became aware of a tall shape moving toward me in the twilight, a boy with long hair, exceedingly frail, wearing a denim shirt open on his chest. He was beautiful to look at and I couldn’t stop myself from staring. When he introduced himself and shook my hand all the possible things I could say in response popped into my head and evaporated in an instant. Finally, just to say something, I asked how he had known it was me. He laughed and lit a cigarette, one of those leaf-rolled skinny cigar-type things. It had a pungent smell that I would ordinarily have found unpleasant. But watching him smoke I wanted a drag too. You weren’t difficult to find, he said, you’re the only white woman here. Matter of fact you’re the only person here other than the security guard.
That was my only meeting with Narayan. Now here I was years later about to meet him in New York. In the intervening years I’d returned to Bombay and tried to find him, without success. I’d thought of him many times, particularly when I was translating his work. Translation is an intimate thing, like
entering someone’s head and feeling your way around. As I waited in the lobby of the Chelsea all kinds of thoughts came and went. But mostly I kept circling around the same one. This time, I told myself, this time I would seize the initiative. I would make something happen.
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t recognise him when he walked up to me. I must have had a big question mark on my face. Zusi, he said, it’s me. He had changed so much, even his face was different, darker, with a reddish tint on the skin, and broader, much broader. His cheeks had puffed out and his hair was streaked with white. He was not much older than I but he could have passed for my father. I had made up my mind and I wasn’t going to let a change in appearance stop me. I stood up and put my arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips. I smelled the alcohol on him. Alcohol and tobacco, I liked it. He didn’t know what to do and it pleased me to be the one in charge and to see he was the flustered one this time. I led him upstairs to my room. He tripped on the stairs and swayed all the way and I took charge again, which I enjoyed so much. In the room he fell into a chair, complaining about pain in his stomach. I thought he didn’t like me and he didn’t want to kiss me. But he was sweaty and he kept pressing the exact centre of his chest and then he was pacing the room and gasping. I went down to tell Stanley the situation. Of course it wasn’t the first time he had been faced with an emergency at the hotel. He arranged a taxi. Then I realised that Narayan was not ready to go, some last-minute reluctance, and I had to pull him to his feet.
At the hospital they kept him waiting on a stretcher because he had no insurance. All night on a stretcher, in pain, hardly able to breathe. I admit I panicked, and so I did what I always do when I’m confused. I called my mother. As soon as I told her where I was she started to give me a lecture and I hung up on her and went back to my spot by Narayan’s stretcher. What are we going to do, I said. Narayan pulled out a little notebook and on the last page was a phone number, a friend he wanted me to contact. I made the call and we waited and every now and then he would moan gently, as if moaning made him feel better. A junior doctor would come by and check his vitals and ask a few questions. On a scale of one to ten how bad is your pain? Nine, Narayan would say. The junior doctor would go away and another junior doctor would appear and ask the same question. Nine, Narayan would say, nine going on nine point five. It seemed a long time later that Mr Xavier arrived with a friend. He paid the hospital in cash and finally things started to happen. They took us seriously. The operation took four hours. I went to the Chelsea and had a shower and changed my clothes and when I came back he was still in anaesthesia. They’d removed his gall bladder with some kind of new camera technology. A week later he flew back to Bombay and I never saw him again. Now I never will.
Philip Nikolayev, poet and editor, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Ramanna Ashram, Rajouri Garden, New Delhi, October 2005
I was twenty-four when I first visited India. A friend worked at a small industrial plant north of Calcutta called Titagarh Steels Limited. I accompanied him to work one day. When he mentioned that I was a poet from Russia a small crowd gathered around me, steelworkers all, rough men who worked with their hands. There was great excitement not only because I was a poet but also because I was newly arrived from the Soviet Union. Bengal has one of the longest-serving communist governments in India and the word ‘Russia’ is enough to make some Bengalis teary-eyed. They made me recite my poems at great length in Russian, although they didn’t understand a word. In return some of the men recited Bengali poems. I was surprised to learn that the plant boss had given permission for this exchange and that the whole factory had come to a halt for the duration. I live in Boston where poetry is an obscure priestly pursuit. I thought to myself, Calcutta’s air is thick with a million fumes but here a poet can breathe easy. Perhaps I’d been affected by Bengali sentimentality, after all I’m Russian.
