Jeet Thayil: Lyrical Impulse

JEET THAYIL THOUGHT he was through. In the preface to his Collected Poems (2015), he announced that he would not publish another full-length collection of poetry, and that the elegy-like These Errors are Correct (2008), dedicated to his wife Shakti Bhatt, who died tragically young, was to be his very last. By the time we get to Thayil’s most ambitious literary project, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (2022), a splendid, voluminous anthology of Indian poetry in English, he had already begun to cast serious doubts on the finality of that pronouncement. Several of the poems that Thayil selected for himself in that edition were new, and some have now found their way into this latest work.

These include ‘Wapsi’, a kind of modified sestina, a poem with six stanzas of six lines each, which serves as an angry, mournful indictment of India’s transformation from the land of ‘Nehru,/ Gandhi, Ambedkar’ into one subdued to ‘cow logic’ and ‘holy terror’. The following two poems, ‘February 2020’ and ‘December 2020’ continue in a similar vein, bookending a year of plague and protests. In these, Thayil, an enthusiastic practitioner of the anglophone ghazal, deploys metre, rhyme, and repetition like a bludgeon against the unfolding narrative of a ‘New India’. He namechecks a series of activists who have been condemned to imprisonment, ‘Teltumbde’, ‘Navlakha’, ‘Gonsalves’, ‘Ferreira’, and draws parallels with poets like Faiz and Mandelstam who fell afoul of authoritarian regimes.

Thayil is very much a poet’s poet, who spent much of his career anthologising colleagues, and whose terrific novel The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017), is in part a fictionalised excavation of the febrile world of the 20th century Bombay poets and painters. The protagonist of that novel, a reprobate artist named Francis Newton Xavier, is an amalgamation of the brilliant, and volatile artist FN Souza, and Thayil’s own personal saint, the poet Dom Moraes. Both figures make an appearance in this collection as well, as exemplars of our tendency to “revere/ good art by bad men and women”. With Thayil though, sin is often adjacent to saintliness, and criminals are not immune to beatification.

Moraes, whose precocious early years led to a difficult, tumultuous life filled with intermittent periods of silence and productivity, is eulogised with great empathy and candour. In ‘Poem Written with Dom Moraes, Twenty Years After His Death’, Thayil imbricates his own voice with his mentor’s, summoning him in an act of poetic communion.

The opening line, “Sunday’s ghost stays in bed”, glosses the line “On Sunday, usually, I find my ghost” from Moraes’ ‘Meetings in Mumbai’. The poem recycles words, images, metaphors and entire lines from the older poet’s work to recount his own life, including the early trauma of his mother’s mental illness and internment (“Mad mother convinced she’s a doctor”), depression (“weeping Minotaur”), broken marriages, and estranged progeny (“one child grown sour”). The last line of the poem echoes and amplifies the opening line from Moraes’ ‘Absences’—“Smear out the last star smear out the sky”.

It is not uncommon among poets, especially Indian poets, to “reclaim” or “take possession” of the past, of literary forebears, and make them anew. Here however, Thayil is engaged in something altogether different, and more radical. He has opened himself up to being possessed by the older poet’s spirit, through the phantasmal remnant of his body of work. Ghosts, both future and past, remain this collection’s recurrent concern and unshakeable trope. Two poems, ‘Late Elegy’ and ‘Mind If I Smoke?’, are suffused with grief at a spouse’s death. Their language is both strange (‘Captain Yama regent of the / back end’), and devastatingly conversational (‘Where have you gone, wife?’).

In I’ll Have It Here, Thayil’s elegiac tone seems also to extend to himself. When he foreswore the publication of another book of poetry in 2016, it was buttressed by a sense of his own mortality. The polluted air of Indian cities, and his own age, appear to have played its part— “I am fifty-five years old. Time once a friend, is now the enemy. Each day is a gift that must be returned. I live in a rented house in a large Indian city. The thick air is alive with chemicals. Chaos is my friend and closest neighbour.” Having thus far survived these admittedly treacherous circumstances, the poet turns to speculate on his own demise.

Two sonnets dramatise the speaker’s death, and its aftermath. In ‘Figure Hurtling’, the beautiful, lilting lyrics imagine a man falling to his death from a tower—

Darling, I was a minute behind you,
a minute behind and ahead,
time enough for a lifetime to spread
its red carpet on the pavement below,
a long way down from the eighteenth floor

The vertical plunge, into the fast-approaching curb, the darkness to follow, is not weighed down by either speed or gravity. Instead, the irregular, alternating rhyme lifts the poem up, and its speaker drops rather like a feather than a rock. The next poem, ‘My Last Address’, has the speaker laid out for embalming before the last rites begin. Death, however, does not call for solemnity, but flamboyance— “lay me out in green satin/ or velvet in A-line”.

This collection, at its lyrical best, is just such a richly adorned corpse; deeply mournful, it still draws “sighs of pleasure” from the reader. This places Thayil squarely in the Baudelairean tradition, an edifier of beautiful corpses, who is readily seduced by the dark, the disturbing, and the grotesque. This is also what connects him to us, his readers and admirers, who are called out in a contemporary riff on Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’, as “dreamer of murder,/ hypocrite reader, my lover, my twin.” While the indictment is not original, it precludes the shallow moralising that has, at times, greeted Thayil’s work, especially here in India.

One is ultimately grateful for the irrepressible lyric impulse that has birthed this latest collection. Its lively verbal and poetic energies retain the power to captivate and provoke. It shows a poet who is far from spent, and continues to respond to the calamities of existence, and to the world around him. After years spent writing prose fiction, and being engaged in important but somewhat thankless editorial tasks, Thayil can now savour a return to his principal, poetic vocation. As readers, we can only hope for more of the same.

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