Editorial
The monsoons are here again, like the last time I was writing an editorial. They were delayed then, but this time, they came surprisingly early, bringing great relief. After two weeks though, the nourishing, fertilizing rain, suddenly stopped. July has been largely a hot and oppressive month, the air swollen with humidity.
At the Hazrat Pir Syed Ali Datar dargah in Mumbai we sweat in the heat of the afternoon, as crowds of people move towards it. The dargah is known for its power to heal the mentally afflicted, especially women. There are tables along the road with clay pitchers of cool water, and people tilt their heads back and empty their glasses in a way that even parts of their face gets drenched. This is the death anniversary of the saint, when the small market leading to the tomb does good business.
Located in the dockyard area this is one of the most destitute parts of the city. On this day, hundreds of people come to pray and ask for the fulfillment of their deepest wishes. And most of all women who are mentally ill. There are poor women, some could be prostitutes, who roll on the ground, from a distance, all the way to the dargah. Some are dancing, to drums, but it is a dance of pain rather than ecstasy. There are families with some of them, who give them a glass of water every once in a while, others are alone. Their long hair is tangled and knotted and soiled from rolling on the ground. They are almost all thin, often bony. It is hard to be an observer of this, and I keep turning my eyes away. We are four of us watching, from a different part of the city, from really another world, but no one stares, no one asks, no one treats our presence here as anything out of the ordinary. It wouldn't surprise them if we too had come to ask something of the saint.
The Sufis say that one travels for many reasons, to meet the masters, to achieve anonymity, for self -discipline, to learn. In the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the great heroes are sent into a long exile in the forests, a space that is the very opposite of what they have inhabited all their lives. There is travelling in almost all the writings in this issue.
The Bengali poet Joy Goswami, who grew up in a small town in Bengal says, “The genesis of the poems in The Ashen Sun was really my terrible depression. Also, I was thinking of all sorts of things. About Andrew Wiles who was speechless when asked how it felt to have finally solved Fermat's Last Theorem - he had no words to describe the 'unbelievable beauty'. I was also wondering what Niels Bohr would have thought after the discovery of atomic structure. I was thinking of the enormous burst of energy from the dropped asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs from the face of the planet, of pterodactyls taking to the air in the split-second before their annihilation. I was thinking of myths, of Hiranyakashipu and Vishnu in his Matsya Avatar, I was also thinking of Lord Ganesha writing the entire Mahabharata without any breaks or interruptions. The whole notion of poetry being 'received' rather than 'written'. In this book, there is the image of this 'headless painter' painting his shlokas on the back of the universe - as if the universe were a giant canvas.”
And Namdeo Dhasal, who comes from a small village in Maharashtra: “One should open the manholes of sewers and throw into them Plato, Einstein, Archimedes, Socrates, Marx, Ashoka, Hitler, Camus, Sartre, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Hopkins, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky, Edison, Madison, Kalidasa, Tukaram, Vyasa, Shakespeare, Jnaneshwar...”
In one breath, the world.
Perhaps travelling in the literature of different cultures means most of all that we carry more interventions in the imagination, binaries, juxtapositions, disturbances.
Claudio Magris, the author of Danube and Microcosms, is the quintessential writer-traveller. He speaks of the circular journey which closes with the return, and he speaks of the rectilinear journey, citing Robert Musil, in which one goes ever onward, gradually losing one's way, losing parts of oneself, never being able to return home and undergoing all the incoherence and senselessness of the world.
From the dargah, we move across the city towards its western coast. We walk towards an old fort, built by the British in the seventeenth century, at the edge of what used to be a fishing village. The area has few fishermen now, but it replicates the labyrinthine lanes of a village, its utterly human scale of homes and balconies, its lack of a sense of privacy, and its easy sense of welcome. Once more, it is a different world from the utterly deprived area of the dargah, and its expressions of prayer and pain. Here, standing at land's end, we watch the sun set over the enormous, circular city skyline, the new cable state bridge over the sea is almost finished, with the two parts about to meet over the water, and the old fort only has the remnants of some stone walls, because the rest has been broken and concreted and now houses a gym for the people of the village. Clouds begin to move overhead, but only a few drops of water actually fall. Leaving the village and moving towards our apartments to another part of the city, what I feel is not a return. That would imply a sequence. Instead, what one experiences is an architecture, times and places buttressing one another.