Adil Jussawalla’s poems speak to the readers directly, with their subtle observations, delicate craft, way with words, and images that reverberate in fragments in their psyche, says KAlYANEE RAJAN
The first poem of the anthology, The Deep from New Poems, begins on a powerful note exhorting the reader to “Enter a sea which lacks detail like glass...” The second stanza plunges the reader deeper, into an introspective state and it ends with a heartrending image invoking “a drowned city’s lamps”, setting the tone of the many poems that follow. Jussawalla’s poems speak to the reader directly, with their many subtle observations, their delicate craft, a lingering way with words, and images that reverberate in fragments in the psyche of the reader, long after reading them. Shorelines records the plight of the various “castaways”, questioning and answering by itself, “Is everyone hereIJ The Earth is flat/ and not everyone’s accounted for”, ending with a haunting image of receding shorelines: “At night the sea’s barely visible./ Beyond it, further shorelines./ Beyond them, fjords and galaxies.”
Some of Jussawalla’s poems defy structure, like the one titled From a Manual of Maritime Signals, the entire poem composed of 19 bulleted points, tied together by the tenuous background appeals of varying degrees from the mariner. Another remarkable and short poem titled Visiting Relatives from The Right Kind of Dog (2013), details the state of a typical household in the face of relatives who tepid limca, staring servants and perhaps a hassled and anxious mother who “keeps blowing her nose”. The narrator is left wondering how the relatives keep going “bzzbzz/ against curtains,/ against portraits,/ against mirrors.”
Also included are Jussawalla’s more famous poems like the complex long poem Missing Person, commented upon in detail in the introduction by Narayanan, and Baglady Anna, who is “…a mountain/ that’s moved without faith./ Gravity keeps her going”, and she is known as “…the one to be avoided like stale/ bread or so they tell me”. The poem Bats from land’s End (1962), reveals the bats talking of their existence in the perturbed townscape, with many disturbing images woven together with the more mundane, for instance of a grandmother praying, ending with the faintly surreal image of the “…hunting arms (that) brought back/ So many pink-tongued babies in a box.” Chakravyuha (1989), a long narrative poem, written originally for a TV adaptation of Ratan Thiyand’s Manipuri stage play of the same name concludes the poetry section. It narrates in poignant and vivid details the travails of Abhimanyu, the magnificent young warrior prince of the Mahabharata, moving beyond the bleeding embankments of Kurukshetra, to dwell upon the futility of war at all times.
The anthology includes previously unpublished fiction by Jussawalla: Strays (1967) an unfinished novel of six chapters, and two short stories Visitors (1975) and A Big-Headed Boy (1985). Strays begins on an ominous date, August 14, 1947, narrated in the first person by a protagonist named Rumi. The reader is shown a snapshot of Rumi’s life as he grapples uneasily through a noisy funeral in the family. Jussawalla’s sensitive engagement with noisy, heartless relatives, who swoop down at you at any given opportunity and tend to completely colonise as well as paralyse a household, finds expression here, once again, as it does in the poem and the short story that follows. The story moves ahead, following Rumi’s search in london for his missing brother Darius, and traces in catchy details, Rumi’s encounters with various londoners, a dubious soul-cleansing ceremony, his attraction for liz, his mixed feelings for Chen and his troubling negotiations with his brother’s friend, Fram. The fragment leaves the reader craving for more as Jussawalla’s masterful storytelling gently draws the reader into its half-finished web of intricate lives of common people.
Jussawalla has charted new grounds in writing singularly arresting book reviews, which begin with the reviewer’s strongly personal take on a certain issue before connecting to the book or author being reviewed. In Breathing Freely, a review of Seamus Heaney’s book, written for the Indian Post, Jussawalla begins with an account of the Bhopal gas tragedy and asks a very poignant question: “In a century which has killed, maimed, wounded or tortured millions of innocent people and destroyed much of their history, what is the function of poetryIJ Isn’t it an escape, a soporific, a cushion against a reality it can’t possibly hope to comprehend and embraceIJ Faced with Auschwitz, must the poet be forever silentIJ Faced with Bhopal, can he ever again sing in that cityIJ”
In Nissim Ezekeil: His Selected Prose, Jussawalla presents a clinical and yet deeply personal analysis of Ezekeil’s oeuvre and remarks: “Quick to respond to what he perceives as situations of gross social or political injustice, (Ezekeil) has tilted at both sacred cows and windmills, the self-confessed ‘active fool’ of one of his poems. This reactive, activist aspect of the writer is absent from this selection of his prose.” The review is particularly heartening for the reader as Jussawalla touches upon various concerns of creative writing, poetry in particular, and that in an effortlessly precise style of spotting and stating the essence. Similar pieces on Naipaul, Aubrey Menen, Gordimer, Dilip Chitre are engaging reads, while the short one on Bessie Head ends on an extremely personal tribute to her, with Jussawalla acknowledging in the last paragraph, how he had failed to respond to Bessie’s letter of appreciation and admiration, which was actually her love letter. The title piece, I Dreamt a Horse Fell From The Sky, is a nuanced analysis of dreams and their interpretation, which sees Jussawalla moving from trying to decode his own dream, before marveling at the many unknown workings of the human brain, ending with, “Monsters and idiots that we are, I don’t think we deserve our brains. They are too good for us.”
A thoroughly gripping read from cover to cover, the entranced reader does feel a little hassled and interrupted at having to jump over to the last pages over and again to figure out the context and dates for the prose pieces. While Jussawalla’s phenomenal and dexterous artistry, his persistent refashioning of language, and his profound involvement with varied aspects of existence are immortalised in the rich annals of Indian Writing in English, Hachette has rendered invaluable service to the cause of literary creativity by publishing this anthology of his works spanning more than half-a-century of superlative poetry, fiction and prose. A delectable treat, unmissable for any meticulous connoisseur of exquisite literature.
The reviewer teaches English literature at a Delhi University college