The Poet and the Pause

To see if I’d still be here,
looking back at you, my figure
still, yours in motion, our
minds receding into the future,
the miles between us stretched like wire.

IN Jeet Thayil’s third book, These Errors Are Correct, there is a sequence ‘Premonition’ in which seven of the ten poems have first lines contributed by someone else. He had been a member of a group of poets who studied at Sarah Lawrence College in the US. After graduating, they came up with the idea of a poem chain through postcards. One of them would write a sonnet, send it to another who would use the last line as the first line of his or her sonnet. It would be sent to the next person and so on. Some of the poems Thayil wrote then found its way into ‘Premonition’, but when he first collated them it had another title. In these poems he had imagined what it would be to lose someone very close. And then in what would be a tragic coincidence, Thayil lost his wife, Shakti Bhatt. She was 27. “When I wrote that sequence I wanted to imagine what it would be like to lose everything. Then everything of course started look like some kind of curse or prophecy,” says Thayil.

It was only with These Errors Are Correct, which came 16 years after his first book of poems, that Thayil felt that he was finally getting it right. “I thought I had figured out what I was doing,” he says. But, ironically, having achieved some level of satisfaction, he decided that he wouldn’t be able to realise it again. Thayil has released Collected Poems (Aleph Book Company, 312 pages, Rs 499) with selections from his three published books and some unpublished work. In its preface, he writes, ‘For various reasons, I am unable to equal the poems in that book [These Errors Are Correct] and it seems to me that if you cannot equal or improve on your last book, it is better not to publish at all.

Stories whir like flies,
only one remains untold:
how can death be not useless?
why stain the air with grief of my own,
when so much hope persists?

An extraordinary number of the major poets of Indian English today have their roots in Mumbai in the 1980s and 90s. Thayil is one of them. “I don’t think it was until many years later we realised we had been very lucky to be there at that time, to meet and become friends with people like Dom (Moraes), Adil (Jussawalla), Arvind (Mehrotra), Arun (Kolatkar), Eunice (D’Souza), so many poets,” he says.

In an introduction to Gemini, Thayil’s first book of poems published in 1992, Dom Moraes, a mentor to many poets like him then, wrote that Thayil’s work was at its best ‘splendidly structured, both skilful and forceful’. But there was a caveat that it ‘is sometimes flawed by his own image of himself’, intriguing criticism from the man who was in some parts responsible for the book coming out. Poetry was difficult to publish then and Gemini’s pages were shared with the poet Vijay Nambisan. “Dom Moraes and David Davidar [who headed Penguin at the time] came up with the idea of bringing out a series of poetry titles that would have two poets per title. They looked around and picked the two nearest halfway decent poets,” says Thayil.

After Gemini, Thayil wrote Apocalypso in 1997. This was followed by English in 2004, and in it, Moraes, who had been ailing and passed away the same year, became the subject of a despairing poem called Elegiac. Thayil says that what he got from Moraes was an example on how to live as a poet and negotiate the world—how to keep a space within oneself that was independent in which to write poetry. “I remember someone once asked him a question, ‘What does it mean to be a poet?’ and I remember his reply and it stuck with me for all these years, ‘The only time I call myself a poet is when I am writing a poem.’ The rest of the time I am not a poet. I may be a hundred other things, I am not a poet.”

When Moraes wrote about the flaw, Thayil knew exactly what he was talking about. “I didn’t have to ask him what he meant. I knew he was absolutely right. Because I think I was flawed by a certain self-image of the poet as a self destructive entity. I think that really did stand between me and good work for many years.”

H — pronounce it etch —, sugar, brownstone,
scag, the SHIT, ghoda gaadi, #4 china, You-Know,
garad, god, the gear, junk, monkey blow,
the law, the habit, material, cheez, heroin.
The point? It was the wasted time,
which comes back lovely sometimes

Thayil started on opium at 19 when in college in Mumbai. In 1984, with opium dens shut, he moved to brown sugar. It wasn’t until 2002 that he managed to finally quit. “There are still days when I wake up with a craving that can never be satisfied,” he says.

He says he didn’t write anything of value in those decades because of the addiction. He worked as a journalist in Mumbai and US but calls those writings irrelevant. He says Apocalypso, published during that phase, was his worst. “There is a reason for that. I had two full-time jobs: one was drugs, one was journalism. In between if they allowed me a moment or second or a minute, I would write the occasional poem and it wasn’t very good. That is the truth of it,” he says.

After getting off drugs following a rehab programme in New York, the writing became better. “Or I think it got better because I had more time to devote to it. When you are an addict, 12 to 15 hours of the day are gone, just getting the drug and doing it. It is a time consuming thing. The minute I quit, I realised that I didn’t need a job because I had been working all those years. The reason I made it to those jobs was because I was a very middle-class kind of addict, and I funded my own addiction. I didn’t steal, I didn’t scam, I didn’t sell household goods. I earned a living and I used that salary to pay for my drugs. I came back to India. I asked my family for somewhere to live, which they very kindly provided. And I became a full-time writer. It was pretty late. I was in my forties at the time,” he says.

In These Errors Are Correct, there is a group of eight poems called ‘Late Vespers at the Hudson’ (also included in Collected Poems), which speak of having arrived at a possibility of redemption (From those to whom much is given / much will be taken away. / I ask for nothing more.). “It was written at a time when I had just quit heroin. I was going to the Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous programme. And I was, I don’t know how to put this, let’s say I discovered or rediscovered God. And I went through a kind of religious period. That’s what those poems are about. They are kind of prayers of gratitude,” he says.

After These Errors Are Correct, Thayil turned to literary fiction with Narcopolis and is now working on his second novel. Poetry and prose however continue to feed off each other and one gets a glimpse of it in Collected Poems. In the selection of his previously unpublished poems, there is a series called ‘Book of Chocolate Saints’, which was actually part of a novel. “It was going to end with a book of poems by the main character. He is a poet and a painter working on this book which eventually appears at the end of the novel. That was my idea. As I began to edit and rewrite the novel, I lost faith in that idea and I took out the book and a lot of that stuff around that book. But then I realised as I was putting together the Collected Poems that many of those poems stood on their own. Instead of just throwing them all away, I included them as a separate section in Collected Poems,” he says.

If poetry, as Thayil says, is done with him then it does still have ways of making its presence felt.

booksCollected PoemsJeet Thayilliterature