Poignant poetry

Trying to Say Goodbye by Adil Jussawalla. Published in 2011 by Almost Island Books, 11, Grotto Apartments, St. Anne’s Road, Bandra (West), Bombay 400050. Pp: 88. Price: Rs 300.

Adil Jussa­walla: From brushes to pens Photo: Studio Grapharts

It was certainly an event to celebrate. Adil Jussawalla’s last book of poems, Missing Person was published in 1976 and now on January 13, 2012, his fans gathered at Kitab Khana for the launch of his long awaited and latest collection of verse, Trying to Say Good­bye. The cosy atmosphere in the reading room was charged with excitement. This handsome volume is the maiden publishing venture of a small and independent publishing house, Almost Island Books, and it is a pleasure to read a book which has been carefully proofread and produced with love and care by two enterprising young people, Sharmistha Mohanty and Vivek Narayanan.

Some of the poems in this anthology, as Jussawalla informs us, were written in a London full of bombsites in the 1950s when he was a student of architecture there; these have been revised over the years and have been honed into their present shape. The collection starts with a diary entry dated November 6, 1957 where Jussawalla, still an architecture student in London, tries to clean up smudges of black ink on a paper caused by his Graphos (a pen, we are told, used for drawing and lettering) and is instructed by his teacher, who appreciates his painting Jazz Players, that he should "stick to the brush.” The first poem is about the Graphos which he finds more than 50 years later and which caused a change in his plans and made him turn to poetry:

". . . It is my cane,

my guide dog and the household god

that deals with things I have lost.”

And, though he has forsaken his career as an architect, he seems to be haunted by this abandoned profession as many of the poems, he tells us, are about houses, a movement from shelter, out of shelter and back to shelter. He recalls that the first draft of the poem "House,” the first one he read in his mellow and mellifluous voice, began with a line to the effect that a house could "come down to its knees in two days flat.” Over several revisions, the poem is now written poignantly from the point of view of the house which is being demolished as he is "condemned for a fault” he cannot remember. The imagery is stark:

"See my still-polished staircase rising

To ends that can never be met:

Doorways which draw a blank”

Most of the poems are so descriptive of the "external,” that one occasionally wonders if this is a ploy to mask his own persona as evident from a collection of his poetry appropriately titled Missing Person.

In a poem entitled "View” Jussawalla describes the idyllic scene from his flat in South Bombay where he sees "Ships fastened to the water” and "Palms along the coast (which) become/ A line of leaves above the door.” But here too, there is a tinge of sadness when he takes a conscious decision not to look at a "tower with its roof askew,” "a drowned garland,” a rotting mill. In fact, even the ships themselves "stand like homes/ Abandoned for the day.” Living in a high rise building has its disadvantages too, he tells us. At one time, he and his wife were constantly assailed by the noise of helicopters. He does not expect from these the majestic flight of an eagle or the pleasant cooing of a dove; he merely wishes they were like the monsoon flies. He mentions he would rescue a fly if it fell into his cups, just "as I was in mine, lifted out;” this, he informs the audience, is a reference to the days when he was addicted to alcohol about which he has written a series of memorable and touching poems called "Government Country.” Many of the customers were seeking asylum and visited these bars which sold illicit liquor where "some of us want to leave,/ some of us had to.”

There is a series of poems about English characters, those he left behind in his early drafts of the late 1950s and early 1960s which were now completed in 2009. Jussawalla read many of these with great feeling. In these poems we meet Jenny, an artist who is "Cockney without any talent and whose paintings are never bought.” Marco is so short that his head "almost rests on the table/ when his feet touch the floor.” He is constantly mocked on account of his height and this makes his existence a "prison of pinpricks.” Jussawalla poignantly draws a picture of a man shunned by the Salvation Army and assailed by loneliness who only dreams of travelling in one of Jussawalla’s suitcases to Chicago to visit a sister he has never met. Also very moving is the poem on Baglady Anna, whose only refuge is a doorway or a bench or any flat surface on which she can deposit her "bags” which "are like boulders that shore her.” Her isolation is etched in the lines:

"Forever closed to crowds,

like a department store

when its final sale is over,

she’s one to be avoided like stale

bread, or so they tell me.”

It is no wonder that she has come to the firm conviction that all roads lead to "greater homelessness” and that Christmas, the time which people generally celebrate with their families, is a "vile trespass.”

The poet speaks with great affection of the time spent in Poona at his grandmother’s house. He wryly comments that there is no park in Salisbury Park and though the house is named "Hill Crest” it is situated next to the hill and not on it. He mentions that his uncle had a nature cure clinic there where he used to treat Mahatma Gandhi who is described in this poem as "a man on a mat/ looks like a collection/ of sticks/ with spectacles on it.” Jussawalla has a bleak view of family life where "Wives shall stick to their pans,/ On the bright blue flames of marriage,/ Cook to a paste;” yet, he can write very movingly about members of his family especially in a brief poem describing his mother "as frail as/ tissue paper/ bunched on a stick” making her way to her "sonless kitchen” down a corridor.

In his earlier interview with Geeta Doctor in Parsiana ("The Parsi Quartet,” April-May 1974), Jussawalla spoke vehemently against the concept discussing poetry on the basis of his being a Parsi: "…the fact that I may be purple or black has nothing to do with my poetry.” Though the interview took place 38 years ago, the poems in Trying to Say Goodbye continue to have a cosmopolitan texture and though he speaks affectionately about several Parsis in this collection one certainly would not call him a Parsi poet.

Though people complain that the title of this collection Trying to Say Goodbye is morbid, Jussawalla points out that the poem with the same title in the anthology deals with a woman who is a betrayed wife who is speaking to her husband across the table in a bar.

Jussawalla mentions that it is his mother’s birth centenary and he hopes to write some poems about her so we hope that we do not need to wait as long for the next volume of verse as we have waited for this one. Clearly, Mr Jussawalla, even if you want to say goodbye, your fans will follow the betrayed wife and like her "won’t say goodbye, for the hell of it.”

FIRDAUS GANDAVIA