VANITAS... A couple of days ago I posted a photograph of mine in my faux Old Testament avatar. That photo dates to 2008, a poetry reading I did at Crossword Bookshop when I shared the stage with a young and upcoming poet. The latter is now an accomplished poet, fulfilling every promise then held out, and I am very happy for the person concerned. My addition to the programme was more an afterthought for the organisers (a well-spoken foundation for the promotion of the arts among the young), a sort of filler to pad out the evening as it were. I had no objection to the second billing since it gave me a chance to air my own modest verse (there was still a regrettable scrap of vestigial vanity in me) - and in any case, I thought it was generous of them to include me at all, since I did not qualify under the ‘young’ label. As it happened, that was my only moment in the sun, brief as it was, and since the photograph found its way to the papers, I even had a fleeting season of notoriety at my workplace. Some of that memory dovetailed itself into others not entirely unrelated. A decade and a half ago I belonged (although in retrospect I would reconsider that word) to a group which shared the aforementioned foundation’s aims of promoting art and culture among the young, albeit less formally and without financial endowment. Its ad hoc informality was manifest in weekly Sunday meetings where people would read whatever was decided would be read at the previous meeting. These readings did not go much beyond L M Montgomery, Lewis Carroll, and R K Narayan for Indian flavour. The agenda after a while became decidedly claustrophobic for someone who wished to look at higher, more distant horizons, but the group’s charter and composition were uncompromising: the young must be promoted. I was acutely conscious of my age - 50 at the time, when the average of the group, less self, was around 22. But if I occasionally felt like a grizzled crow among a bunch of chirpy starlings I didn’t mind, because the group was fun, and it gave me badly needed cheer. I even thought - stupidly - that I could contribute fruitfully. At any rate, I found (and retained) some very good friends there. Only once - but that once was enough - my age was brought home to me forcefully by the person presiding over the group. During the rehearsals for some event - a play, or dramatised reading or something - I presumed to essay a part, and was told, none too kindly I thought, that the event was for ‘young people only’. I promptly apologised and shut up, and since a lifetime’s carefully nurtured noblesse obliged, put up as sunny a face on it as I could. But it hurt, and hurt badly. After that my attendance at those meetings dropped, naturally. Yet, with the wisdom (?!) of the intervening years I can see that that wafer thin sensitivity was nothing but that vestigial vanity I mentioned earlier. Today I think I can easily vie with the duck or the rhino. I am past many things. Very little touches me, although the journey to this state of grace has been a long, and perhaps necessarily painful one. Long ago in college I found myself President of something called the English Literary Society, and in the manner all such pompous beings even published a quarterly journal of writing - although nothing fancy, just a cyclostyled and stapled collection of college poetry for the most part. [As an aside, this speaks unspeakable volumes for my supposed status as a physics student, but that’s another story, unlikely to be told]. But the patron of this impressive (optimistically) effort was a professor in the English Department, who egged me on to send a copy of the journal to the contemporary High Priest of Indo-Anglian writing (as it used to be known, before it became IWE), the poet Nissim Ezekiel. Well, we found out where he taught in Bombay and promptly mailed him a copy, with a slightly smug request for comments. God knows what one expected, but when the copy came back - as it duly did, with Professor Ezekiel’s pencilled remarks - I did not have the heart to show it to the contributors. Some innate infirmity of heart in me wished to spare them the slaughter, although the good professor didn’t spare my own work either (“I do not think this is poetry”). My own English Department prof was more understanding, at least he made some emollient noises. But undergraduate vanities are terrible, and it took me a long while to get over that monumental squishing, even if I consoled myself with the thought that I was more a Dom Moraes man - which was true enough, and I still am - than a Nissim Ezekiel man. It WAS true that I didn’t much care for the latter’s Indian English experiments, it WAS true that I found sublime fufilment in Dom Moraes’s exquisitely jewelled English artifacts (I had just bought the Penguin Modern Poets volume which featured him alongside Kingsley Amis and Peter Porter). But for all that, the High Priest’s snub rankled. Badly. Yet one didn’t stop writing. One laboured on. In 1973 a bank batch-mate of mine introduced me to his aunt, the well known writer Qurratulain Hyder, at her Warden Road residence in Bombay. After the fussings over tea and food - she was a warm, affectionate, and supremely funny person - my friend told her that I was a poet (I actually cringed), and asked her if she could publish my verse in the Illustrated Weekly, of which Ms Hyder was then Associate Editor. She asked me just one question: “Beta, does your poetry make sense?” I hesitantly said I supposed it did. “Then it won’t be published!” she said, and burst into peals of laughter in which my friend and I happily joined. But that was her - for me very percipient - joke, and she took my proffered typewritten sheets and said she’d see what she could do. Unfortunately, I don’t know whether the Weekly did publish them, because soon after I left for the backwoods of Bengal, and I never saw a copy of the magazine in all my wanderings, and in time I forgot about my meeting with the wonderful, effervescent Qurratulain Hyder. Sadly, not long after, she herself passed to the Great Beyond. But we’re still on vanities, or vanity itself. A large part of that was satisfied when some of my poems were published in the Calcutta “Telegraph” Sunday Magazine. Some years later I found myself shortlisted in the British Council-Poetry Society Poetry Competition. Appearances in other journals (mostly Bombay based) followed. Yet one somehow fought shy of a published corpus, the slim volume that every poet dreams about, or at least is supposed to. With increasing years, oddly one’s diffidence too enlarged, although I think this was actually vanity on the wane: external validation, for such it was, seemed to have lost its purpose. Sometime in 2006/7 I had a couple of poems of mine in the Guardian UK, and that chuffed me a great deal for it seemed a validation of style. But as for a collection, nix. Then, in 2008 the fine and well known poet Jeet Thayil did me the honour of including me in his Bloodaxe Anthology. I rested on that laurel for a while. I remember his asking me why I hadn’t published a volume, and my laughing the suggestion off, to his puzzled incredulity. The problem was - although I didn’t tell him this - one wasn’t young any more, and fame (if that’s what it was) was an accoutrement of youth. Shakespeare was right about the tide in the affairs of men. Bengal’s Lalon Fakir said pretty much the same thing too. But the overriding reason was something else, something probably spiritually healthier: the thrall of vanity was broken, and in its place was a tranquil indifference. “And when it is accomplished - behold! - all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile - and the return to an eternal rest.” That’s my beloved Conrad, in a somewhat different context, but it serves my purpose rather well I think. *** JJ. 28/12/14
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 18:06:31 +0000
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