We are delighted to publish de Kooning’s Smile, Deepankar Khiwani’s collected poems, with an in-depth introduction by Anand Thakore. This is Copper Coin’s second collected, since John Berger’s in 2015. We are so taken with the introduction that we feel compelled to share it in its entirety, but not before sharing a cherished memento:
Here, in his own handwriting, Deepankar reveals his fondness for formalism besides the Kabir-like relief on finding ‘his mirror cracked’. The woman in Kabir was relieved to find her earthen pot shattered ‘one day’:
भला हुआ मेरी मटकी फूटी रे
मैं तो पनिया भरन से छूटी रे
However, Deepankar’s poem takes an intriguing turn and we partake of the ensuing epiphany, not without wonder.
The poet-publisher Sam Hamill had his own tender way of remembering dead poets:
All the quiet afternoon splitting wood, thinking about books, I remembered Snyder making a handle for an ax as he remembered Ezra Pound thirty years before, thinking about Lu Chi. Using the ax, I forget the ax.
Closing my eyes, I see.
—‘Old Bones’, Almost Paradise (Shambala, 2005), p. 113
Anand Thakore’s manner of recall is his own:
INTRODUCTION
Anand Thakore
i. O Half-Written Mis-Spelt Life
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity a while
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
—Hamlet, act v scene ii
I first met the author of these poems in Cathedral and John Connon School, Mumbai. We were both fourteen at the time, and fate, for its own strange reasons, had chosen to place us in the same ninth-standard division of a school that Salman Rushdie had recently described in Midnight’s Children[i]; a school moreover, curiously enough, that Adil Jussawalla, who was soon to play a supportive role in our lives as poets, had attended three decades earlier. On a sultry July afternoon at the beginning of term, the author of these poems approached me to inquire why I spent my lunch breaks reading instead of playing football or ‘quad’[ii] downstairs like everyone else. This ironic concealment of true intent was typical of his multi-layered personality, and intricately bound up with those masks he continued to wear for the rest of his life, with his strange determination to appear ‘normal’, ‘mainstream’ and ‘socially adapted’ at all costs, while secretly sustaining a rich, if deeply perturbed, intellectual life that was always cautiously curtained from those immediately around him. His love of poetry and his pursuit of the art as a practising poet was to remain for him a highly private matter for most of his life, and it is my belief that towards the end he had come to feel the pinch of his own invisibility, regretting the fact that he had only rarely, if ever, attempted to project himself as a poet in society. The true subject of his curiosity when he came up to me that afternoon was not why I was reading instead of doing what most of our classmates were doing during lunch break but what it was specifically that I was reading at the time and why. I happened at the time to be poring over the pages of a metrical translation of the Iliad by Sir William Morris,[iii] which I’d picked up for ten rupees from the street-side booksellers just outside the Junior School building. I was soon to discover that his knowledge of Greek mythology so far exceeded mine that it made me feel like a novice. He had recently put together a vast chart tracing the genealogies of the Olympians and the Titans and all their half-human, half-divine descendants. It ran into reams of foolscap sheets and accounted for discrepancies between various mythological traditions. Even more remarkably, he had just penned a highly incisive critique of ‘To a Skylark’ (prescribed on the ICSE syllabus) which condemned Shelley’s ‘arbitrary’ use of the simile and attempted to drive home the notion that ‘fine music’ and ‘the aesthetics of variety’ were no satisfactory substitute in poetry for visual accuracy. Here was someone whose mother had brought him up on a rich diet of Victorian, Romantic and Elizabethan verse (she had introduced him to the basic principles of scansion in his early teens); someone who had already begun to come up with neatly chiselled units of stanzaic verse at a time when I hadn’t really got beyond the rough prose ekphrasis, though elementary musical composition in raga and tala, by contrast, was a process that had already begun in my life. My early initiation (also parental) into Hindustani music, mirrored his initiation into the art of poetry and that most serendipitous of lunch-break encounters was to be the beginning of a literary rapport that lasted unbroken for thirty-five years. It was also the opening act of one of the most intense and sustained friendships I have ever known: we were brothers, rivals, friends, fellow-poets and much more; and it was not for nothing that Dom Moraes referred to us a decade later, in partly malicious jest, as ‘the incestuous twins of the Bombay poetry world; our very own Rimbaud and Verlaine . . .!’ My friendship with Deepankar Khiwani would rightfully make for the subject of an extended memoir, and the very thought of capturing some of its intensity here, in this introduction, so soon after his recent and wholly unexpected demise, fills me with dread. I have chosen, instead, to glide over such personal matters for now and concentrate on his sporadic but significant poetic oeuvre, restricting myself to biographical details that are directly connected with it. In his late thirties, the poet was to revisit the scene of our first meeting, to ask once again in verse those lethal questions of identity that so disturbingly pervade most of his work:
now thirty-seven I sometimes still sit at Mocambo
and write on my napkins the usual questions;
what growing up meant, what the city is,
what I means . . .
Then I walk past my old school
and hear them practising the anthem:
School first, House Next, Self Last.
And comfort myself with that order of things
Beyond the high stone wall
‘Cathedral’
__________
Deepankar Kishan Gopal Khiwani was born in Delhi in 1971 (the same year as the author of this essay, who was born in Mumbai, a few months earlier). His paternal ancestors were wealthy Hindi-speaking landowners originally from Punjab, who had settled near Multan, where they owned large agricultural estates. During the partition of Punjab, they were forced to abandon everything they owned and fled into exile, migrating to various parts of North India. Exile, rootlessness and concomitant histories of loss, a sense of being cut off from the past and of belonging nowhere, are fundamental themes in Deepankar’s encapsulations of personal crises; though political and cultural contexts are often suggested only peripherally, if at all. This chronic sense of belonging nowhere is curiously countered by a deliberate attempt to belong everywhere at once, as it were, by means of a meticulously cultivated anglophone internationalism, whose limitations too he is forced at times to acknowledge:
My sleepless eyes
rest on that single sign that makes it seem
I still am in this city; then realise
how it could well be any other name
on this departure screen . . . for these bright halls
in every airport begin to look the same
Delhi Airport’
Deepankar’s mother, Swapna Dutta, was possibly the most potent influence on his creative processes, the force that first ‘shaped’ him in childhood—to quote a famous line by Dom Moraes, a poet whom Deepankar revered—‘for the craft of verse’.[iv] A rare connoisseur of literature, and of poetry in particular, she too, like his father, grew up in an atmosphere of dislocation and unforeseen deprivation. Born in an affluent Bengali family, and raised in Calcutta, she lost both her parents in her teens and was cheated of her inheritance. She brought her children up on Victorian novels and poetry—Tennyson, Browning and the Romantics in particular—and she introduced Deepankar to the rudiments of metrical writing long before most of us knew anything about such matters. The dedication to ‘Ispahan’ (a poem written shortly before the author’s death, which deals with the surgical removal of a malignant growth) reads: ‘for my Mother, who taught me the poem by Browning,[v] but was terrified I’d learn too much.’
On moving to Bombay, the Khiwanis settled first in Worli and then in Versova, a ‘distant suburb’ which, in those days, would have been considered the back of beyond by most kids at Cathedral School. The economic circumstances of Deepankar’s childhood were unstable to say the least, but the cultural environment he grew up in was, by contrast, rich. His parents saved whatever they could to send him to one of the oldest and best reputed English schools in the city; and I feel the emphasis on Western and anglophone traditions in his parents’ choice of school and in his upbringing in general is crucial in context. The ICSE syllabus which was taught at Cathedral was designed for first-language English speakers, and was in many ways more advanced than the one taught at government schools (we had to study Shakespeare, for instance, and Deepankar stunned us by committing whole plays to memory.) Coming from Versova, he would have had to get up at six in the morning to be in school by eight-thirty; most of us got to school in less than half an hour by car or bus. Deepankar, though he concealed this admirably, and excelled in academics and generally outsmarted his peers, could not but have been aware that he was a not-so-affluent boy amongst the children of cinema tycoons and leading industrialists; and the financial insecurities of his childhood years were to determine much of the course of his later life—his repeated abandonment of art for the sake of more tangible concerns (only to return to poetry each time in greater desperation). For all his erudition and natural genius, poetry remained for him at best a serious avocation and seeking to make a profession out of writing of any sort involved a risk, at once emotional and financial, which he was simply not willing to take. Indeed, he seems to have turned his back upon poetry completely for large sections of his adult life, fearing the self-destructiveness it seemed necessarily to involve, vowing ‘not to return’. Ambivalence with regard to poetry as a way of life was a salient feature of his fractured personality and after coming to adulthood, he seems to have written only when he could no longer restrain himself; when life, in other words, compelled him to compose verse:
But these bright halls, although as dirty-white,
these basins, mirrors ageing just the same,
were different that adolescent night
I vowed not to return though still I came . . .
‘Delhi Airport’
Shakespeare was probably Deepankar’s greatest obsession in school; but his allegiances, when it came to lyric verse per se, were to the Victorians (Tennyson, Browning and Arnold) and the Romantics (Keats and Coleridge in particular). He introduced me to The Ballad of Reading Gaol[vi] and could recite most of The Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner[vii] by heart. His memory for English verse was enormous, accurate and enviable, as also his capacity to reproduce the lyrics of black-and-white Hindi film songs (which were to influence his later poetics considerably, if surreptitiously). His reading on subjects like the history of European art and the kings and queens of England was extensive. He also developed a habit in school of sketching human figures in his notebooks and demonstrated considerable natural skill as a draughtsman; but what was truly interesting about these sketches was that almost all of them were characterised by a sense of gender-neutrality—one simply couldn’t tell if they were men or women. One afternoon he shared with me his dark, burdensome secret, hitherto unrevealed to anyone except, possibly, his mother: He told me that he wrote poetry.
I didn’t get to see any of his early attempts at verse until just after that hugely liberating moment in our mid-adolescent lives when we graduated from school. We met regularly throughout our college years, sometimes to show each other poems or short prose pieces we had been working upon. The internet had not yet appeared on the scene, so one had to meet physically to do this. Like many precocious, overly intellectual adolescents, we flirted with philosophy, almost as if to mask our deeper concern with poetry. We had begun to ask, along with authors like Kenneth Clarke, Will Durant, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer and Herbert Read, general questions concerning the nature of art; questions that were to work themselves into the fabric of his poetry in the years to come. However he may have sought to answer these questions, both in theory and practice, at different times in his life, craft, as such, was fundamental to his way of perceiving art; and he was never really to abandon his formalist moorings, though he attempted consciously, at times, to break free from them. The precariously balanced and mellifluously cadenced lines quoted below from ‘Study of a Vase’ (Entr’acte, 2005), with their adept handling of iambic rhythms, enjambement and rhyme, come together to form what Cleanth Brooks might have called a ‘well-wrought urn’.[viii] And they do this while discussing those very questions with regard to the nature of art that we met as teenagers to so passionately discuss. While the poem is, at one level, about the attempt to sketch an object, language itself, in order to become poetry for Deepankar, needed to acquire the characteristics of the well-made object. Technique, as such—the means by which the poem or ‘linguistic object’, so to speak, acquired its unique shape—remained always of paramount importance to him; though never at the cost of the intense, personal significance that specific objects, persons, places and situations held for him:
Art destroys
the sureness of the thing. Perhaps this small
chip off the rim will stay unseen; if drawn, a choice
addition or faithful flawism—and yet all
create a symbol that forgets the symbol that this
has been, found in my grand-aunt’s wooden chest,
holding her letter to a child born dead. It is
a sign of the dying that seek the dead’s long rest.
