An interview is an artificial conversation between two people. It is shaped in three tenses — the future expectant, the present imperative and the past perfected — so it is a revenant with more than the usual freight of inequity and mischance. Things get even more complicated when you have known someone for nearly 30 years and are trying for cogency.
In his 18th floor eyrie, Adil Jussawalla looks at home. This is a good sign, for his uncertain health had meant he rarely made too many forays to the ground level even before the pandemic began. During the lockdown he lost his wife of 50 years, Veronik. But as William Blake reminded us, “Joy and woe are woven fine”, and out of this weaving comes news of new work and new accolades. The Magic Hand of Chance (Paperwall) completes a trilogy of prose anthologies, which began with Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments (Aleph) which I edited, and went on to I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky: Poems, Fiction and Non-Fiction (1962-2015) (Hachette). Then came Gulestan (Poetrywala) a chapbook of extraordinary power, a lament for spaces defiled and chances lost. His first book Land’s End was reissued by Copper Coin, followed by meditations on the liminal spaces of Shorelines (Poetrywala). And now we have another collection of poems for those who are young at heart, The Tattooed Teetotaller and Other Wonders (Poetrywala). Meanwhile, the Mumbai lit fest, Tata Literature Live! declared Jussawalla its poet laureate for 2021.
Excerpts from our conversation (expletives deleted):
Let’s begin with this line from the brief introduction to The Magic Hand of Chance : “As readers go through what follows and wonder what’s happening, it’s partly what my words intend: wonder’s a good state to get lost in, and for many is often enough.”
Wonder has at least these two meanings. One might say, ‘I wonder what’s happening?’ thereby suggesting the openness of curiosity, whether about a sound in the street or the arrival and disappearance of a shooting star. The other is an attempt to see things afresh with a sense of wonder. Even if the content of what I write, whether prose or poetry, is dark or grim, I’d like to believe that there’s still a sense of openness about it. I want to present what I have discovered, not what I set out to discover. I hope that with wonder there is a sense of questioning. Each encounter sets off questions: can this be true? Can what s/he is saying be true? In that sense, there’s inquiry and the root of inquiry is curiosity. I think it was Pound who famously said that there could be no literature without curiosity. This wonder then has a measure of curiosity in it.
Gulestan draws on an archive of memory and the desecration of intimate spaces of shared history: I think of crushed petals and blood.
I think of publishing poems in the form of books, linked in terms of themes — history, family history. There are more poems like Gulestan which might find their way into print one day but right now, consider the pandemic, which seems to have affected everyone in one way or the other. Writing about that crisis I find I have to balance the personal with the general. While my point of view may be personal, it has to be slightly more expansive than that. I find myself then speaking in generalities. Ifind what Eliot said about poetry more and more correct. You have to find the objective correlative of what you are going through. Putting this in a corny way, you could say I am going through an inner flowering. It would be banal to say that, but it is what I am experiencing. Now I have to find something that would relate to that state — it need not have flowers, need not even be a tree, but it would have to correspond to this feeling.
This thinking of publishing poems in the form of books — is it a new thing?
It has always been there. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t like a book of poems of mine to speak in too many voices. That may suggest versatility to some but I would prefer not to mix too many different voices and tones in one book, at least. I know there are many writers who would disagree with me.
Does the relentless, ruthless self-examination required by poetry ever exhaust you?
Yes. But there’s always the danger that the self-inquiry is narcissistic and that it indicates a self-absorption which really interferes with what you’re crafting, what you’re trying to say, what you want to say. The self is not just exhausting but it is also very easily exhausted. So, the subject has to be outside the poet, outside the self, observed by the poet naturally, but not leading them to be self-referential. Not that I am suggesting that I succeeded in doing this in all my work; just that this has been what I am trying to do more and more. One way of doing that is not to use the pronoun ‘I’ too much in one’s work, to think instead of a ‘we’. There’s so much that any particular ‘I’ is going through which is shared by others. Sometimes I feel I have to carry it to an extreme, to be completely invisible as a poet. This feeling is not unique to me, it has happened to others.
Mehlli Gobhai, a common friend and an artist whose work you responded to, would often speak of how suspicious he was of the personality of the artist intruding into the paintings.
That’s close to what Eliot was saying about poetry not being an expression of emotion but an escape from emotion.
There is an ongoing preoccupation with family .
