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Manohar
Shetty has published three books of poems, including
'Domestic
Creatures' (Oxford University Press, New Delhi). His poems have been
widely published and anthologized. In the UK his poems have appeared in
'London Magazine', 'Poetry Review', 'Wasafiri' and 'Poetry Wales'. He
has edited a special edition on English language poets of India for
'Poetry Wales'. In the United States his poems have appeared in
'Chelsea', 'Rattapallax', 'Fulcrum', 'Shenandoah' and 'New Letters',
and in 'Helix' in Australia. Several anthologies feature his work,
notably 'The Oxford-India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets' ( Ed
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, OUP, New Delhi). His poems have been
translated into Italian, Finnish, German and Slovenian. He has been a
Homi Bhaba Fellow and a Senior Sahitya Akademy Fellow.
He edited 'Goa Today', a monthly magazine, for eight years
and has worked in magazines and newspapers in Bombay, Bangalore and
Goa. He is a regular reviewer of books for various Sunday papers and
magazines in India.
In 2004, he won the top prize in the nation wide 'Asian Age' Short
Story Competition.
He has edited 'Ferry Crossing-Short Stories from Goa' (Penguin India),
which has gone into four editions. He has lived in Goa since 1985 from
where he runs Ms Editorial Services which edits .and reworks all
manuscripts including academic dissertations, novels, short story
collections, travelogues and long articles and features.
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He has rediscovered Goa in his writing and his poems. One of his love poems, 'GIFTS' has appeared in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's 'The Oxford-India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets', and from there into an Italian translation for a journal called Clandestino, and then into a wonderful, multilingual anthology of love poetry, Amore in Verse, published in Rome. A more detailed biography and an assessment of his work would appear in Asia-Major Reviews soon.
MANOHAR SHETTY first
visited Goa in the early seventies when he was a college student in
Bombay. He recounts in this exquisitely written essay, "Drifting on a
High Tide" his experimentation with drugs. In some sense, the
accuracy and precision of this narrative reflects a poet's skill with
his medium. One cannot help recalling William Burroughs 'Naked Lunch'.
Drifting on
a High Tide
- 1 -
I first came to Goa in the early Seventies, ostensibly a college student — ostensibly because like most other students in my college I didn’t attend classes, and only sat for the final examinations after a month of intensive studying. I came on the steamer, the Konkan Sevak, along with two friends. That steamer — scrapped after a stint with the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka — has sailed into cult status. It was where a holiday to Goa actually began with its endless rounds of housie and loud, old-fashioned music. Old timers, both Indian and foreign, still recall those trips wistfully. The ship chugged off from Ferry Wharf in Bombay in theearly hours and arrived at Panjim jetty the next morning, welcomed by a luminous sunrise and the friendly waves of the Mandovi river.
We were not interested in housie or old-fashioned
music. We found a corner in the lower deck, and watched with some
respect, amidst the din of the diesel engine, long-haired foreigners
sniffing cocaine and mainlining heroin, veins in their wrists and
forearms bulging like twisted high-voltage wires. Unlike some of my
friends, I didn’t do the hard stuff. And unlike the maestro Nissim
Ezekiel, I didn’t experiment with acid. I lacked the courage to lose my
mind unconditionally to the clutches of a whimsical chemical. But we
were armed with smooth Afghani hashish and grass from Kerala — not the
inferior Bombay Black, which was laced with opium and looked like goat
droppings, that we usually smoked.
We spent two weeks in
Calangute, Baga, and Anjuna and stayed at Souza Lobo on Calangute
beach. Souza Lobo was then an L-shaped shack with a few cheap rooms,
separated by bamboo screens — not the pucca structure and popular
restaurant it is now. Besides us, there were a few square foreigners —
‘square’ because they didn’t smoke dope. We didn’t interact with them,
but did the usual rounds of the flea market at Anjuna where the air,
thick with marijuana, emaciated foreigners sold or bartered old
cameras, tape recorders, semi-precious stones from Nepal, home-made
cheese and hash cookies, Swiss army knives, books, musical instruments,
sleeping bags and haversacks — the last two items much prized after a
thorough wash in Dettol.
Much of our time we spent in a narcotic
haze, contemplating the sea and watching feline-eyed freaks (as they
were known in those politically incorrect days), utterly self-absorbed,
slowly injecting themselves into a state of nirvana and an early exit
from the temporal world. I didn’t find much evidence of flower-power
gentleness and there were areas in Anjuna, especially, where foreigners
were openly hostile to the local community and gawking visitors. There
were restaurants with an unwritten code that effectively debarred
Indians.
I was then a scrawny, longhaired young man at odds with
my family and the college curriculum, and as callow as they come. It
was the era of Woodstock; all my friends swore allegiance to Bob Dylan,
Joan Baez, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison
and a host of other ‘far out’ anti-establishment musicians. I hummed
along tunelessly, but I also buried myself in books. Unlike my friends,
who were far more interested in music, I was a compulsive reader. In
the boarding school I went to I read the westerns of JT Edson, Zane
Grey and the Sudden series by Oliver Strange. Other favourites included
the Jennings series and some of the Biggles adventures. In college I
read every thing that came to hand: early favourites were JD Salinger
and Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. I read Camus (a tattered copy of The
Rebel bought for three rupees at the flea market), Dostoyevsky, Gogol,
Kafka, Andre Gide, Bernard Malamud, Graham Greene, the then fashionable
Herman Hesse, and the obnoxious philosophy of Ayn Rand. For a while I
went through a science fiction phase and was captivated by the novels
of Stanislaw Lem and JG Ballard. I also harboured a strange and illicit
secret: I wrote poems — or what I thought were poems. They were savage
outpourings heaping scorn on the establishment and reflections on my
own raw uncertainties about my future. I hadn’t read much poetry and
after the mandatory Tennyson and Walter de la Mare in school, I thought
of it as something vaguely pompous.
Apart from what I felt was
my focussed, justified and uncompromising rebelliousness and the
enervating battles with my family, I was studying such exotica as
Mercantile Law and Statistics in a suburban commerce college I loathed.
For the first time in my life I failed an examination. All this was
enough to drive me to those secret outpourings in a diary. In the early
years I was writing in a complete vacuum, with only nebulous notions of
rhyme and half rhyme, drawn mainly from the rock lyrics of the time. I
knew no other writers or poets, only another young man, intense and
handsome, with light eyes and brownish hair, who wrote page after page
of Hindi film lyrics. He was always broke and I was a willing cadgee to
his hooch and omelette-pao needs. I was highly impressed when he told
me that he spent his nights sleeping in the local crematorium. One
night he invited me to his fiery digs, and amidst shots of reeking
narangi — the local rotgut — and swirling ganja smoke, shadows of
flames fanning the dingy walls, he showed me the obituary register,
which he occasionally helped fill up. The names of the dead were
scrawled one below the other with their ages. I was relieved to find
that no young person figured in that list. I could not always
understand the lyricist’s highbrow Hindi when he read out his songs,
but to me he was the ultimate ghostwriter.
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