‘Study of a Vase’
In his collegiate years, he laboured to hone his command over rhymed, metered and stanzaic composition, attempting an almost Tennysonian smoothness of cadence and control of line while simultaneously exploring the potential of more open forms. The boy who had said to me in school that he didn’t read modern verse because it meant very little to him, was now turning into the young man who introduced me to Eliot’s Preludes[ix] and scores of poems from The Penguin Book of Modern Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott.[x] He had begun to question his Romantic-Victorian and pre-modernist definitions of art, though the formalist position was to remain of deep value to him throughout his journey as a poet. Most of what he wrote in this period remains unpublished and unavailable, but I have a personal file of hand-copied pieces from which I quote this tiny, untitled and deceptively simple fragment. Minimalism was to play an important role in his subsequent view of poetry, as also a gentle, almost invisible, delight in paronomasia, in this case, clearly suggesting biblical symbolism:
Break bread with me
Distil
Amnesty in your eyes
Press
Your fingers
To
My wrists
And I will bear the nails
His orientation in visual art, music, literature and cultural history in general was predominantly Eurocentric (with the notable exception of Urdu ghazals and black-and-white Hindi film songs); and his early poetic influences were more British than American; though one crucial evening in our lives, when he was in his final year as a student of Economics at St. Xavier’s College and I was about to earn a BA in English literature at Elphinstone College, he introduced me to the poetry of Hart Crane, whom he had been reading about in considerable depth. Professor Leibowitz’s[xi] linguistic analysis of Crane’s verse and Unterecker’s[xii] detailed biography made a profound impact upon him; and the life and work of Hart Crane came to represent for him an aesthetic and a possibility which he was at once allured by and felt compelled, for his own safety, to consciously reject. I quote some of his favourite lines from ‘Voyages III’:[xiii]
And where death, if shed,
presumes no carnage but this single change,—
upon the step floor flung from dawn to dawn
the silken skilled transmemberment of song
And these lines from ‘Repose of Rivers’, which he was later to quote in a poem with all the bitter cynicism of his mid-thirties:
How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn stich and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled—
I remember now its singing willow rim.
What Crane taught both of us, in a somewhat extreme fashion, was that poetry, amongst its varied semantic concerns, was necessarily, even perhaps primarily, about the search for a higher musical order in speech; but the life of the romantic voyager who had surrendered himself to that search, with its concomitant themes of insanity, alcoholism, bisexuality and ultimate suicide, was one that Deepankar was, understandably, to view with increasing scepticism as he grew into his twenties. His consumption of alcohol, in those years, like his behaviour in general, was admirably restrained; the mask of serenity had to be worn tight at all costs. But it was in the sheer polyamorousness and inevitable emotional chaos of his career as young bisexual satyr that his life was to acquire something of a ‘Cranesque’ glow. In ‘Shiroshi Sequence’, written well after he had entered a life of monogamy and matrimony, a mode of life that he remained essentially loyal to, he looks back upon his late adolescent love of Crane, and his own early visions of ‘love’, from a sullenly disillusioned and de-romanticised perspective:
The Cranesque pool ‘I entered once
And quickly fled’, I found within plot Seventy-Seven A.
Ten acres, fourteen lakhs. But it was sold as well.
‘Shiroshi Sequence’
The life of Hart Crane became emblematic for Deepankar of a set of attitudes that threatened mainstream perceptions in the most unpragmatic of ways; one indeed, that was most unlike the kind he was to base his own life upon; but more importantly, Crane came to be representative for him, of an immeasurably expansive possibility in language, the ‘transmemberment’, to borrow Crane’s own phrase, of a plethora of senses and sensations, and the liberty to subjugate sense to sound. And yet, strangely enough, almost no traces of Crane’s impassioned romanticism and inexhaustible sensuality remain visible in Deepankar’s own published poetry. His own poetics were to found themselves on completely different principles that are more clearly visible in the work of poets like Hardy, Larkin and Frost. The undeniable allure of the romantic voyager came to be viewed, throughout his work, with what he believed to be ‘necessary scepticism’.
It is not for nothing that most of Deepankar’s erotic (or possibly erotic) poems, except those with clear dedications, sustain, like his early sketches in school, a sense of ambiguity with regard to the gender of the addressee. This is partly to allow for a certain open-endedness in his poems; one that grants the reader the freedom to imbue the text with his or her own personal brand of sexuality. It could be argued, of course, that similar stances have been adopted by a wide range of strictly heterosexual poets. But in Deepankar’s case, I believe there are also social and personal reasons for this sort of stance; back in those days, the maintenance of a mainstream heterosexual posture was, for most people who swung both ways, still a necessary part of social integration and acceptability; and gender-neutrality might well have been his way of suggesting his sense of marginalisation, without overstating it. ‘The Vampire of The Underground’, for instance, demonstrates this sort of open-endedness; it leaves the gender of the sexual partner unstated, but lurking in its lines is a longing that the addressee ‘could never hope to unlearn’:
Ah, it takes long learning, skill and knowledge of love
to be cruel quite precisely. Your tongue
snared, your eyes shut, your arms pinned down
by the longing you could never hope to unlearn.
When I bit into your neck at the sort-of end, and saw,
disentangling my trapped arms, you heavy on the bed,
no weight on me at all, I laughed at our helplessness.
But, as always (and I swear it) I wept to taste your blood.
Around the age of 21, in his final year of college, a change came over him that I have never quite been able to put my finger on. The precocious boy who had grown up seeing literature, and art in general, as a prime motivating factor for existence itself, was now to turn his back upon his own creative processes, attempting consciously to suppress them and devote himself to more tangible pursuits that ensured him better chances of surviving materially.
‘It takes too much,’ he once told me in the months just before our final exams, referring, of course, to poetry, ‘We’re mad, but not mad enough.’ On another occasion, when he claimed to have successfully refrained from reading or writing poetry for over six months and I inquired how he had managed to achieve this, he replied by saying: ‘You can let go of anything, Anand, if you try hard enough.’
Thankfully, he was mistaken as far as that was concerned. His self-proclaimed plans to ‘kill the poet within and proceed with the more serious business of staying alive’, were sporadically scuttled by a desperately surfacing need to write; and it is primarily to this bizarre history of recurrent and fortuitous ‘failures’ on his part, that we owe the fine poems in this volume.
In the years following his graduation in Economics he was to enrol as an apprentice in a chartered accountant’s firm and then launch on an extremely brilliant international career as a business consultant. Financial insecurity and a personal unwillingness to take mad risks played an obvious role in these early decisions; but I feel something needs to be said here about the literary environment, or more precisely, the lack of anything like a literary environment at the time when these decisions were made. I was possibly the only person Deepankar knew at the time, apart, of course, from himself, who had seriously attempted to write verse. One could study English Literature at college and university, as I did, but Indian academia, particularly with regard to the study of the humanities, was dismal to say the least. We didn’t have courses in creative writing at the college level, with visiting writers and poets; nor was the work of contemporary poets easily available. There was practically no infrastructure for the publication of poetry, except for small presses—which we hadn’t even heard of yet—like Praxis[xiv] and Clearing House[xv] (which was founded collectively by Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel, Arvind Mehrotra and Arun Kolatkar in 1975). These small presses had poor distribution systems and we didn’t really get to read much verse in English that had been produced on the Indian subcontinent in our own day and age. The internet wasn’t yet around and any information regarding contemporary writing came to us through such institutions as the British Council and American Centre Libraries, whose focus was definitely not on any form of writing that had emerged in the English language locally, least of all poetry. I can think of very little in Deepankar’s environment at the time that might have suggested to him the possibility of a life in literature.
And yet, for all his deliberate and determined attempts to sacrifice his genius, as it were, upon the altar of survival, Deepankar was soon to begin what I like to call his ‘Sea Lounge Phase’; a rich and unexpected resurgence of the poetic impulse, set off, as is frequently the case in one’s early twenties, by uncertainties surrounding love and sexuality, but also spurred on, importantly, by the entrance into his life of Dom Moraes, whom we happened to stumble upon one afternoon, entirely by accident, at the Taj Sea Lounge in Colaba, where we had arranged to meet one another to share our recent poems. The Sea Lounge, with its exquisite view of the Gateway of India and the Mumbai harbour, remains one of the most expensive restaurants in Colaba. Deepankar, who had just earned his first salary as a chartered accountant, was feeling rich for perhaps the first time in his life, and decided to treat me to the most exorbitantly priced cup of coffee available in the area. I had just completed my MA in Eng. Lit. and was teaching English for a term at Elphinstone College, a stone’s throw from the Taj Mahal Hotel. Dom lived in an old apartment behind the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Sea Lounge had become a sort of secondary residence for him. I recognised him because I had seen him earlier at a reading by Yehuda Amichai, which had been organised at the Theosophy Centre by the Poetry Circle.[xvi] I approached Dom with a line from one of his poems which I suddenly remembered: ‘The syllables of water in our ears/taught us new words till we learnt how to praise.’[xvii] This seemed to please him, though he also seemed to be secretly retreating in terror at being unexpectedly accosted by a pair of young poets. As may be expected on the part of someone who was fundamentally uncomfortable with ‘playing out this frowning poet role’[xviii] in society, Deepankar was not initially inclined to show his work to Dom (whom he had read and revered). But I took matters into my own hands and shared his poems, as well as my own, with our newly made acquaintance; and this was to lead to a troubled, if fecund, triadic interaction, that would endure for about two years and then arrive, as was common with Dom and his protégés, to an abrupt, though partially foreseen, conclusion. About a week after our first encounter with him, Deepankar and I were to find ourselves mentioned in the Sunday column Dom wrote for the Mid-Day:
The other day, also, completely by accident, I met two young poets, Anand and Deepankar. Anand Thakore came up to me in a restaurant and said that he did not think any other poets wrote in living English and that he would like to show me his poems and those of his friend Deepankar. This is something that does not happen infrequently and my initial instincts were of terror and a strong desire for flight. Very fortunately, I conquered all this and I met both. They showed me their poems. I have never seen better poems by two young Indian poets in all my life. They have tried to keep away from other Indian poets; I hope that I will be able in some way to make them better known in other places, as they well deserve it. It is amazing that two such poets should not have been heard of before, but that is what the literary scene in India is like. I cannot do much more than quote one poem from their collections, though they have not given me permission to do anything of the sort.
Dom Moraes, Mid-Day, 1995
Some of these impulsive journalistic utterances are, of course, pure hyperbole and narcissistic fantasy on Dom’s part. As far as ‘staying away from other Indian poets’ was concerned, that was, and was to increasingly become, much more of a recurrent motif in Deepankar’s life than in my own; and though I did say something about how certain anglophone Indian poets did not write in what he calls ‘living English’, I most certainly did not saythat he was the only living Indian poet who did! The latter was to be the first in a long and inventive sequence of distortions of the truth with regard to both of us. He even claimed, at a future stage, after quoting our work with considerable applause in the papers, that he had never read or met either of us. But to this date I cannot think of any instance, after this one, on which Deepankar’s verse received any laudatory mention in the papers or in a literary magazine, with the exception of a very brief review of his first book by Jerry Pinto.
