Manohar Shetty

- 3 -

I first met V, an ineffably beautiful Goan Catholic, in the offices of the Indian Express at Nariman Point where we both worked as sub-editors. Her very first glance had a seismic effect on me, an effect so irradiating it scorched my shyness and sense of reserve. She worked in the daily and I was with the Sunday magazine section. Unlike me, she worked on shifts and there were days I could not see her. After some adroit manoeuvring, I managed to get her transferred to the magazine section, thus ensuring greater proximity. I had by then met a few poets — the genie-eyed Adil Jussawalla who later became the literary editor and Dom Moraes — quaint English accent, whisky flask in the bottom drawer — who was, for a while, the editor of the magazine. When the magazine, then known as The Sunday Standard, shifted its office temporarily to a dreary, empty building at Sassoon Dock, the hub of the fisheries market of Bombay, my relationship with V flourished with its own felicitous fragrance. The warehouses below were full of frozen fish but the waste strewn everywhere turned the office into a putrid, piscine hell. The stench of rotting fish seeped into the newspapers, our clothes, the stationery, even the tea and the galleys. When the breeze swelled the smell rose to epic, ossuary levels. The roads were littered with comb-like bones and the translucent shells of prawns. In the rains, floating fins clung to our shoes and the ends of our trousers. Escapee crabs scuttled around and legions of cats hankered after our fin-filmed shoes outside the docks. One of the staff, a vegetarian, puked regularly at the end of the day. I tried to rise above the miasma and did what any smitten young man does: write a love poem. I called it Gifts:

You unfold, like starfish
On a beach, your touch
Stills the rumpled sea,
Hair plastered seaweed.

I come from the labyrinths:
Traffic lights park in my eyes
Before I cross, highways fork
And stream like veins in my hand.

You hunger for a blade of grass
In the welter of concrete,
I step on softening sand
Suspiciously. Together

We trace a bridge: you pick
A shell translucent as neon,
And I a tribal earring
Reflected in plate glass.

When this poem found its way into 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 I sensed that a spark, phosphorous-like, had bobbed up from the sea of dead mackerel, shark and bummalo.

But apart from the poems, the ‘arcades, late movie shows, the piled lit windows’, the city was building an ominous wall around our lives. The salaries of two subs could not sustain a decent household in the city. And there were changes at the senior level of the magazine that made us wary of our future there. There was also talk that the magazine section would be shifted to Delhi. I found no refuge in dope — I had long since given it up after a bummer of such terrifying intensity that I doubled my intake of nicotine. (That trip into paranoia was triggered off by my smoking almost an entire chillum of hash, undiluted by tobacco, in an adda at Churchgate. In that trip, the city stood starkly and grotesquely still, my pulse pounding with the terror that the terror itself would not end.) When the offer came of an arranged marriage, with a dowry masked in some huge property, I was almost as petrified as in that tailspin into palpitating stasis. I had also grown tired of commuting, of being thumped back and forth like a dirty volleyball. And V longed to return to Goa.

For me, leaving Bombay was still an awful wrench. I had published A Guarded Space, my first book of poems and had made friends in the small bardic fraternity as well as in the newspaper world. It was the place, where years before, I had discovered the work of Hughes, Heaney, Gunn and the Americans Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell, all on my own. I would miss the Fort area the most, not only its magnanimous bustle and helter-skelter efficiency, but as a place where I lived much of my life. My mother, an only daughter, had six brothers and some of them owned and ran restaurants and bars in the area: Ankur, Apexa, Alankar, the hugely popular Apoorva, the jauntily named Garden Jolly and in recent years, Wall Street. I ran Ankur for two years in the hope of instant prosperity, but soon realised that there were obstacles far beyond my realm of control. There were unwritten laws I could not transgress. I left Bombay in 1983, with a cavernous bag of books, and little else.

Some months after I left Bombay, I wrote a poem called Departures, about a lonely and disorienting bus journey. The poem is a trifle long to be reproduced here. But a few years later, married to V on borrowed money and settled in Goa, I wrote a poem called Moving Out, whose immediate motivation was the shifting of our house in Panjim, but whose echoes I can track back to my departure from Bombay.

After the packing the leavetaking.
The rooms were hollow cartons.
The gecko listened stilly —
An old custom — for the heartbeat
Of the family clock.

After the spring cleanings
Now the drawing of curtains.
I thought of the years between
These grey walls, these walls
Which are more than tympanic.

There remained much, dead and living,
Uncleared, unchecked: dust mottled
Into shreds under loaded bookshelves;
The fine twine of a cobweb
Shone in the veranda sunlight.

All this I brushed aside along
With the silverfish in flaking tomes,
The stains on marble and tile
Scoured with acid; but the ghosts
Loomed like windstruck drapes;

Like the rectangle left by
A picture frame: below a nail
Hooked into a questionmark,
A faint corona,
A contrasting shade.