After that first visit I returned several times. I’ve travelled in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra and stayed in ashrams in Delhi, Benares, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Dehra Doon, and rural Bengal. A pilgrim’s progress and a poet’s progress. I learned Urdu and Hindi to the point of some fluency. When I visit India, which isn’t as often as I’d like, I use Calcutta as my base and branch out from there to Delhi, Bombay, Madras.
I met Xavier and Doss toward the end of my first visit when I attended the poetry conference. I had done some translation, Pushkin, Mandelshtam, Brodsky. When Xavier asked if I could contribute to the anthology I thought he wanted my translations from the Russian. But why would he want Russians in an anthology of Indian poetry? When I realised what he was getting at I didn’t agree right away. I didn’t know if my Urdu was good enough to translate poetry into English. Of course that was the point. Doss and Xavier came up with the idea of anthologising the kind of poets who had never before been anthologised, outliers, rebels, hermits, dangerous faces unwelcome in polite society. They found poets no one had ever heard of, or had heard of once and quickly forgotten, or had heard of many times over a period and then never heard of again.
I think there were some clear guiding principles that shaped the anthology. Mainly they went out of their way to eschew sentimentality. Too far out in my opinion, Newton particularly. I think he’d read too much hardboiled noir set on the mean streets of Los Angeles or Saratoga or Louisiana. It was no guilty pleasure either. He used those books like fuel. Once I asked him to send me a reading list. This would have been in 2002, the year I compiled such lists from some of my friends. Newton was in New York and he sent me his list by email. It numbered in the hundreds.
I made a partial list from his original. As you will see he survived on a diet of poetry and pulp with a preference for vanished poets. I am speaking of course of the modernist trinity of Srinivas Rayaprol, Lawrence Bantleman, and Gopal Honnalgere, poets who had been forgotten by everyone except the odd scholar or barkeep to whom they owed money. If for nothing else, the Hung Realist anthology should be acknowledged for reinstating these three lost souls to the stage or street corner or gang to which they belonged. But also I found it pleasurable to see the way obscure American and Indian poets rubbed shoulders with vanished thriller, pulp, and sci-fi authors. My friend Ben Mazer with the pseudonymous Richard Stark and the Marathi poet Manohar Oak, self-proclaimed charsi who once asked to borrow five rupees from me, five, not fifty, which I thought was kind of him because I would have given him fifty if he’d asked. He was homeless at the time, or almost homeless. Toru Dutt, Nitoo Das, Monika Varma, Gauri Deshpande, Reetika Vazirani, Arundhathi Subramaniam, and Anindita Sengupta were grouped together, which seemed correct. But so were Ed Wood, Anis Shivani, Ajithan Kurup, Temsula Ao, H. Rider Haggard, Raul de Gama Rose, Tishani Doshi, Seicho Matsumuto, Revathy Gopal, Karthika Nair, Sridala Swami, and Zulfikar Ghosh, a grouping that seemed incorrect though I am still unable to say why. The baroque racism of the reclusive H. P. Lovecraft had been set against the sweet rhymes of the reclusive Vijay Nambisan. Lovecraft and Nambisan, now there are two names you would never normally see in the same sentence! Saleel Wagh, Indira Sant, Vilas Sarang, Arun Kale, Mamta Kalia, Bal Sitaram Mardhekar, Vinda Karandikar, Damodar Prabhu, and Dilip Chitre may have belonged together as Marathi poets of a certain age, but why distance them from Narayan Surve, an orphan poet who grew up on the streets of the city, or the future publisher Hemant Divate, or the future trouble-maker Bhalchandra Nimade, or Bandu Waze (what a name and what a story, the poet and painter who gave up writing and painting and moved into a temple near Poona), not to mention Sadanand Rege, Vasant Dahake, and Namdeo Dhasal, all of whom had equally dramatic, if not melodramatic life stories? He was also reading a selection of the English modernists of course, A. K. Ramanujan, Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Dom Moraes, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, but they had been lumped with the detective novelists Georgette Heyer, Dorothy L. Sayers, and James Crumley, and the formalist Vikram Seth. Then there were the combinations that seemed so oddly fitting I thought there must be something more to it. Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Cornell