Many scenes now rise to the mind from the prolonged, boyish glooms and inveterate melancholia of those formative days, which I now choose, for lack of space, to elide from these pages. It suffices to say that Dom was hugely impressed by Deepankar’s capacities as a poet and completely taken up with his intelligent but unassuming personality. Dom perceived in Deepankar’s uncanny facility with rhyme, cadence and stanzaic pattern, and in his capacity to play a natural colloquial tone across a tightly metrical iambic music, a reflection of his own formalist strengths and concerns as a poet; but more importantly, he was deeply drawn to Deepankar’s capacity to artfully ‘conceal’ himself in his first-person poems, prioritising his sense of form over the need for self-expression, revealing about himself only such details as were essential to the poem’s smooth functioning as a verbal construct. Dom saw this as a sign of rare emotional maturity in a poet so young. ‘You’re not showing yourself…’ he once said, in my presence, to Deepankar, on examining one of his poems, and he clearly meant this to be approbatory in context. My own early work, by contrast, though he praised it for its ‘tightness of language’ and ‘control of movement’, seemed to him to suffer from too much self-display and emotional exhibitionism. Dom came to represent an aesthetic and an approach to art that Deepankar, in his twenties, seems to have found fundamentally valuable (though both poets, strangely enough, begin to deconstruct this paradigm with a furious energy in their final poems); a mode that subjugates what one ‘wishes to say’ to ‘what needs to be said’ in order to make the poem work as a construct; and which seems to presume, somewhat strangely, that the tighter the mask is worn, the more convincing one is likely to sound. Dom sensed in Deepankar’s work a certain kinship with Larkin—in his adept use of meter, enjambement and rhyme, his handling of the first-person voice, and his ability to render experience without the distractions of ‘irrelevant detail’. He was the first writer of repute to respond appreciatively (or for that matter in any way) to Deepankar’s verse and this gave Deepankar considerable confidence in his own abilities as a craftsman; but more significantly, the two poets seemed to have known at once that the connection they shared was not simply based upon the control they could both essentially exercise upon language at the level of form. What they shared was an almost despairing view of the poem as a sort of false face; an artificial visage worn to conceal the wearer’s overwhelming sense of his own subliminal absence; the feeling that there is no one here, saying whatever is being said—though language survives as a sort of endlessly open field in which interesting events tend to occur, some of which, sometimes, turn into poetry:
One day he wakes to find his mirror cracked
And through the window there in its dark frame
He finds the selves that stare as if they lacked
The will to find his face and theirs the same.
‘Poet Shaving’[xix]
But when his eyes looked for
the eyes that would look back, acknowledge him,
and say—this is the I you really are
I see the bruises that they do not see,
my flesh still laughs beneath that bitter scar—
He found he looked into myopic eyes.
His hair was thinning, and his waist was thick.
He blanched to know the mirror never lies.
‘Looking Glass’[xx]
Deepankar was attracted to Dom’s evocations of medieval and mythological microcosms, and found himself influenced by the self-satirical autobiographical tone of ‘John Nobody;’[xxi] but above all, he seems to have empathised with Dom’s deliberate negations of emotion in verse. Some of his favourite lines in Dom’s verse were the following, taken from a series of sonnets that sets itself against the backdrop of a medieval war:
Hack at my heart, you will not make it bleed.
Tell me my loss, I will not answer you.
We who are dying have everything we need.
Dom Moraes, ‘The General’
And he was fond of quoting, in multiple contexts, what the speaker of ‘John Nobody’ says with reference to a girl about to be raped (‘and what she thinks is no concern of mine’). The scepticism of all empathetic sentiment in these lines is an important undercurrent in the work of both poets; and yet, paradoxically, much of their work is undeniably sentimental in nature. A self-conscious tension between the denial of sentiment and its sudden unbridled celebration seems to have been crucial to their processes.
The Sea Lounge recurs as a motif in Deepankar’s verse, and leads to a sequence in his first collection. It becomes a space associated with reflections on the ‘shallowness’ of life and his own, mostly but not always, futile attempts to imbue it with ‘depth’ through poetry; a space he comes to associate with the act of writing: Poetry for him comes to be about ‘pitching a depth to anchor shallowness’ while being ‘bound to this bay by ropes we cannot see’. The individual poems of his ‘Sea Lounge Sequence’ are explicitly called ‘poems’ in their subtitles (poem 1, poem 2 and so forth) as if to underline the fact that these pieces are self-consciously about the act of composing verse and to expose the sense of deceptiveness that poetry for him necessarily involved:
We look out at the boats
Still and empty, drifting and yet moored
to this shallow bay by ropes we cannot see.
and try to make some craft of this,
our sitting here, observing each other
watch boats,
as if we could find the purpose to this space
awash with afternoon and indifference,
and tied down to looking for symbols,
as essentially rudderless as all searches,
Still as all symbols, awkward as the symbolised.
‘Sea Lounge Sequence, Poem 1’
Boats function here as metaphors for a sense of emptiness, waiting to be converted through ‘craft’ (paronomasia clearly intended by the poet) into symbols that have explicit significations (‘purpose’); this process of transformation, however, finds (‘like all searches’) neither direction nor motion, remaining ‘rudderless’ and ‘still’; and that which is ‘symbolised’ (the ‘self’ of the speaker) remains, as is often the case in Deepankar’s verse, consumed by a sense of being ‘awkward’.
It is precisely because places like the Sea Lounge are amongst the most elite, international and predominantly anglophone spaces one could possibly find in the city that Deepankar, while trying consciously to deny a sense of belonging anywhere, comes paradoxically to ‘belong’ to them as a poet.
One important feature of Deepankar’s aesthetics in his twenties was a cultivated scepticism of contemporary political and social issues as material for verse. He was likewise sceptical of addressing in verse any issues of local, national and ethnic identity—an attitude that was to change in the later poems of his ‘Bombay Sequence/Life on an Island’, which do not hesitate to raise questions of belonging and examine issues of ethnicity. He tried deliberately at times in his early work to ‘divest his poems’, as he once put it, ‘of all local identity’, only to discover that such an attempt is itself highly problematic and questionable. He seems to have been fundamentally uncomfortable—though his work was to appear later in several anthologies of ‘Indian’ verse—with that collective sense of ‘post-colonial’ identity that was gradually being constructed around English-language poetry written on the Indian subcontinent; and for all his scholarship and fascination with critical theory, his attitude to literary academia was one of humorous condescension. Once, when I urged him to try describing ‘current situations’ in verse, like scenes from the city we lived in, for instance, he responded with a short rhyme that he never later published:
Walking Past the University
For Anand
And since you speak of Bombay and the Ghats
And smoke your bidi, walking to the Taj,
I listen, nod, and wonder why the arts
Are now such a minor matter—race so large,
That we must talk of peepul trees at Khar[xxii]
To prove to others who we really are;
To those who couldn’t care (at their most keen)—
Past two brief minutes in a magazine
Once you have passed their post-colonial test—
And after that, ask, like them: what next?
It is significant that in the years to come, he was to choose a career as business consultant that kept him travelling around the world most of the time; a way of life that didn’t allow him to stay rooted in any given place for long periods; and I believe that his willingness to be a perpetual traveller had much to do with the essential sense of uprootedness, exile, and necessary geographical adaptation that was so inextricably woven into the fabric of his family history.
Dom ensured that Deepankar’s work appeared in a ‘special Indian issue’ of a British magazine whose name, unfortunately, I have not been able to trace. This was the first time, apart from the poem Dom quoted in the Mid-Day, that his work appeared in print. The year would have been 1996 and nothing that he wrote, to the best of my knowledge, was to appear again in print until the publication of Entr’acte by Harbour Line, almost ten years later. Deepankar came into contact with several members of the small but significant coterie of anglophone poets living and writing in Mumbai at the time, notably Jeet Thayil and Adil Jussawalla. His chronic unwillingness to ‘play out’ his ‘frowning poet role’[xxiii] ensured however, that he made no attempt whatsoever to project himself as a literary person in literary circles. He was invited with Jeet Thayil and several others to read his poems at the British Council auditorium, but read his own poems poorly. ‘Performance’, as such, except as a first-person voice whispering from the page, was not a mode that came to him naturally as a poet; nor was it an ability that he was eager to develop.
Over the course of the next two years after Dom’s entrance into our lives, our strange triadic understanding began to grow increasingly unpleasant and tense, and this had much to do with Dom’s unpleasantly divisive stratagems. There was something about him that could not bear to see the intimacy that Deepankar and I shared both as poets and friends. Poetry, for Dom, was the solitary, solipsistic business of a soul entrenched in its own inescapable isolation. To be sharing our experience of poetry as freely as Deepankar and I did at the time was to go against what was for him the fundamental nature of the enterprise. He said many devious things, which are better not mentioned, in his efforts to come between us; but most importantly, he tried to convince each of us individually that we were a ‘bad influence’ on each other’s creative processes. Thankfully, none of these devious tactics on his part made any lasting impact on our friendship, though they certainly achieved their briefly disturbing effects. Deepankar was so repulsed by them that he swore never to meet Dom again, and true to his word, he never did, except in a late poem composed many years after Dom’s death and a few months before his own. ‘Reunion at the Sea Lounge’ begins with the line: ‘The couch Dom would sit in is now empty as my plate’:
The pianist is greyer, and a little hunched, but still plays Yesterday
With as much technique and as much indifference.
One can’t sit down to write in the right hand corner
They’ve set a buffet high-tea there instead.
We are all of us older, and have more money,
We pay the prices easier and we hate being sentimental.
‘The face you’ll see in the mirror will grow
more horrible over time’, he said to me, right here:
Such an odd thing to tell a teenager.
Turning his back, for personal reasons, on a poet who had been so appreciative of his gift and whose craft he had so deeply revered, coincided for Deepankar with a second withdrawal from poetry; one that would last, this time, for many years, during which his focus was to shift almost completely away from his identity as a poet. None of the new connections he had made in the small group of anglophone poets living in Mumbai at the time were to lead to the forging of serious literary friendships based on the frequent sharing of poems and ideas about poetry. Keeping away from poetry meant keeping away from poets and Deepankar had decided to go all the way in his doomed and questionably sensible attempt to achieve this.
For the next ten years, Deepankar—though he wrote rarely and sporadically when the fit was upon him—seems to have successfully distanced himself from the literary side of his personality, focusing primarily on building a career as a business consultant. He earned a degree as a chartered accountant and then graduated with outstanding grades in business administration from IIM Bangalore. When he joined Ernst and Young, he launched upon a scintillating career that was to take him to many parts of the world on a wide array of business projects. In 2000 he married Ritu Yadav. His daughter, Rara, was born in 2001. His family life was on the whole stable, though was fond of questioning, in his poems, the validity of marriage. Take these lines from ‘Meditations in a Home Accessory Store’:
Strolling down functional aisles on functional feet, I head
to the functional assonances of marriage—well, that’s served its purpose:
the slow process of cauterisation to each other, to naïve purposelessness,
and purposeless intolerances; tell me dearest, is breaking this
glass because you don’t want to cry, legitimately functional?
Or take these concluding lines from an exquisite variation on the villanelle, which pits familial commitments against the ultimately rejected temptations of an extra-marital dalliance:
The resolution on the phone’s quite good..
Strengthen yourself, delete it from the screen.
My phone’s wallpaper frames our holiday.
My daughter plays by me, taking apart
The clockwork of her doll, insistently.
I’ve met your deadline, answered you at last.
This is the way that it was meant to be.
‘This Is the Way’
In 2002 Ranjit Hoskote put together Reasons for Belonging,[xxiv] an anthology that focused on a new generation of anglophone Indian poets from Jeet Thayil (age-wise) down to Vivek Narayanan and myself. Deepankar’s work didn’t feature in it, not because of any objections to his verse on the part of the anthologist, but simply because Ranjit hadn’t come across it yet! Indeed, some years later, when Deepankar read a poem at a poetry soirée I had hosted at Chandri Villa[xxv] (by then the Harbour Line headquarters), Ranjit’s immediate response was to take me aside and say, ‘He should have been in, but I didn’t even know he had been writing!’ When Deepankar finally put his first manuscript together Ranjit received it with whole-hearted admiration and approval and provided it with an extended blurb that was at once accurately descriptive and laudatory. I cannot help musing at this point over the irony inherent in Deepankar’s absence from an anthology entitled ‘Reasons for Belonging’. Self-effacement is a strategy he used in his poems as well as in his social role as a poet, and for sure, he had his own indecipherable reasons for employing that mode, but I can’t help thinking in retrospect that these choices—or symptoms, perhaps—were inextricably connected with a sense that he ‘didn’t really belong’.
