Jayanta Mahapatra in Mumbai
Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction. There was a time in my adolescence when I would read Jayanta Mahapatra, admire it greatly but not know how to adequately express my appreciation for him. I would write to him, enquire about his wellbeing and express my own woes and angst but I never offered appreciation. To his credit, he never seemed to get bored of my rants. Instead he offered me wonderful advice and philosophical perspectives that made it easier for me to bear the vagaries of life. So I kept writing to him for a few years and he replied without fail. Later I discovered that he wrote to every single person who took the trouble to write to him.
Life went on and my correspondence with him petered down to a greeting card on New Year’s at the most and then even that disappeared. So there was literally no contact with him for more than a decade of my life. But truth is stranger than fiction.
Years after my last letter to him, I found myself standing at the Pondicherry Literary Festival, waiting for the release of my poetry book. And that’s when I discovered that it was none other than Jayanta da who was to do the honors! I was astounded. I went up to him and told him how pleased I was that he was releasing my book for that had always been my dream.
It was also the first time that I was meeting him despite ‘knowing’ him for over 25 years. Whenever we’d exchanged letters, he’d never failed to enquire after my husband and son and I about his wife whom I’d addressed as “Runu di”. Now too he asked about my family and shared the sad details of Runu di’s passing away. In those moments, I saw the stark loneliness that had enveloped his life. He was 85 and his health was failing. I could see his weariness with life, his ebbing strength and above all, his utter solitude, despite the scores of admirers milling around him at the festival.
So I looked at him and said — “Jayanta da, please come to Mumbai and spend a few days at my home. You need the vacation”. He nodded off-handedly and said he would think about it. Over the next few weeks, I wrote to him often, extending my invitation to visit Mumbai over and over again.
Exactly four months later, on August 7th, he was in my city! He’d told me over the phone that he would need a wheelchair at the airport but it would be arranged by the airlines. I asked him if the airlines could also arrange an iron anchor to steady a figure giddy with happiness at the arrival terminal.
The few days that Jayanta da spent in Mumbai passed like a riot. The beloved octogenarian was in excellent health despite a nagging backache and asthma, for which he popped pills by the dozen and stubbornly refused my gift of a pill box that would keep his medicines well organized. “I prefer my little plastic pouch,” he said.
We gorged on pav bhaji, vada pavs and pulaos, alu parathas and idlis. When I expressed my consternation at his desire for Mumbai street food, he smiled disarmingly and assured me that he would be fine. That said, I noticed that what he risked in choice of food he more than made up for by tempering the quantity. He barely helped himself to more than a sparrow’s ration of what was on the table. I asked him if he would like to do readings in Mumbai because so many poetry lovers were eager to attend such an event but he refused categorically. “All I want to do is relax,” he said. “This is a vacation, remember?”
When we sat on the stone ledge by the Arabian Sea at Land’s End, he opened up about his writing experiences like a flower to the sun. He spoke of the memorable lunch he’d had with the then editor of Poetry Magazine. The magazine was the top literary journal of its times. At that point in time, Jayanta da had been conferred with the Jacob Glatstein award by Poetry Magazine and the editor had invited him for lunch at Chicago. Jayanta da confessed to being nervous about meeting the prominent editor one to one. But the editor put him at ease and the conversation flowed naturally. “I realized that day that if we restrict ourselves to our narrow surroundings then we never explore our potentials. We remain diffident about our abilities but traveling and interactions with folks across the globe build our self-confidence immensely.”
“Padmashris and Sahitya Akademi awards were important milestones in my life, but I have to confess that when an editor of a prestigious poetry magazine invites you for lunch from across the world, it’s a priceless feeling, a recognition unmatched by any formal award,” he added.
We were silent for a while and watched the battle between a crab stranded on the rocks and a crow eager to make a prey of it. “I wish the crab could find its way back into the water,” Jayanta da spoke out aloud, echoing my own thoughts.
