Manohar Shetty

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Buffeted around by music directors and other better connected songwriters in the harsh tinsel world of Bombay, I don’t know what eventually happened to him. But I had made a discovery. In Rampart Row at Thacker’s Book Shop I found a shelf containing the Penguin Modern Poets series. Each slim volume carried a selection from three poets. Over a period of time, I bought most of them and read them all slowly and raptly. Brownjohn-Hamburger-Tomlinson; Holbrook-Middleton-Wevill; Murphy-Silken-Tarn; Black-Redgrove-Thomas; Amis-Moraes-Porter. I had never read anything like it before. Sharp, terse, unequivocally modern and the language polished steel. This was poetry, palpable and profound, sometimes inaccessible and opaque, but always intriguing. For some reason the Faber poets were not included in the selections. But I soon discovered them too. Ted Hughes’ Hawk in the Rain, Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist and Thom Gunn’s Fighting Terms were the first full-length collections that I read, followed by Ian Hamilton’s The Visit, borrowed indefinitely from the British Council library. The poems of these four poets struck me with their powerful immediacy and their poise. In later years, I would lose the uncritical enthusiasm in the first flush of discovery I had for some of the Penguin Modern poets, especially after I read more poets in translation from Russian and various European languages and the work of contemporary poets in India. Even in those surcharged Beat-fashionable years, I was not taken in by the Beat poets or the Liverpool Mersey Sound. But at that time of ignorance and innocence, the discoveries were overwhelming and thrilling.

The poetry of Ted Hughes, Gunn and Heaney has always stayed with me. They are My Sad Captains and in those difficult years, my lifeline. In Goa I was armed not just with dope, but with books by these poets. I remember reading Ted Hughes’ Hawk Roosting, one of the great poems of the last century, late one night in that threadbare shack in Calangute, the waves crashing like drumbeats, my eyes dilated in wonder and intoxication, the room filled with the unmatched fragrance of hashish. The words seemed sentient, rising in eidetic loops and whorls. I remember, in a freakish attempt at connectivity, writing in long hand the last stanza of the poem and gazing at it incredulously:

The sun is behind me
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

The banality of evil as seen through the cold soul of a hawk, the tone despotic and menacing. I see it even more clearly now: there are hawks all around us.
We spent most of our time lazing on the beaches of Bardez — we were known by our families as ‘spare parts’. But one morning I took a rickshaw from Panjim to visit a friend in Dona Paula, about seven kilometres from the city. The driver took me through a landscape so rocky and desolate that I felt I was being escorted to a mugging. The sight of a huge monitor lizard soaking up the sun on the pre-Cambrian rock only enhanced the primeval air of the place. However, nothing exciting befell me. But I was not to know then that twenty years later I would buy a home there. And, admiring the refulgent natural beauty of Goa in those drifting two weeks, I was not to know that seven years later I would meet another natural beauty who would one day lead me to Goa.

At that time, I was bonded to Mumbai. Its vicious inequities apart, the city unleashed a pulsating and infectious energy. It was a combative place, though I was a poor runner in the rat race. It was a city which retched you out every evening from crammed trains and buses and regurgitated you the next morning. The queues at bus-stands were like the tails of reptiles which grew back tirelessly and the traffic an endless purring, choking chain. But the city still had a hold on me. At night it was a giant electronic circuit board, emitting siren-like signals. But its sleazy underbelly stank of sewers and a scatology uniquely its own. A few years after the trip to Goa, I wrote a poem called Bombay, in which the city is seen as a beast devouring itself and everything around it. A stanza read:

Marooned by the unkillable
Cycle of mutilations, it widens
Mutant serrated teeth
To rip and masticate the tightening
Tourniquet of the sea.

There is an obvious reference to land reclamation; however, it is not the kind of poem I usually write. I do not relate to places directly and with the same authenticity I do to personal relationships and to undefined, marauding inner anxieties. But a city will grow invidiously into you with its smells, its clangour and overpowering physical presence. Images of it will flicker in and out unconsciously. Soon after Bombay I wrote a poem called Mannequin, which to me conveys a truer, more subtle view of the city. Here is a mannequin, in her own plain words:

Bathed so long in this rich ring of light
I can now discern a recurring face
In those scudding hordes. I watch his
Worried brow, the perpetual briefcase
Weary with age, as he vanishes past
Too pressed for time to appreciate
My groomed slender frame, my glass blue eyes
Gleaming all day from my elevated place.

Sometimes, under the harsh neon light, a woman
Stops before my transparent cage, transfigured till
Closing time by my silks and earrings.
I would like to erase that longing
In her eyes — ornaments can be replaced;
But a vacant darkness swarms
Within me too, and I cannot go beyond
This fixed fond smile.

Thom Gunn in In Praise of Cities talks of the city as a feminine entity, both sweetly seductive and whorish:

She presses you with her hard ornaments,
Arcades, late movie shows, the piled lit windows
Of surplus stores. Here she is loveliest;
Extreme, material, and the work of man.

The city, Gunn writes, ‘is indifferent to the indifference that conceived her’ and it ‘compels a passion without understanding’. I was soon to discover passion of another kind and the indifference that would turn the city into a trap.

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