I would like to posit at this stage an undeniably subjective view of my friend—one that is not necessarily evidenced by his poetry as such, but which arises from my private knowledge of him as a person: I believe there was something about Deepankar’s personality that simply refused to belong to the times he lived in, though his skills at social adaptation to a variety of circumstances remained extraordinary. There was something of the lapsarian, the atavist and the antiquarian about him that seemed to alienate him from his own century; he was a lover of Gothic cathedrals and Byzantine icons; an explorer of European history from ancient Greece onwards (though also something of an obsessive sixties’-Bollywood analyst!). But I see him most at home, oddly enough, in the company of the late Victorians: those fin-de-siècle circles around Oscar Wilde or Robert Browning, perhaps, that anticipated but didn’t quite set foot in what we now call the modern world.
Around the turn of the millennium, in the years preceding the emergence of new independent publishing houses (Hemant Divate’s Poetrywala[xxvi] being possibly the most notable of these) the scenario for the publication of English verse written upon the Indian subcontinent was dismal to say the least. Mainstream publishers simply didn’t want to go near poetry, particularly if it was written by someone not already widely known for some other form of writing. In the absence of social circumstances conducive to the emergence of anything like a broader literary culture for anglophone Indian poetry, I decided, as we entered the new millennium, to take matters into my own hands. In 2001, with a view to bringing out work being produced by poets locally, as well as make available to the reading public my first collection of verse, I founded Harbour Line. It seems unfortunate, in retrospect, that circumstances should have compelled me to adopt such a strategy; but I had moral support for my attempt, from a wide range of poets across two generations, and this made it easier for me to establish a small structure whereby poetry produced locally—including my own—could be made available in print, albeit for a small group of readers, since wider distribution remained a problem. The exact parameters that defined Harbour Line as an entity, remain, for some, a matter of considerable debate: what started off as a sole proprietorship came gradually to be perceived by the literary community as a publishing collective. However that may be, and despite the fact that the project practically came to a close after our first four publications, I can safely say in retrospect that I feel thankful for having initiated it, if only because if I hadn’t, Deepankar’s first collection of verse would probably not have appeared in print during the course of his lifetime. In 2005, a highly encouraging response to my first book by novelist Khushwant Singh in The Hindustan Times encouraged me to organise Harbour Line on a slightly larger scale. Poets published by small and barely known publishing concerns seemed as likely to be taken seriously, as and when they found a serious readership, as anyone else:
I had not heard of his name till I read one of his poems in an anthology of Indian love poetry. In my review I quoted a few lines from his contribution. I was rewarded handsomely as he sent me his first collection, Waking in December,[xxvii] published by himself. All my reservations against authors publishing their own books vanished. Here is a gifted poet of the calibre of Dom Moraes who paints landscapes and seascapes with their flora and fauna while strictly observing rules of meter and rhyme which most modern poets tend to ignore…
Khushwant Singh, Hindustan Times, 2005
Responses of that nature suggested to me that a small press could have a big future, if given a chance. In addition to my own first book of poems, Harbour Line had also published Aquarius by Jane Bhandari in 2002. I approached Deepankar and Vivek Narayanan simultaneously, asking them both if they would be interested in bringing out their debut collections with Harbour Line, and to my great delight, they both replied in the affirmative. Working as an editor on Deepankar’s manuscript was at once an honour and a joy. As was expected, he rejected the majority of my specific editorial suggestions, with the gratifying exception of a few here and there. He also wrote back to me in detail, asserting his point of view, particularly with regard to technical issues like diction, semantic clarity, syntax and rhythm. And yet, whenever I suggested to him in a general fashion that certain poems could ‘work’ better with a certain amount of cosmetic surgery, he invariably considered revision. The efficiency of the poem as construct seemed all-important to him, taking precedence over those more self-expressive concerns that so often determine and dominate the tone and structure of a debut collection of poems. This is not to suggest, in the least, that Entr’acte ( Deepankar’s first collection and the only one to be published during the course of his lifetime) lacks the presence of a strong personal voice, or fails to deliver experience at a personal level. Most of the poems in the book function on the basis of a first-person voice; and yet, an unusually mature sense of distance consistently asserts itself between this voice and the immediate situations it describes, a distance achieved simultaneously by the dynamics of form and by a recurrent questioning of its own identity: Who is saying all this? Am I a voice or a person? What does it mean to be a person? What differentiates the person from the act? While apparently locating itself in the immediate present, the ‘I’ of these poems finds itself helplessly assailed by private histories of bereavement, swept away from the ‘now-ness of things’ by waves of inexorable nostalgia and fruitless anticipation. Jeet Thayil sensed in the book what he described somewhat mysteriously in his blurb for Entr’acte, as ‘a tone of oceanic nostalgia for the present’.[xxviii]
Before publication, copies of the Entr’acte manuscript were presented for inspection to a small group of poets—Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Jeet Thayil and Ranjit Hoskote—all of whom received it warmly and with considerable admiration for the adeptness of Deepankar’s craft. In a letter to Gieve Patel, accompanying the copy of the manuscript sent to him, Deepankar attempts to describe the process of putting isolated poems together in a way that makes them belong to a single unified book:
Gieve,
Many thanks for agreeing to review and provide input on this manuscript.
These poems were selected from those I wrote over a period of ten years, and it is only in the last three months that I seriously considered publishing them. Having determined to do so—primarily at Anand’s insistence—it’s been surprisingly simple as well as a rewarding process. Simple, because there was so much more material that tuned out to be near-ready than I would have imagined. And rewarding, because seeing the themes and understanding the evolution of the problems one has attempted to cope with, offer a good perspective on what has changed—and what hasn’t. The accompanying challenge, of course, is to avoid the impulse to re-imagine and re-inhabit the poems with a mind that has moved on in these ten years, and wants to say different things.
Entr’acte is a working title. I used it because it captures both the sense of intersection as well as the theme of an illusory reality flashing through illusory... illusions! As an imagined anagnorisis that is such a persistent motif in so much of my writing. But as I collated the poems I also saw the natural clusters of concern and theme, and these gave rise to the chapters; the titles of the chapters, you will see, are lines from the poems that comprise them. The introduction provides a narrative around how these chapters unfold. And finally, there is an Epilogue—poems of a new and different voice written earlier this year.
Where am I with this manuscript..? I have reviewed the poems, in terms of overall structure, edited out areas which I felt were unclear, and revised grammar. I haven’t quite completed checking up on punctuation, and propose to do that in the weeks ahead.
I am interested in your opinion both on technical issues, as well as whether the poems ‘work’ in your opinion. Some of the latter questions may be a matter of personal taste, some may not, and so I’d be glad to get your reactions, whichever category they fall into. Then, of course, comes the larger task of reacting to those reactions and asking the poems to.
Thanks again,
Deepankar
On viewing the manuscript, Ranjit Hoskote provided us with the following extended blurb, possibly the longest written comment (apart from this introduction) on Deepankar’s work so far:
The dominant tenor of Deepankar Khiwani’s Entr’acte is nostalgic, but Khiwani is not a simple nostalgist. He remains self-possessed, even self-critical as he revisits objects layered with memories, scenes from adolescence, occasions of loss or discovery that stand out from the flux of routine and travel, arrival and departure. Alert though he is to the risk of sentimentality, Khiwani does not always sidestep it: there are moments, in these poems, when he seems to welcome it as an antidote to the gathering pressure of events. This is a cadenced poetry of wit and balance; its ironies are safeguards against hurt, not corrosive depredations mounted upon the complexities of emotional experience.
The world collapses around Khiwani in slow motion. Everything is greatly slowed down in his perception, as though duration had to be redeemed from the speed of the contemporary, and translated into a phenomenology of scrutinised moments. A poet falls, drunk, from a chair on a lawn; a mirror cracks, leaving the man shaving in it bewildered by the multiplicity of his faces, selves. Or then the familiar is subjected to an interrogation that is no less dramatic for being unobtrusive: Khiwani uses oblique angles and subtly altered perspectives to recover life’s disturbing and forbidding aspects from beneath the sanitisations of normality.
Some of these poems are veined with the poignancy of childhood memory; in others, the poet traces a map of absence around the fugitive sensation or the proper ceremonial of passage that seems to elude him. Khiwani holds together a life led in many phases—over its shifts of orientation and direction—by means of a grammar of changing light and variously shaped windows, limbs observed in mellowness and objects rendered in their fragility. Khiwani observes the objects in his poems with a meticulous attention that becomes, almost, a form of devotion. This is a devotion to things that are transient, ephemeral and fleeting, yet make us most fully conscious when we retrieve them from time’s inexorable kingdom, translate them into the realm of the finely crafted image.[xxix]
Thus spake Ranjit Hoskote in 2006; and as I find myself teetering half-way through this biographical essay, I can’t help feeling wryly amused by the sudden contextual irony in Deepankar’s choice of phrase, when he refers in the concluding lines of his first book, to his ‘half-written mis-spelt life’, a phrase Arundhathi Subramaniam most perspicaciously latches onto in her comments on Entr’acte: The last poem in Entr’acte is called ‘Epilogue’, for obvious dramatic effect, and here are its concluding lines:
In a faraway piece of earth I’ve buried my epitaphs, and now
O half-written mis-spelt life, all that I have are these typewritten pages,
with an unwritten prelude and missing titles,
and the will to try to put them all
back, into place.
Arundhathi Subramaniam describes the book as follows[xxx]:
This is poetry of formal assurance that refuses to engage in any flamboyant displays of virtuosity. The poet returns time and again to the blurred divide between self and other, reality and art, equipoise and decay, loss and longing, violence and love, volition and compulsion. What makes the reader trust this enterprise is the quality of restraint. This enables Deepankar Khiwani to probe the shadowy areas of betweenness in the ‘half-written mis-spelt life’—its ambiguities and betrayals, as well as the unbidden moments of searing clarity.
Following the publication of his first collection, Deepankar seems to have written almost nothing new for the next five years. It is possible that the lack of any public response, outside a small inner coterie, and the fact that Harbour Line did not really have an efficient distribution system that could make the book widely available, might have dissuaded him from writing with a view to publication. His career as a business consultant became increasingly international and demanding at this point, culminating in a four-year stay in Paris and then in Zurich, during which he attained a very senior position as a CEO in Capgemini—a position from which he took early voluntary retirement a year before his sudden death at 49, hoping to focus at last, perhaps, amongst other things, on his much-neglected genius.
Around 2010, the growing internationalism of his life seems to have spurred him on to begin two sets of poems, both of which concern themselves intensely with questions of belonging and a concomitant sense of dislocation in time and space. ‘After Arles’, the first set of poems that Deepankar locates on European soil, is a series that describes a visit to a photography exhibition by a photographer he had once shared an intimate relationship with. It examines the theme of belonging with regard to a specific person rather than a place; whereas ‘Life on an Island’ (later entitled ‘Bombay Sequence’) concerns itself obsessively with his relationship to the city he was raised in, a geographical expansion, as it were, of the themes the earlier sequence had raised at an interpersonal level.