On another such occasion, he narrated the trekking experiences he had in Colorado with Alan Ginsberg and two of Alan’s young friends. Apparently the four of them had gone mountain climbing to a place called Boulder on the North East side of the Rockies. It was winter and the place was covered with snow. Jayanta da, who had never seen snow before, was so excited by the sight that he climbed up almost 13000 feet at a reckless speed. Not surprisingly, the cold and the altitude got to him at the summit. He developed nausea and a severe headache. Coupled with his longstanding asthma, he felt ghastly indeed. None of the others in the group had been as foolhardy as him.
“I was such a fool,” he grinned. “My headache subsided only after I descended to the plains.”
Later Jayanta da wrote about the incident in an article for The Times Of India — “Up On The Mountains With Alan Ginsberg”.
Jayanta da also told me about Ginsberg’s penchant for Hinduism. Apparently the American poet had visited India in 1961 and joined the Kritivas poetry movement that had begun in Kolkata then. He visited Puri and went to the Jagannath Temple. As we all know, foreigners are forbidden from entering the temple. Predictably, Alan was collared by the chief priests on the premises. He hastily parted with whatever money he had and lay prostrate at the priest’s feet begging for mercy for the ‘crime’ he’d committed. He lay there at the holy man’s feet even after he’d been pardoned, just digesting his relief.
We were still sitting on the parapet of Land’s End then and I was smiling at Jayanta da’s recounting of these amusing incidents, when Jayanta da happened to observe a poor woman selling something from a basket on the footpath. He drew out a ten rupee note and bought a plastic toy whistle from her. I was slightly puzzled by his actions but refrained from expressing myself. After a few minutes, several passers by, stopped by and bought the woman’s wares. Jayanta da, paused and said, “See! You buy one and a cascade starts…”
I smiled and said, “So that’s why you bought it! But what will you do with it?” “I’ll give it to some child back home,” he replied.
Despite the age, Jayant da’s knees bent easier than mine and he could squat with ease on the sands of Juhu beach. He needed no glasses to see things near or far while I struggled with both. The only thing that seemed to bog him down was mental and physical stagnation. He wanted life to move and himself to move with it. Once, we even dropped into Starbucks and had the Americana Grande with ‘tons of cream’ laughingly scandalizing our dietary morals by the amount of double cream we had with our coffees that day.
Every day we returned home after such new adventures. Over a cup of evening tea one day, Jayanta da’s conversations became more introspective and confessional. He spoke about the agonizing equation he’d had with his mother all his life, what it was like to have a father who put his wife before his children, the days when he’d run away from home at the age of fifteen (he’d run away from home and spent three penniless days in Mumbai when he was fifteen, slept on the railway platform, got into local trains whose destination he did not know … until his father scoured him out somehow and came to Mumbai to fetch him), the terrible famine that occurred a hundred and fifty years ago and forced his grandfather to convert to Christianity, about his wife’s last days, her illness and the terrible vacuum her death had created in his life. He spoke about his son and daughter-in-law and most importantly he spoke about how he felt that poetry was finished inside him. “I feel as though I have no more of it left inside me,” he iterated tiredly, “yet something new comes out about once a week.”
I saw tears fill his eyes as he recounted incidents close to his heart, I saw his jaws convulse as he gave way to emotions that were anchored in memories, that go beyond the confines of time and past the boundaries of space, like when had mentioned how his mother threw away his precious diaries when he was a teenager.” I used to be a loner in school. Those diaries were the only voice I had in those days…”
At the end of such conversations he mentioned unfailingly, that all ‘this’ is there in his autobiography written in Oriya. “Someone is translating it into English,” he added.
When the day finally came to bid him farewell, my husband and I accompanied him to the airport and we implored him to visit us every year.
“The way you people talk about visiting every year…it’s like as though I’m going to live to be a 120,” he joked before leaving.
“Of course!” we chorused.
“I’ll come,” he said simply as he positioned himself into the wheel chair and raised his arm in goodbye.