At the beginning of my sophomore year at Kharagpur, when I discovered poetry, or more precisely, when I was inflamed with what can be done with the English language, after reading Vikram Seth’s “The Golden Gate”, I took to spending quite a bit of time in the literature section of the humongous Central Library (a rare blessing in book starved India). This section, in an eloquent reflection on its usage, was banished to a dark attic like space within the library. In order to reach it, one climbed up three floors in a stairwell, which was quite often in the dark because no one could be bothered to replace fused light bulbs.

As for those fellow eccentrics, who could be occasionally found flitting about in those musty racks (Prof. Ramu of Mechanical Engineering is the most memorable of these people; he was then systematically chewing through the Harvard Classics’ Five Foot Shelf of Books), I suppose we evolved suitable responses in the low light conditions and daytime darkness in those rack in order to navigate the Dantesque steel-riveted stairs without breaking our necks. I had to put up with gaalis of my more normal friends, who had to occasionally came up there hunting for me in order to take me out carousing. I also must mention the few couples – a minor miracle in that sexless place with a 99:1 male female sex ratio - who sometimes came up there to get away from it all, i.e., to makeout, only to be startled by wild ghosts like me. I, however, always assisted Cupid by immediately moving my literary assignations elsewhere.

...

It was in those laybrinthine hours in which I read, unsystematically, quite a bit of poetry ranging from Shakespeare from that Five Foot Self to the more obscure poets in selnder volumes put out by Prof. Lal’s Calcutta based Writer’s Workshop. And like a paper chewing goat, with a mouth given to Brownian motion, I finally ended up reading a yellowing edition of “The Oxford Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets”. It was in this book that I first encountered the two poets who have stayed with me every since.

The first poet is Kamala Das, with her stringent and strangely wonderful feminist poems. For a long time afterwards, I have chanted these two lines from her poem “An Introduction”:

“I speak three languages, write in Two, dream in one. … I too call myself I.”

for they seem to summarize my attempts at negotiating and bridging rifts between language and identity.

The second poet was Arun Kolatkar, and the anthology had a selection of poems from his singular “Jejuri”. As it has been often described “Jejuri” on the surface is a very fine sequence of poems on the topic of a wry urbane intellectual’s pilgrimage into the religious country. But like good poetry, it is also more than that – it is a meditation on the clash of clocks, modernity's with the timeless's; on how “irrational” faith can still pervade a “rational” human being's thought; on how gods, those that will be worshipped and those who will remaind obscure, are born and die. And among all these “Jejuri” poems, I have returned to the poem “A Scratch” quite often, with its fantastic final two lines - “scratch a rock /and a legend springs” – these succinctly sums up many phenomena including some our attempts attempts at reconstructing of memory.

Recently it has come to my attention that the New York Review of Books has reissued Kolatkar’s “Jejuri” (previously they had revived Upamanyu Chatterjee's "English, August" for us), recently for those of us who have been unable to lay our hands on this book for a while. I am going to get it, and I think everyone else who reads poetry, or even otherwise, should do the same.