Apart from these two sequences—parts of which were anthologised by Sudeep Sen[xxxi], along with a marvellous variation on the villanelle—Deepankar produced no new work until he took retirement in 2019. He often told me that he would have phases during which he would begin working on poems again, with a second manuscript in mind, but that these phases were short-lived because he ‘gave up too quickly’. While in Paris he managed to do incredibly well for himself financially and began to complain of a sense of satiety, a sense of frustration at having wasted his life on things he was not genetically inclined to do, and of being ‘lonely at the top’. He found himself caught for several years in a prolonged binge of heavy drinking and grew increasingly dependent on cocaine and crystal meth, all of which left him in states of deep depression and heightened desperation. When I met him on his return to Mumbai from Paris, he seemed to be healing but inwardly distraught.
As he envisioned his life post-retirement, Deepankar seems to have embarked on two projects simultaneously: the first of these was amassing a varied collection of rare and expensive antiquities—Celtic jewellery, for instance, illustrated medieval manuscripts, an eighteenth-century Russian samovar; but his second project, more pertinently, was to get in touch with what was rare within him—to rediscover his lost identity as a poet as best he could in mid-life. He began getting in touch with other poets, sharing work by his favourite poets with me regularly, participating at times in online poetry circles, but the writing didn’t really take off the ground again, until he began to feel the sudden devastating pressure of a dangerous illness that had been diagnosed too late. What followed was an unprecedented, if doomed and short-lived, period of deeply disturbed poetic effervescence. The sudden likelihood and imminence of death in the near future, seems to have shaken him out of years of slumber, and he found himself producing work at a frenzied speed he had never before experienced. I can’t help thinking of Keats in context; of the poems in Section I of this collection (poems 2010 -2020), nineteen were composed during the last three months of his life.
Six months before his death, while he still seemed in perfectly good health, I spent a few days with him at his new apartment in Goa. When I asked him if he had been writing, he compared his state of mind to that of the Trojan War, just before the commencement of the Iliad: nine years of stasis; the Trojans safe behind their walls, the Greeks in their tents; a stalemate situation with no progress either way; ‘And then,’ he added with a hopeful chuckle, ‘there’s all the furious action of the Iliad that unfolds in a matter of weeks; maybe that’s how things work for me, maybe Homer had writer’s block and suddenly overcame it . . .’ Neither of us realised it then, of course, but his words had an oracular ring to them: Deepankar was to write in the last three months of his life more poems than he’d written in the preceding ten years. The immediate presence of death seems to have brought him briefly to life as a poet, allowing him to write with a fury long suppressed. In his last poems he returns, as might be expected, to memories of a mother who had brought him up to appreciate verse; and to those Hellenic themes that had occupied his imagination in childhood; and there are times when he moves away from nostalgia and myth, focusing on the harshness of disease, medical treatment, and the proximity of death, observing and commenting on these without the slightest trace of self-pity and seasoning with his characteristically wry and self-satirising humour, a latent layer of futility and despair.
Throughout the last few months of his life, it was terribly important to him that no one should guess at the severity of his illness, or what exactly he was suffering from. When I visited him, a week before he was hospitalised, he seemed in reasonably good form, though he complained of ‘chest pains that needed investigation’. His death, like his triumphant concluding flourish as a poet, was anything but expected; and that flourish has only survived because he sent an untitled manuscript (poems 2010-2020) to Copper Coin for publication, a fortnight before he died. Copies of this manuscript were also sent to poets Ravi Shankar, Manohar Shetty and myself. He asked Manohar to consider a possible title for the new book he had envisioned, the contents of which now form section I of this collection. In an email to Ravi Shankar, he complained that he was still unsure of several choices and that ‘the ink was not yet dry’. The email quoted below, dated 3-3-20 (a little more than three weeks before his death) is a retort to certain points I had raised with regard to etymology and what I perceived as his ‘distaste for transferred epithet’; but importantly, it is also a brief critique of a linguistic terrain—‘our current environment in India’:
Linguistic and etymological understanding are always important because they can create interacting resonances of meaning and often of sounds—look at the way Tennyson lays out a feast of Saxon consonants (‘dry’, ‘clash’, ‘harness’, ‘waste’, ‘clang’) in one place and then uses a Latinate abstraction in large parts of ‘In Memoriam.’[xxxii] Or the poem my mother chose to teach me technique in poetry: Gray’s Elegy[xxxiii]... (my first exercise in scansion). See what he does starting with exclusively Anglo-Saxon words (‘ploughman’, ‘curfew’, ‘herd’, ‘moping’, ‘Owl’, ‘bed’, ‘beetle’) to later develop the concepts with Latin Infusions (‘Can Honour’s Voice?’, ‘The applause of listening senates to command.’[xxxiv]etc.). To me this is a pleasure in itself.
I think it’s worth considering that the process of semantic drift and lack of rigour in understanding or having interest in words creates overall a deterioration in linguistic culture (That ‘consider’ meant ‘gaze at the stars’ gives power to ‘consider’ it not so deeply).
And finally, because in general our current environment in India is one in which you and I cannot easily find readers or writers with any discrimination, one can easily fail to miss cliché. I don’t know on what basis you make the assumption about my having a distaste for transferred epithet—absolutely not true. But when Gray writes ‘The ploughman homeward plods his weary way’, it’s powerful, the way he combines semantic roots, alliterative sounds and a freshness of feeling.
Deepankar’s final outburst of poetic energy is an inimitable compound of humour and darkness; a determined attempt to imbue an intensifying sense of failure and pain with an adeptly sustained lightness of tone; an almost frivolous levity that breaks out at times into brief and swiftly restrained fits of the bitterest laughter. His last flourish includes nursery-rhyme-like personifications of a teapot and a pair of scissors; a parody of a song from The Merchant of Venice[xxxv] (which we had to study in school); recollections of the serener aspects of childhood; an absurd response from Facebook to a dead person; a hilarious ‘mask’-poem that ends in a huge sneeze (the Covid crisis had just set in a month before his demise); and an amusing epistolary rejoinder to a glaring grammatical lapse on the part of a fellow poet (Arjun Rajendran). But all this frivolity is poised against the physical harshness of a terminal illness, the realities of hospitalisation and the mood of utter futility, the pointlessness of all resistance. The actual physical circumstances of illness, treatment and hospitalisation are mostly—though not always—quietly suggested and not directly delineated. Take for instance the following lines in which a surgery to be performed on his own body is only very vaguely hinted at by the act of cutting open a watermelon:
What will one do if one sees the flesh rotting inside—
Excise the rot surgically, or throw all away?
For all is God’s award.
Sometimes of course, one needs to throw away the good..
The knife must be sharp and pointed,
The right hand must be resolute, swift
And you must grasp the melon
With your left hand steady
‘Ispahan’
Or observe the irresistible sense of subtle paronomasia that hovers around the word ‘chest’ in the following lines, which evoke the microcosm of Treasure Island[xxxvi]—a world of parrots, adventure and hidden treasure—only to remotely suggest the physical pain of a surgical operation:
I open my little box
of mango wood with a carved parrot
on the lid.
His beak is clamped but he looks at me sideways with speculative interest
that could help or harm, one can’t know quite which.
I can’t trust him - even he wouldn’t trust himself,
He is Captain Flint’s parrot, found in Bermuda.
But the chest is mine now! I open it, just a crack.
‘Treasure Chest’
And then there are times when he seeks to capture the raw physical pain of surgery and illness, though never letting go of those brief, partial alleviations provided by humour or myth: ‘Swaddled’ begins by quoting Blake’s Songs of Experience,[xxxvii] to suggest as he feels the growing proximity of death, the inevitable pain of human birth:
For this is what comforts and supports
and this feels secure, the certainty—and the brittleness
of clear glass panes and a needle, this time
inserted above the fingers of the right hand,
pulsating like an aching reminder:
that one is merely a body, no more, and never was.
I who put much spirit into my flight,
need that reminding, for I barely understood,
even when I was bruised by clouds and burnt by the Sun
And the poem segues over centuries from the Hellenic image of Icarus into the world of the New Testament; a nurse folding his arms into a cross:
Now the nurse crosses my arms neatly
on my chest: a posture of Medieval piety
that makes me chuckle despite myself,
and what indeed is healing if without laughter?
- and even if the rot has spread deep inside,
The brain can smile - indeed, must smile at the brain.
That was a gnashing of teeth below in the sky,
and now, says Doctor, a blazing light shall come
In the last poems he sent me individually by email (also the concluding poems of his second manuscript) Deepankar returns to the world of Hellenic myth that had consumed him so obsessively as a boy. In a dramatic monologue spoken by the son of Codrus—last of the mythical Kings of Athens—Deepankar plays the ventriloquist, summoning, strangely enough, the theme of homo-eroticism, only to talk of a boy who feels outshone and outdone by the heroism of his father; a son who seeks self-acceptance through the idea that unlike his father, he was not born for great deeds, but simpler things:
Now my father, he was a real hero, everyone said—
attempting to ravish Dionysus himself!
Somehow I could never bring myself to do that sort of thing,
and there was so much to do here till now:
repairing the burnt palaces and gymnasia,
restoring the temples,
‘Codrus Draws Near’
The predominant mood of his Hellenic poems is that of failure; and yet, along with an overpowering sense of defeat, the restless questioning about the meaning of art and life persists in these poems with a renewed vigour. Daedalus asks himself what it means to construct a labyrinth that even he might not know the way out of, a metaphor for poetry and art in general; Medea proceeds in her quest for freedom from guilt; and Jason, at the end of all his adventures and labours, finds himself asking the most poignant question of all—how to die:
When it is over, how indeed shall one end it?
The craft one has lost lies,
while rotting; unmanned by Love,
it falls on him to murmur:
‘That journey was in fact the end of me’
and stumbles to sleep on its shadow there,
that smells like an ocean.
But is rather more instead
too like that drop in the ocean:
‘Jason and Helle’
The poem quoted above brings together two myths in the unlikeliest of ways, invoking at once the story of little Helle falling off the golden ram—whose fleece the argonauts were to pursue—and the last moments of Jason, that most celebrated of heroes fated to die an utterly unheroic death. Deepankar paints him as he lies in the shadow of his famous ship, its prow now rotten, about to break off and hit him on the head in his sleep. The achievements of Jason and the voyages of his ship come to be viewed as no more significant than those of the little girl who fell into the sea, centuries earlier, purely by accident.
Passages like this one are exemplary of Khiwanian paronomasia at its finest. There are puns throughout, imbuing the tone of exhaustion with a subliminal lightness and delight in the capacity of language to suggest more than it says. ‘Craft’, of course, could refer at once to the Argosy and to the craft of verse or Art in general and ‘lies’ could be read to imply that all art is deception (i.e. The art one has now lost continues to deceive as it decays/rots). ‘Unmanned’ could be taken with reference to the ship as ‘having no one to man/control it’, or as a reference to the craft of verse being now either ‘deprived of love to guide it on its journey’ or ‘deprived by love of its manliness’ (which is one interpretation of what happened to Jason). And there is a gentle pun on ‘falls’, suggesting the wooden prow that is about to fall on his head and kill him; even a mild pun on ‘drop’ suggesting Helle dropping off the ram into what was later to be called the Hellespont.
There is a certain curious heroism inherent in those of us who continue to play with language as death draws near. Deepankar, as he develops his deliberately anti-heroic themes, his celebrations of defeat, emerges paradoxically, as a heroic celebrant of the written word. He passed away on 28 March 2020.
ii. De Kooning’s Smile
No: what we need to do is learn how to blank it out ...
The canvas itself of course, hangs spotless as pure doubt,
and De Kooning’s smile hovers above, uncertain as all art.