And with the passing of the family. Whether it’s parents or a spouse or even other family members who have made an impression on me, they continue to haunt me.
Are these poems by way of exorcism then?
They’re not nasty spirits to be exorcised. It’s a way of putting them in a certain place and me putting myself in a certain place and saying, ‘Hullo, I’m still around. I’m glad you are too.’ I don’t believe in rebirth. There are people who speak confidently about meeting in paradise or not — often because they are seeing themselves in paradise while others are damned. I’m less confident of all that, to put it mildly.
As for reincarnation, I know we all return to atoms, to the stardust from which we came, but how these could re-conform and make me into a cockroach in my next life if I have been particularly evil, I cannot imagine. I don’t know if a cockroach knows that it is a cockroach and that this is not a good thing to be. And so I don’t understand this idea of punishment or reward in some other life. All the same that death doesn’t prevent the dead from speaking to us if we are willing to listen. I am not talking of séances or ouija boards; I am talking of the persistence of memory which brings them back to you in different ways. It’s up to the receiver to decode and to use these messages. So there are more poems about the family, about me and the family, but hopefully with some relevance to those who read me.
You now live alone. Veronik’s gone and you’ve not left your home for several months now. Is solitude better for your poetry?
Veronik and I were together for more than 50 years. (My stepdaughter Katia is 61. My granddaughter is almost 30. Some of my contemporaries have a lot of catching up to do.) But through this all, there have been many times when I was alone. When Veronik and Katia moved to Bombay, Katia would have to go to France to spend time with her father and Veronik would accompany her. Later on, when Katia finished school in Bombay and decided to settle in France, Veronik would take a break every year to spend at least a couple of months with her there.
The solitude has been conducive to writing more drafts, yes. Whether these drafts will ever become poems is another matter. Before I close, I would like to have three more books of poems published but that depends on a lot of things. Anyone who thinks that living alone leads to more creativity is mistaken. What happens to the body, what happens to friends, to surviving relatives, not to mention the effect of pandemics and accidents, can take its toll. A certain mindfulness is called for, a certain alertness, if I want to continue to live a productive life.
I see the attractions of another way of being: to withdraw and to say, ‘Let me just enjoy the day’ and stop bothering to reply to letters, stop making poems. That is the way of the hermit. But there is a sense in which I am a hermit, I am willing now to make do with much less. When one is part of a family, things pile up, they accumulate because one acquires them and because others acquire things too. Now these may be shed.
Can we talk about the late flowering of Adil Jussawalla. There were 35 years between Missing Person (1976) and the next book of poems.
I thought up something clever about myself just a few hours ago. I began writing verse during my teens in school. So I thought, since I still see myself as a student — or a bhikshu, to use a Buddhist term — that I was an early beginner but a late learner. At this stage of my life I don’t think I would like to publish anything that hasn’t taught me something about myself and the world I live in. I’d like to try not to give in to the temptation of producing showy stuff which may just be clever. Right now it has to be poetry. I find I no longer have a choice.
I find I can’t really write a long piece of prose. People keep saying, ‘write a memoir,’ but that seems out of the question. And although my poetics have changed, my lines have a different feel about them, I have to continue in that way. You must have seen Tarkovsky’s Solaris with its sea of memory. Strong memories of Veronik do come back. I need to put them down in a way that makes sense to someone else, not just to me, not just as catharsis and as healing. I have to write them as poems, to make poems.
The interviewer is a poet and novelist.
Virus by Adil Jussawalla
Silent with beings we’re meant to follow,
on occasion asking a question,
looking up and about on mattress or mat,
footwear shucked off,
are conventions that mean keeping a distance,
not touching,
like prayers to those we were asked to plague
when in trouble, which we did and may still do
like many, like me, when affronted by death.
But if, in time,
we’ve come to believe they’re all in the mind,
those beings, the wounds they staunch without touching,
the fear too of dying in bits of ourselves
in a litter of unanswered questions,
we may still have in mind what we carried from them,
those beings once believed in, and which,
though at a distance,
in momentary lapses of reason,
through hoops of unquenchable fire,
we leapt to and clasped to our hearts.
*****
Treasure the corona you’ve made of contagion —
their kisses, their touch, if that’s what you’ve done.
It could be a word — one, just one:
‘forgiveness’, ‘compassion’,
the crown we are not meant to wear alone
but pass from person to person.