Woolrich, Anna Kavan, Leela Gandhi, Chester Hines, C. P. Surendran, Bhujang Meshram, Vivek Rajapure, Subhashini Kaligotla, Alexander Trochi, Keki Daruwalla, James Hadley Chase, Anjum Hasan, Margaret St Clair, Max Brand, Bruce King, Catherine Moore, Gurunath Dhuri, Patricia Highsmith, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Anand Thakore, Bhanu Kapil, William McIlvanney, Imtiaz Dharker, L. Ron Hubbard, Dashiel Hammett, Kamala Das, Herbert Huncke, Philip José Farmer, Easterine Kire, Menka Shivdasani, Ranjit Hoskote, Ken Bruen, Alexander Baron, Curtis Bauer, E. V. Ramakrishna, and Richard Bartholomew. And the combinations that seemed purely bizarre. Sudesh Mishra, Robert Bloch, Stephen Dobyns, Mickey Spillane, Mani Rao, Ravi Shankar (the poet, not the sitar player), Mamang Dai, Gary Phillips, Elizabeth Hand, Desmond Kharmawphlang, Jim Thompson, Suniti Namjoshi, G. S. Sharat Chandra, K. Srilata, Kazim Ali, Mary Erulkar, Hubert Selby Jr., Edgar Rice Burroughs, Bibhu Padhi, Manohar Shetty, Jim Carroll, Helen Zahavi, Robin Ngangom, Santan Rodrigues, Anupama Raju, Natsuo Kirino, Ruth Vanita, Priya Sarukkai Chabra, Samuel Loveman, Vivek Narayanan, Monica Ferrell, Gerard Malanga, Leigh Brackett, Elaine Sexton, Saleem Peeradina, Melanie Silgardo, K. Satchidanandan, H. Masud Taj, John Rechy, S. Santhi, Malay Roychoudhury, Tulsi Parab, and of course the father of them all, not Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who stopped writing in English at the advice of an English poet, but Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who had no tongue but English, who died at the age of twenty-two, in 1831, when Madhusudan Dutt was all of seven years old.
Anyway, as I was saying, to hear those guys talk you would think sentimentality was the enemy of poetry. But there was more to it than that. I want to go back to an evening in 1984 at the World Poetry Conference, perhaps the same evening the Parsi kid was talking about, or it could have been another night. We were walking on the ghats and we passed a flower shop and I stopped for a few minutes to take a closer look. I was interested in the way the flowers were handled by the vendor. Floristry has a distinct and complex interpretation in India, which responds to climate of course but also the cultic and ceremonial uses of flowers, as well as tradition, taste, and who knows what else. I am no proponent of the binary but sometimes it can be useful. I was watching the vendor work and it came to me that the west thinks in bouquets and the east in garlands. A flower shop expresses India as much as a temple. How they stack the flowers, how they wash them, how they bunch them, how they decapitate them, how they weigh batches of flower heads on scales, pile them high, spread them on water trays, package them, break them up into loose petals, festoon them, wreathe them, colour-coordinate them, scrutinise them to remove faults. It’s a craft of a million things I can’t pretend to know enough about. Also, let’s not forget, flowers heads are offered to the gods as prasad. I always thought this beheading of plants was a vegetarian version of the goat sacrifices at Kalighat. That evening I bought a packet of marigold petals, cheaply and for no reason. It was completely fresh. As we walked I held up the petals and said, this marigold was a poet not long ago. Doss and the Parsi boy did not hear or they pretended not to hear. But Xavier! I’ll always remember the expression on his face, as if a cold hand had closed around his heart. He looked at the flower like it was the face of a friend who had disappeared a long time ago. It lasted for a few seconds no more and then he was back to his usual self, the world-weariness he wore like a cloak or a mask. But in those few moments I had seen him and I knew. His aversion to sentimentality was a pose. I think that was when we became friends.