—Deepankar Khiwani, ‘For Robert Rauschenberg’
This book is divided into two groups of poems arranged in reverse chronological order. Section I ( Poems 2010-2020) contains an untitled manuscript sent to the publisher three weeks before the poet’s demise in March 2020. Section II comprises all the poems that had appeared in Entr’acte (poems 1995-2005). There are marked differences between the two phases of the poet’s work, with regard to tone, treatment and stylistic preference. Representations of ‘self’, in Khiwani’s later work, seem to involve a gradual loosening of masks—a process that intensifies under the threat of imminent death; and this unveiling of self is accompanied by a freeing-up of his style, a movement from the strict, almost processional mellifluousness and formalism of his early verse to an exploration of colloquial tone and at times jagged, irregular speech-rhythms. His earlier obsession with identity—or more precisely the lack of it—and his intellectual fascination with the nature and meaning of art persist with increasing intensity throughout his later poems; but in the second manuscript, there is a broadening—an expansion both geographical and psychological—of the field within which these themes are addressed. Bombay moves suddenly from the background into the forefront, claiming importance, not merely as a setting for something that could have been said anywhere, but because it is the city he grew up in; Arles acquires a specific significance because of the film and photography culture associated with the place (whose superficialities, of course, he is eager to expose); mythology and his boyhood penchant for the Hellenic enter his work in the form of the dramatic monologue; and most importantly, his work is suddenly charged and impelled by the overpowering proximity of his own imminent death.
The second manuscript begins with a visit to the Rencontres d’Arles, the annual summer photography festival. The poet goes there to engage with the exhibited work of a photographer whom he has been intimate with in the past and now finds himself estranged from. These photographs, importantly, involve back references to the poet’s own life. When he views them purely as constructs ( ‘presented for inspection’, to quote Marianne Moore)[xxxviii] they are images that simply fail to appeal to him as art. He finds them overburdened with ideology, catering to the ‘gallery’, as it were, and is eager to expose the superficiality of the general ambience, the cultural speciousness of the space in which the exhibition occurs. The crucial question he is asking throughout the poems that comprise the ‘After Arles’ sequence, is how to make art out of something that fails utterly to work for him as art; and along with this rises the question of his own survival as a poet: how do one’s creative processes survive in an ambience devoted to a vast pseudo-aesthetic masquerade? What emerges from these questions is a bittersweet series of satirical glimpses into the contemporary art world, which culminates, because of his personal involvement in the photographer’s life, in a crescendo of increasingly bitter self-satire. The poet finds himself eager to distinguish between what works for him as art and what doesn’t; but in the process he discovers that there is no genuine place for his own perspectives on the matter, anywhere in the environs of the festival. Once again, we see at the heart of Khiwani’s poetry a sense of ‘not belonging here’; and this alienation has nothing to do with the fact that he is in a foreign country, surrounded by an alien culture; what it has everything to do with is the fact that whichever way he turns, what he considers clearly to be ‘non-art’ is being widely perceived as ‘Art’ (per se, with a capital A). This tension between conflicting perspectives intensifies till it results in a state of inner collapse; but Khiwani’s refusal to be absorbed by an environment he cannot accept is also one of his greatest strengths as a poet. As an aesthete it is a matter of pride for him to remain an outsider; while at the personal level, in his relationship with the photographer in question, he finds himself helplessly drawn in.
‘Multiple Exposures’, the first poem in the sequence, begins with a sense of resentment at being told in words—by means of a caption provided by the photographer—what the photographs are actually ‘about’ and how they are ‘supposed’ to be perceived. The photographer’s immaturity and naïvete as an artist find themselves instantly ‘exposed’ (the multiple meanings of ‘exposure’ in the title are obvious) in the perceptual processes of the poet. The photographer’s dependence on verbal language to draw attention to the visual image he presents is a sure sign, in the poet’s eyes, of his obvious limitations as an artist. It is also a sign of something in the cultural environment of art and photography festivals that he perceives as dysfunctional:
At the entrance
on a large poster I see I should read
what I should see,
in black and white:
And the caption itself is not only a trite statement on photography in general but also hopelessly tautological; yet another unfortunate instance of the obvious being thrust before the reader’s eyes, for the purpose of explaining one’s art—which ‘photograph’, after all, is not also an ‘image’?
‘. . . these photographs are images;
each a specific moment shot
and preserved about this conflict . . .’
Now the question in the poet’s mind is how to make a good poem in response to a set of at-best ‘average’ photographs with disastrously banal captions . . . an amusing enough question in itself, but one that has disturbing consequences for him personally, because, amongst other things, of the strong personal history he has shared with the photographer. Whatever Art may be for him at this point in his life, it is certainly not what is being overtly presented before him as ‘Art’. As the poet’s gaze moves through the gallery from one photograph to the next, they begin to acquire for him a cinematic continuum, transforming themselves into a set of images moving in time, as it were, rather than frozen in space; which is to say that the poet is perceiving them in a way that is deliberately antipodal to that verbally ‘prescribed’ by the photographer. Something in the perceptual process compels him to view the photographs temporally, blurring set boundaries between one image and the next rather than perceiving ‘each’ photograph as ‘a specific moment shot and preserved’. This sudden movement in time—the mutually contrastive nature and inseparability of past and present, particularly with regard to his relationship with the photographer—is essential to the way the sequence develops; but what Khiwani explores here is also a sudden disappearance of boundaries between the images presented as Art and the physical space in which they are set; a case of art spilling over into life, as it were; and life imposing itself on art in unexpected ways. The instance of the gallery attendant’s face suddenly appearing, reflected in the glass that covers a photograph is striking:
I need them there separate,
at peace for now,
each an image, a shot,
a specific moment; so that I might reflect
on the struggling man—
But instead the Gallery Attendant shuffling
appears in the glass, an image
redolent of a past, like its drunken ghost,
and murmurs to me: Monsieur—not so close, svp
What the gallery attendant says there (reflected in the glass) is a fine piece of dramatic irony because it suggests that the poet is now getting too ‘close’ once again—at the personal level—to the photographer whose work he is viewing—a suggestion that leads directly to the next poem. ‘Rencontres’ (Remembrances) is an apostrophe to his photographer-friend; a possibly older man, who has played a ‘fathering’ role of some sort in his life and with whom he has shared a strong and very possibly sexual intimacy in the now distant past. Must he now, he asks, reconstruct his image of an erstwhile friend/lover/companion purely on the basis of what this person presents to the world publicly as ‘Art’?
Father, photographer, my one-time friend.
Am I now, seven years on, to construct you
Like this, from these luminous hallucinogenic slides,
And the segue from the immediate space of the festival, and the frozen space of photography into time past is briefly overwhelming:
I don’t know your children, I want to say,
I am stuck, the boy who drank with you. You’ve grown up,
I see your life, the wife in the lace bra, the colleague shot in black
All I see is what is missing,
The process of confronting his own past through the photographs exhibited in the gallery, raises questions with regard to the nature and function of art. Whereas he remains uncertain as to what art is—except that it invariably involves pain—he seems reasonably self-assured when he attempts to define what art is not. It is not, certainly, what the brochure circulated at the festival says it is:
I feel absurdly as if I’m here
to hand over this message: Art Provides Closure.
While of course it doesn’t; Art, whatever it is
is a dark condemned space with the door unlocked
where men wander in, innocent, stumbling, unsure sometimes
of what they wanted;
‘After Arles’ arrives at what I personally like to perceive as its point of climax in the concluding lines of ‘Burst Mode’; a poem that attempts to embrace in a lighter vein ‘what is missing’, and which blends a satirical view of an exhibition-space with a delightfully comic use of sexual and at times clearly homo-erotic innuendo. The poem abounds in sexual puns around the verb ‘take’ (‘take that, life’, ‘the hooker not taken’—reminiscent, of course, of Frost)[xxxix] culminating in the blatantly orgasmic imperative line: ‘Take it, take it, bitch’, rendered with convincing realism, in French:
But the Texan guest-judge paces in perspiring judgement,
on the third floor, taking no time for these dry questions,
sniffing instead very slightly at the rotting images
nailed before him; Give me a fucking break, he mumbles, finally,
glad for the power to blink..So important.
The face of a Chinese butcher frowns at him—
parried adeptly, however, as he checks for his flight.
Then, as he remembers his wristwatch is gone,
he sees again the face of the Tunisian boy last night,
crying out at him, Prends-le, prends-le putain.
I am aware that I too, as commentator, run the risk of stating the obvious when I say this (as the caption beneath the first photograph does), but there is no way, of course, at the realistic level, that the poet could ‘know’ that the Texan judge, as he stares at these images at the festival, is recalling his recent sexual encounter with a Tunisian rent-boy who has stolen his wristwatch. The judge’s reaction at this point is clearly something engendered for effect by the poet’s imagination; and as such, it is an important clue as to what the poet considers to be ‘Art’: art, for Khiwani, is not, as it seems to be for his photographer-friend an accurate representation of what exists, so to speak, but a process that shows you, or begins to show you ‘what is missing’ in life; and a subsequent attempt to imbue existence with something that existence on its own fundamentally lacks.
In an earlier poem entitled ‘For Robert Rauschenberg’[xl] (which appears in his first collection) Khiwani recreates that curious moment in the annals of modern art when Rauschenberg begins to systematically erase a pencil drawing that De Kooning has sent him. In ‘After Arles’, Khiwani begins a process similar to Rauschenberg’s: he attempts to systematically delete from memory the images presented before him as art, but in the process he also substitutes them with, and in a sense ‘superimposes’ upon them, a series of verbal snapshots that are entirely of his own making.
‘Bombay Sequence’, the next continuous series of poems in the untitled manuscript, is preceded by a sort of prologue that pits a sense of growing globalism against a recurrently unfulfilled need for local identity. We see Khiwani breaking into colloquialism here, in a way that is entirely new for him; but we also see him questioning his own move, overwhelmed by self-doubt with regard to linguistic and cultural allegiances:
So I dunno what to write now.
And don’t know if dunno is acceptable,
Or if it’s too westernised for Bombay.
Or then too American for a reader in England
Where I find I have readers via the internet.
The confusion that the poet captures in these lines, with regard to his own linguistic choices, is central to his sequence of ‘Bombay-poems’. Bombay, whatever else it may be, is importantly ‘Bombay’ for him and not ‘Mumbai’. It is significant, I think, in context, that these poems began to emerge when he had been posted in Paris for four years. His geographical distance from the locale he was writing about seems to have given him a sense of detachment that enabled him to perceive the city he grew up in through a fresh paradigm and with a sudden interest in what he had hitherto considered ‘boring’. His geographical displacement prompts him to perceive Bombay as material for art; but these are not poems overtly animated in any way by a sense of home-sickness for the city he grew up in; what they focus on instead is an essential sense of inner displacement and dispossession which the poet seems to carry around with him wherever he goes, irrespective of geography. If at all there is a sense of home-sickness lurking in the background music to these poems, it is a home-sickness for the sort of home that the physical realm can never really provide. ‘Bombay Sequence’, while it raises its questions of national, local and linguistic identity, is also an attempt to construct a hometown out of language, a place the poet can finally ‘live’ in.
