Nissim Ezekiel 

A Tribute by Keki N Daruwala 

and you are as pure 
as if you had confessed 
and received absolution. 

You have done nothing 
to deserve it, you have merely slept 

and got up again, 
feeling fine 
because the morning is fine; 

sufficient reason surely 
for faith in a process 
that can perform such miracles 

without assistance from you. 
Imagine what it would do 
with a little assistance from you! ” 

--Nissim Ezekiel

Poet of the Heart 

KEKI N. DARUWALLA 

He worked at various jobs and then he stopped 
For reasons never clear or quite approved 
By those who knew; some almost said he shopped 
Around for dreams...

These lines from Nissim Ezekiel's poem "Case Study" could almost apply to him. He certainly worked at various jobs (at art galleries, editorial offices, scrubbing the decks in an "English cargo-ship/ carrying French guns... To Indo-China," and finally as Professor and poet rolled into one). And he shopped around for dreams, though he never "stopped" till Alzheimer's halted him some years ago. As a result, for many of his friends, grief is tempered with relief that he is not lingering in limbo anymore. 

Over the last decade he was less a poet than a patriarch among Bombay poets, chatting, advising, joking as he read their poems and tried to place them somewhere. Though forthright, he was seldom blunt, never pontificated and normally put his views across with considerable wit. He was a friend and not a mentor. He had more or less sloughed off his earlier roles — art critic, literary editor of important journals, radical humanist a la M.N. Roy, book reviewer, and writer of lucid and sometimes trenchant prose as V.S. Naipaul discovered to his discomfiture. 

He was a poet of the heart, of failure, of doubt, of "the unquiet mind, the emptiness within," someone who revelled in rodent-like explorations of love. Though he was an academic and read a lot he was not "barricaded from/ The force of flower or bird by what he read". He showed the others how to break away from the pseudo-spiritual, pseudo-philosophical poem brimming with sonorous Miltonicisms. Imagine what would have happened to Indian poetry in English if poets had followed in the footsteps of Sri Aurobindo, that great savant and revolutionary, but a terminal poetic disaster? 

I first sent him some poems (all of them pretty awful) in 1964. He didn't like them and said so. In 1966 when I met him at his editorial office (Imprint Magazine) with new poems, he was very enthusiastic and wanted to publish my collection just as he had published Gieve Patel's first book. He gifted me A Time to Change, a slim paperback with a white cover. When my first two books came out some years later under P. Lal's Writer's Workshop imprint, he reviewed both very generously. Not many established writers give that kind of a boost to the younger lot. 

I guard myself vigilantly against the influence of other writers. The only time I let my guard down was when I modelled a poem, "Bombay Prayers", after the way Ezekiel used to play with, question and cajole his God. Nissim has left a whole slew of such poems — "Poster Prayers", "Hymns in Darkness", "Latter-Day Psalms". He sets the tone in "Psalms" by saying "Blessed is the man that walketh/ not in the counsel of the con-/ ventional, and is at home with/ sin as with a wife. He shall/ listen patiently to the scorn/ ful, and understand the sources/ of their scorn." 

His irony was gentle and self-deprecating. He wrote too many love poems, one thought — Arvind Mehrotra calls his poetry at times purposeless, "and the man himself hopelessly priapic". Vilas Sarang, not to be outdone, calls him a transitional poet who was an "Able Seaman" but not a "Captain" of poetry (whatever that may mean). He says that "the actual imagery of the `Indian landscape' remains, scant, generalised and repetitive" in Ezekiel's poetry. He has even been criticised for his "irrelevant metrical discipline", which I feel is very relevant. It is only in his later volumes that Nissim turned to free verse. Most Indian poets have no idea about metre and rhyme and flounder when they try to get to grips with them. 

Some of his poems like "Night of the Scorpion", "Enterprise", "Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher", "Background, Casually" will remain minor classics and anthology pieces for decades. His help to fellow poets and artists will be remembered. No one has done more for Indian poetry in English than Ezekiel and P. Lal. It is not Mumbai alone that will mourn for Nissim. 

The Hindu I Sunday, Feb 01, 2004 I

A Special JSAL Number on Nissim Ezekiel