Khiwani uses the physical geography of Bombay and the history of its urban development to indicate a parallel geography of the self and society. The fact that Bombay was not originally a single island but several small islands, each of them individually cut off, at once from each other and from the vast mainland that comprises the Indian subcontinent, is crucial to this vision. It suggests alienation and fragmentation at once and Khiwani uses the geographical metaphor to talk of both phenomena with regard to his personal psyche and society in general. But his vision of the city also takes into account the important fact that what we now call ‘Bombay’/‘Mumbai’ emerges from a collective human effort to bridge the gaps between the islands, not by building bridges, as is often the case, but by ‘reclaiming’ land from the sea, a process of making the sea ‘ours’, as it were, by turning it into land. Khiwani draws our attention to the fact that in spite of such efforts to unify the city at a geographical level, the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic cartography of the city remains endlessly splintered, fragmentary and in a state of constant political conflict. He is still waiting, somewhat hopelessly, for gaps to be bridged:
the waiting, waiting, endless isthmus of
waiting,
for this collage to dry
of concrete quicksand
that men bridged, pieced, reclaimed
‘The Island’
And as he at once inhabits and confronts the ‘endless isthmus of waiting’, he questions the validity of the very notion of ‘reclamation’. By what right do we reclaim from nature what nature has not granted us?
And so we may spend ourselves
reclaiming what never was from what will always be,
These references to the history of Bombay’s urban development, and the importance that the idea of ‘reclamation’ plays in that process, strike, for me personally, a common chord with the recent history of the Indian nation. The freedom movement was seen as an attempt to reclaim by ‘Indians’ from the British what was ours by right, and the Indian constitution further affirms these rights; but no such right is granted by the Arabian sea to the population of Bombay, the right to create land where there is no land to call one’s own. What history denies Khiwani, then, because of his genealogical link with Partition, and the concomitant sense of perpetual displacement, is a natural sense of belonging to the land/city he inhabits. He comes to perceive, in the course of the poems, that what history has denied him as an individual has also been denied to vast sections of society; that he is only one member of a tribe of persons, who, for all there linguistic and cultural differences, share a common experience of dislocation that persists for generations.
Khiwani’s view of Bombay as a city of immigrants and settlers who are never quite settled, and as a sort of ‘collage’ loosely put together without any underlying unity, is certainly not an original one; nor is his use of geography and the history of urban development to drive home the point something that has not been attempted by many poets before him. In fact, a whole tradition of English-language poems about Bombay seems to have developed over the last four decades. I think, in context, of ‘Sea Breeze, Bombay’, a short poem by Adil Jussawalla that appears in Missing Person:[xli]
Partition’s people stitched
Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind
Khiwani, nearly forty years later, is still echoing the state of tragically irreversible exile that Jussawalla’s lines give voice to. He is, by way of genealogical descent, one of ‘Partition’s people’, whose homeland in Sind was ‘scissored’ by ‘gentlemen’. The sense of exile, for him, remains trapped in his blood; and his ‘Bombay Sequence’ hearkens back to the rootlessness, the sense of being unsettled and ‘adrift of the mainland’s histories’, that Jussawalla captured back in the seventies:
Communities tear and reform; and still a breeze,
Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,
Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,
And settles no one adrift of the mainland’s histories.
‘Sea Breeze, Bombay’
Khiwani’s search for rootedness, or for some form of connection to the city, takes him back in time to dear old Mumba Devi, the goddess after whom ‘Mumbai’ was originally named. The renaming of the city—for obvious political reasons—involves for him a brief re-installation, as it were, of the goddess, an assurance of her presence, a symbol that might grant meaning of some sort to this chaotic state of things (as Athene did for Athens perhaps . . .). Her power however, is purely in ‘name’ and her reign, he tells us clearly ‘lacks a future’:
But now she’s back—official, denominated
In charge, over a vast glittering expanse
Far beyond the bay. And yet, she’s missing most days.
Perhaps there is no interest in the past. Or the reverence
Lacks a future—and she knows it.
‘Dea Loci’
In ‘Bombay Sequence’, Khiwani adopts a mode of social realism that is conspicuously absent in his earlier work. He finds himself responding in verse to events reported in the news and seems to have come a long way from the young poet who scoffed in his mid-twenties at the need to talk in verse of ‘peepul trees in Khar/to prove to others who we really are’. The politics of language, race and regional identity now turn into important themes in the work of a poet who laboured hard to avoid them:
Today they pulled people off the trains, and beat them
Partly because a fading actor made his mediocre films
In other languages. I’m getting around
To understand that I’m an outsider too, like that actor
And his films that belong nowhere. But where do I go to,
With a father from Pakistan, and a mother from Bangladesh
‘Belonging Outside’
Khiwani concludes that he has ‘no faithful claim to kinship with this place’; and in a striking snapshot of Bandra Station—in which everyone is ‘configuring this place, this day/Upon each other’s retinas’— he gives us a revealing glimpse of those whose ‘claim to kinship’ with Bombay is stronger, perhaps, than anyone else’s: the aboriginal fisherfolk of Mumbai who were here before everyone else, ‘with their baskets of glittering fish, that have their eyes wide open,/staring as only the dead can look at you.’. The sequence ends with the image of a man showing a reporter ‘an outsider’s wounds’.
________
Section II of this book brings together, in their original sequence, (but without the overall structure of the original book) the poems that appeared in Entr’acte (Harbour Line, 2006). When he viewed the manuscript, Jeet Thayil cautioned Khiwani against the use of a French title, that many local readers might not understand. But Khiwani was adamant; it was not like him to play to the gallery and he took pride in his refusal to do so. The title, moreover, is crucial to Khiwani’s vision of the book as a whole, both thematically and in terms of its construction and arrangement. It is a collection of poems that organises itself on the basis of a theatrical metaphor: the original book is arranged like a play in two brief ‘Acts’—each with a prologue and an epilogue—with the bulk of the material sandwiched ‘between the acts’; an attempt to pit theatrical illusion, as it were, against the realities of life. The structure of what lies ‘between the acts’ is further complexified by its division into seven chapters, each bearing as its title a line picked from one of the poems in that sub-section.
These seven chapters trace an autobiographical journey that addresses various themes (art, sex, relationships, marriage, the perpetual void within . . .) as it proceeds towards a state of helpless self-dissolution. In the prologue (which forms the entire content of Act I) Khiwani pulls off a gimmick that few poets have been able to successfully pull off. He demonically combines the title-lines of the seven subsequent ‘chapters’/‘scenes’ in a collage that suggestively indicates in advance what is ‘about to happen’ in the book. The prologue contains all the seven lines that are about to appear as chapter-headings, and then again in individual poems; and it presents these lines in their exact subsequent order of appearance. A reading of the first poem in section II of this collection (entitled ‘Prologue’), and a subsequent reading of the poems in the order they have been arranged here, should clearly reveal the poet’s strategy; though the poems do not appear here in ‘chapters’ or with the ‘Act I-Act II’ format.
Khiwani’s need to accommodate his verse within a broader format more commonly associated with dramatic writing or the novel has much to do with a need for cohesiveness and accurate categorisation. He was a firm believer in what we called the ‘each-poem-for-itself-theory’; but when it came to putting together his first manuscript, he found himself arranging individual poems into groups thematically and then re-arranging them sequentially till they came together as an almost ‘plotted’ narrative of the self. The lines that form his chapter-headings are evidence of his skill as a one-line-master. I quote three of them here, separately, by way of example:
‘This photograph shows more of me than you’
‘Art destroys the sureness of the thing’
‘It took a while to understand the pain was mine’
Khiwani seems to have derived a peculiar pleasure from throwing his own lines out of context and then throwing them right back in again, much in the way that an actor might mischievously make use of lines from a play in daily situations. ‘Poets’, Khiwani reminds us, ‘are good actors’, who ‘forget that they are elses to the parts they play’; and poetry, for Khiwani, necessarily involves a high level of aesthetic tension between whatever it is that the ‘act’ reveals and what occurs ‘between the acts’; what is made explicit in verse is, for him, at best a suggestive indication, pointing at much that has been deliberately elided.
One of the first things that strikes the reader about the poems in Entr’acte is the poet’s sheer sleight of hand, his uncanny control over ‘form’—using the latter term in its most traditional sense. Khiwani always believed in the value, whatever the specific content of a given poem may be, of a systematic, mathematically consistent and predominantly iambic music playing in the background; a music that maintains the sort of rhythmic regularity that is only achievable by means of a careful and even distribution of syllables and accents. He pays particular attention to principles of consonance and assonance and is eager to avoid ‘jarring’ syllabic arrangements. In his first book he comes across as a master of the decasyllabic and pentametrical line (though he takes liberties with line-length when he wishes to); and he demonstrates a considerable gift for stanzaic pattern, rhyme, meter and the most delicate enjambements. His rhymes—with a few notable exceptions—tend to be simple ones, but they are often hidden in an exquisitely designed pattern of enjambement, that makes them hard to catch at a first hearing. His sense of line seems to stem simultaneously from the need for metrical containment and the urge to spill over gracefully, and the result is a rare balance between conversational flow on the one hand, and the mathematical integrity of form upon the other—a mature blend of neoclassical formalism and naturalness of tone, in which artifice finds itself carefully hidden behind an apparent directness of style. Khiwani’s fascination with the conventional rudiments of poetic form goes back to his early reading of the Victorians and Elizabethans; but it also emerges, strangely enough, from his obsession with the lyrics of black-and-white Hindi film songs, many of which he could quote effortlessly in their entirety. He often compared his own lines in English poems with lines from Hindi film songs and was more than aware of the influence.
‘Night Train to Haridwar’ has many of the salient characteristics of the poems in Khiwani’s first collection. The poem is arranged in immaculately rhymed sestets, each of which is further subdivided into a quatrain and a couplet, consistently maintaining an ababcc rhyme-scheme. The lines are sharply iambic, pentametric and decasyllabic, with a few, almost invisible variations in the syllable-count. Most of the rhymes are obvious ones, though some stand out as less predictable. The use of enjambment allows for the playing of a conversational continuum against the monotony of the metrical structure. What is striking is the use of the heroic couplet, with its closely clinching rhymes, at the end of each stanza, in order to intensify a sense of closure, a stillness that contrasts in some places with the enjambed movement of the preceding lines, and delivers in other places the effect of a sudden, unforeseen ‘stop’. The poem begins with a sudden jolt and halt (‘Now past midnight the train stops with a jolt’)—a break in the train’s motion, that is then suggested by an adept handling of stanzaic form:
I smile at myself: Journeys, Halts indeed!
I should have been a poet, adrift at sea
asking the questions that could nowhere lead
except to more uncertain ways to be.
All it could be is engine trouble that
detains us, or some station we stop at.
What we witness in the lines quoted above is the form of the poem suggesting the movement and sudden stillness of the train being described. The train has stopped in the middle of ‘nowhere’ and the verse proceeds to ‘lead’ us to a deftly designed couplet that leaves us, for all its syllabic perfection, not with a sense of things being musically resolved but with a sudden jolting halt that unexpectedly rhymes an enjambed ‘that’ with a conclusive ‘stop at.’ (followed, of course, by a full stop…) An effect is created by means of a line that doesn’t stop where one expects it to; and by juxtaposing that line against its end-stopped companions.
Moments like these, when form becomes content—or the other way around, perhaps—are important ones to look for in Khiwani’s verse. At the level of content, the poem is about a train journey to a specific location and a sudden halt in that journey that leads to introspection; but the poem is also, as is necessarily the case with Khiwani, a journey through the terrain of linguistic form; and an exploration of ways in which the forms of language might not just ‘represent’ but actually begin to imitate what is being described.
At the level of content, importantly, we are told nothing about why this train journey is being undertaken by the poet, or what its exact purpose and implications are. We are, however, given a clue in the title, a reference to a specific destination: ‘Haridwar’, as some readers would surely know, is a place of pilgrimage where the ashes of the dead are ritualistically immersed into the sacred waters of the Ganga. But we are told nothing about whether this is the specific purpose of the poet’s journey, whether anyone has died recently or not, and if so, what sort of relationship this person has had with the poet. The withholding of such information with regard to the exact circumstances in which his poems are set, is crucial to Khiwani’s stance throughout Entr’acte. Nothing is to be said about what is actually happening in his life, except obliquely. Emotions, sensations and perceptions are presented in the absence of precise autobiographical facts; and it is the immaculate forms that emotion, sensation and perception assume in language that ultimately draws us towards them. While ‘Night Train to Haridwar’ conceals the true function of the physical journey it describes, it also contrasts that journey with another, less tangible one—that, strangely enough, of ‘a poet adrift at sea’; and though the poem gives us no exact information regarding anyone’s death, it leaves us in an ‘air-conditioned, quiet compartment’, with a sharp objective co-relative for an unchanging condition of inner void and entrapment; an image ‘trapped’, as it were, between the two lines (or the ‘two panes’ . . .) of an exquisitely constructed couplet:
there in two panes reflected, clearly seen,
two panes of glass, with a vacuum caught between.
Again, we see the form of the lines magically mirroring their content: an ingenious visual and mathematical equation is struck between the ‘vacuum caught between’ the ‘two panes’ of the double-glazed windows, and the voice of the poet trapped in the two rhythmically symmetrical lines of a finely crafted couplet.
Most of the poems in Entr’acte present the individual in isolation from society, or in relation to a specific ‘other’, an apostrophised ‘you’. The microcosm of each poem seems to limit itself sharply to the personal concerns of the poet at a given moment in his life, with no attempt to place the self within a broader pattern of social, political, and historical themes. ‘Plassey’, however, comes across as a striking exception to this rule. The poem describes a visit to the location of the famous battle that consolidated British power on the Indian subcontinent (a battle won, largely, because of corruption on the part of Indian mercenaries). It conflates nature with history, describing the scene of the battle that led to the annexation of Bengal, as ‘a land consanguineous with flowers’. ‘The bright red palasha flowers’, after which Plassey/Palasi was named (‘Progeny of blackened branches stiff as bayonets’), suggest the blood that has been spilled there and evoke images of war, decay and corruption. We see Khiwani enter a process here that compels him to perceive himself not simply as an individual caught in a net of personal concerns, but as a part of a broader process of colonial and post-colonial history (a development that anticipates the social realism of his later ‘Bombay’-poems):
I think how
in coming here, perhaps, we still seek a failure to forget;
fail to forget the flowers falling down,
in a place where breathes an unforgiveness yet,
grappling with a guilt. This silence of Plassey is the history
that has outlived its page, but will not go.
I pick a flower up, as a souvenir.
And thousands more lie rotting still, below.
It could well be argued, from a purely formalist perspective (and I am tempted to turn this into a statement of opinion), that Khiwani’s earlier book demonstrates finer workmanship, clarity and maturity than his second manuscript. It is certainly true that he spent much more time brooding over and meticulously re-working the first set of poems, scouring his lines to a degree of coruscation not really seen in the second manuscript, which, by contrast, was put together in a desperate race against time, illness and death. But what we witness in the second manuscript is a significant widening of the scope of his poetry, a need to re-locate the self within a broader context of social and cultural issues; and along with this broadening of horizons comes a rising scepticism of those very forms of verbal artifice over which he had earlier demonstrated so much control. It is a process that involves a tearing of masks at the personal level, and a gradual removal of ornament at the linguistic. There is a raw energy flowing out of his later verse that takes precedence over his earlier, more formal concerns. A case could be made, of course, as many readers will, for a deliberate roughness of style; but having examined both phases, I must confess that I remain, on the whole, more in awe of his earlier, more strictly formal work. I cannot honestly say that his attempts at social realism in the ‘Bombay Sequence’ work convincingly for me as Art; and I miss, at times, in his later poems, his earlier tautness of line.
_______
I feel compelled at this point to bring this essay round to the concerns with which it began: my personal—admittedly over-personal—involvement in the author’s life and work (which means, of course, that I need, in conclusion, to call him ‘Deepankar’ again, not ‘ Khiwani’). It is hardly probable that two poets whose lives were as closely entwined as Deepankar’s and mine were should not have influenced one another’s poetic strategies repeatedly. If we sought, on certain occasions, to imitate one another, we also attempted even more severely to contradistinguish ourselves; above all, we struggled not to let each other’s perceptions of our work affect our individual processes adversely. When I showed him a poem called ‘Punching Bag’, written in the wake of a bitter fraternal quarrel between the two of us in our late twenties (‘Yes, I have come back/And not for blows this time, only words…’), he responded by composing a poem that bore the same title (though our secret title for it was ‘The Punching Bag Strikes Back’). My poem apostrophises the titular object; his personifies it, lending it a human voice:
It doesn’t matter that you beat your fists
only against yourself; or that your knuckles bled:
I was too filled with hatred for myself,
and too strung up by needing pain, to hurt.
Deepankar Khiwani, ‘Punching Bag’
It is also a rare privilege to be the ‘friend’ referred to and apostrophised in ‘Shiroshi Sequence’, a set of poems that appears towards the end of this collection—‘Shiroshi’ being the name of a village a few miles down the road from a piece of forest land owned by my family in rural Maharashtra. It was important to Deepankar—as soon as he could afford this—to counter the sense of dispossession that ran in his blood, by acquiring a strip of land that he could call his own. He saw this as a process of bringing things round, as it were, till they had turned full circle, a way of compensating for the deprivations his forefathers had suffered during Partition. It was his dream to bury his mother’s ashes (some of which, if I am not mistaken, he had secretly preserved after the immersion at Haridwar) in this piece of newly acquired land—a curious confluence of Hindu and European ritualistic practices, and a symbolic attempt to give back to his mother the rightful estate she had been defrauded of in life. ‘Shiroshi Sequence’ focusses in a half-comic but also deeply serious way on the pragmatic and subliminal emotional complications involved in the process of finding, purchasing and taking legal possession of a piece of rural land; and it describes a series of excursions into the countryside around Bombay that Deepankar and I jointly embarked upon in order to accomplish those ends. The poem establishes at the onset a need to set boundaries between two people (‘The evening before we started, I said to my friend:/‘No more of us. Let us be ourselves.’) and it develops a playful juxtaposition of personalities:
A likely pair we made on that expedition to buy land
out in the country: a singer with a forked tongue
and a myopic business consultant. ‘I’ve known you,’
I said, as we watched the surveyor, ‘nineteen years.’
And the joint mission seems simple enough to start with:
. . . ‘Whose land is this?’ I asked.
‘A Dr. Bhagat’, you said. He owned thirty-six acres,
bought forty years ago. You sang to the waterfall, and I
wandered around with the local agent, notebook in hand,
jotting down the rates.
But as the land hunt proceeds, nature finds herself steadily reduced to a commodity; and the poet is forced to ask unforeseen questions that are increasingly ‘buried in uncertainties’:
. . . Search or Survey first?
‘Do you first establish that this here is what you want,
or, instead, whether or not you can get it?’ I asked,
provoking much debate.
And then, as is often the case in Deepankar’s verse, the simplest of feelings finds itself pitted against the growing comic confusion:
And so it went, right on. My father called long distance,
insisting that both went parallel. And my sister swore it could be either first.
You, of course, told me the real issue was whether I distrusted the world
so deeply that I needed to have a process in all I did.
And I thought: I just wanted a stretch of land, in which I could bury a loss;
but here I am, stumbling through the searching and surveying, still.
As things turned out, my friend, Deepankar, did finally buy himself a piece of farmland near Shahpur, a few years later. His ashes were buried there last year.
Anand Thakore
Thakor Farm, Shiroshi
June 2021
NOTES
[i] Salman Rushdie, 1981, Jonathan Cape, Penguin Books, winner of the Booker Prize, 1981
[ii] A variation on football played with a tennis ball in the Cathedral School quadrangle
[iii] The Iliad, Homer, trans. Sir William Morris, Oxford University Press, 1934
[iv] Dom Moraes, ‘Autobiography’, A Beginning, 1957
[v] ‘The Melon Seller’, Robert Browning, Ferishta’s Fancies, 1884
[vi] Oscar Wilde, 1898
[vii] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
[viii] The Well-Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks, critical essays, 1947
[ix] ‘Preludes’, T. S. Eliot, 1917
[x] The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, Kenneth Allott, Penguin, first published in 1950
[xi] Hart Crane: An Introduction to the poetry, Herbert A Leibowitz, Columbia University Press, 1968
[xii] Voyager, A Life of Hart Crane, John Eugene Unterecker, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1969
[xiii] ‘Voyages’, Hart Crane, first published in part in 1923, then in White Buildings,1926
[xiv] The Praxis Foundation was the brainchild of Udayan Patel. It was founded with a view to promoting art workshops and art cinema. Adil Jussawalla was put in charge of its publishing programme in 1987.
[xv] Clearing House was a publishing collective centred in Mumbai and devoted to anglophone Indian poetry. It was founded in 1975 collectively by poets Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
[xvi] The Poetry Circle was founded jointly in Mumbai by Menka Shivdasani, Akil Contracter and Nitin Mukkadam in 1986, with some support from Nissim Ezekiel. Poets met there regularly, in a room in the Theosophical Society Hall building at Churchgate, to read, share and discuss work.
[xvii] Dom Moraes, a line from ‘The Newcomers’, which appears in the ‘Later Poems (1967-1987)’ section of Collected Poems, 1957-1987, Penguin, 1987
[xviii] Khiwani, Entr’acte, Harbour Line, 2006
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] Dom Moraes, title poem of his third collection which appeared in 1965
[xxii] A Mumbai suburb on the Western Line
[xxiii] Khiwani, Entr’acte, Harbour Line, 2006
[xxiv] Anthology edited by Ranjit Hoskote, Penguin, 2002
[xxv] The essayist’s ancestral residence at Gowalia Tank
[xxvi] Founded by the Marathi poet Hemant Divate in 2003
[xxvii] Anand Thakore, Harbour Line, 2001
[xxviii] ‘Deepankar Khiwani’s first book of verse is unexpectedly assured, its tone one of oceanic nostalgia for the present. These poems achieve a formal transparency of language and intent, but they are animated by secret narratives of loss.’—Jeet Thayil, blurb for Entr’acte, Harbour Line, 2006
[xxix] Ranjit Hoskote, blurb for Entr’acte, Harbour Line, 2006
[xxx] Arundhathi Subramaniam, blurb for Entr’acte, Harbour Line, 2006
[xxxi] The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry, Harper Collins 2012
[xxxii] Tennysson, 1850
[xxxiii] ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, Thomas Gray, 1751
[xxxiv] ‘Can storied urn or animated bust / Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? / Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust? / Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?’—‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, Gray,1751
[xxxv] ‘Tell me where is fancy bred / Or in the heart or in the head’, Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act 3 scene 2
[xxxvi] Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1882
[xxxvii] Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Blake, 1789
[xxxviii] ‘Poetry’ by Marianne Moore, first appeared in Others for 1919
[xxxix] Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’, Mountain Interval, 1916
[xl] ‘In 1959, the artist Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning to provide him one of his drawings as part of an art project. de Kooning, older and more established than Rauschenberg agreed to participate and gave Rauschenberg what he considered an important drawing. It was a drawing executed in grease pencil, with heavy crayon, ink, and graphite. Rauschenberg spent a month on the work, erasing it completely. Then he placed the erased drawing in a gold frame and inscribed the date and title on the drawing: “Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953”. Faint marks of ink and crayon linger on the paper, which measures 19” x 14-1/2”.’—epigraph to ‘For Robert Rauschenberg’, Deepankar Khiwani
[xli] Adil Jussawalla, Clearing House, 1976
~ De Kooning’s Smile is now available at a special discount:
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