WHAT—OR WHO—do we see when we look into the mirror? We do a cursory check to confirm that we continue to exist in the way we did yesterday or last year. We may have changed jobs or had a baby, or our views on capitalism might have altered, but the peremptory nature of the check doesn’t change because of new directions we’ve embarked on. Generally speaking, we take our reflection less seriously than we do other people. Before taking part in a social occasion, we might view it custodially, with a hint of personal pride or disappointment, but, in moments of crisis, we hardly assess ourselves in the glass—as actors do in movies—in the way we assess our actions, beliefs, and biographies. The reflection in the glass leaves the matter of who we are open and inconclusive. And yet the act of looking is a private one; we shy away from it when we’re being observed.
There are two moments in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s oeuvre when the speaker is caught looking at a mirror. The first instance is recorded in “Approaching Fifty,” which is short enough to quote in full:
Sometimes,
In unwiped bathroom mirrors,
He sees all three faces
Looking at him:
His own,
The grey-haired man’s
Whose life policy has matured,
And the mocking youth’s
Who paid the first premium.
This kind of knowingness is unusual, and it doesn’t occur frequently to us. The speaker, however, points out that it’s happened to the man in question more than once: “Sometimes.” Has the recurrent self-assessment following the viewing resulted in greater self-knowledge? The condensed, telegraphic quality of the poem would appear to deny this, as would the detached observational phrasing—“grey-haired man,” “mocking youth”—and the choice of the third-person singular to convey a feeling of disorientation. Is the “he” in the poem really “I”? Is, in that case, the “I” identical with the poet? It does seem so, but Mehrotra won’t commit to an identification. What he’s giving us (characteristically, as we find in his poems) is a sighting, which in this case converges with an (equivocal) declaration of self—here is a man who was at a certain place at a certain time. The time is not the future (the grey-haired man’s world) or the past (the mocking youth’s) but now, in which the haunting occurs. We’re no closer to knowing who the speaker is, or who the man in the mirror is, or what he’s doing in these bathrooms where the glass is smudged and “unwiped.”
The second instance of such a sighting is recorded in “The House,” where the eponymous abode stands “In the middle / Of a forest,” with “Bats in the rafters, / Bat dung on the floor.” An abandoned place, then? Nevertheless, the speaker spots “A dentist’s coat,” “hanging from a nail” and “Smelling pleasantly / Of chloroform.” All references to dentistry in Mehrotra’s poetry are inflected with comedy, with the Lethean seductiveness of class and childhood (Mehrotra’s father was a dentist), and the terror and plangency that comes from discovering that the trappings of class and childhood are transient. The poem continues and ends with:
Mud on his sandals
And smoke in his eyes,
On a railway platform
I saw him last,
Who passes before me
In the cheval-glass.
The transition from first-person singular to third is disconcerting: Who is the person in the mirror? Is it the speaker, or is it maybe the man who wore the dentist’s coat? The cheval-glass is genteel, superannuated, colonial furniture, a relic of childhood; why is the man glimpsed in it so unprotected and unexceptional, “Mud on his sandals / And smoke in his eyes”?
To answer these queries we need to think again about what the two poems about mirror sightings are doing. We also have to understand that Mehrotra’s poetry is written by someone who’s long been unsure about why he is precisely where he is; that his constant interest in looking, remembering, discovering—houses, the interiors of shops and emporia, a painting, a likeness in a mirror—has less to do with a realist or even a commemorative impulse than addressing the uneasy matter of where he is at a particular moment. The Irish short-story writer and critic Frank O’Connor once said that a fundamental distinction between the novel and the short story is that the former captures the passing of time, while the latter is often structured around an instant. There are exceptions to O’Connor’s rule, such as Guy de Maupassant’s stories “The Necklace” and “A Day in the Country,” both of which, in a matter of pages, communicate to us the passage of lifetimes and the wonderfully disconsolate sense of lives having been lived. Mehrotra’s mirror poems do something similar: they narrate a biography, without the necessary accumulation of detail and information, while also conveying the fact that no additional illumination accrues from our passing through the stages of life. We do not begin to understand better why we are in front of the unwiped mirror at one moment and the cheval-glass at another. What Mehrotra captures so memorably—as few of his contemporaries have; as, indeed, few poets have since Jibanananda Das—is the experience of being present in the world without explanation.
The poems’ speaker’s sense of time, of the world, and of himself is not unconnected to his sense of history, and his fitful yearning to figure out his place in it. Towards this book’s end, before the translations, are the extraordinary poems—including the most recent, “Daughters of Jacob Bridge,” a poem sequence completed this year—Mehrotra has written after the publication of The Transfiguring Places (1998). That the poems occur where they do in the collection doesn’t necessarily indicate they are either a culmination or a fresh start—instead, they provide a new opportunity to follow the poet’s shifting perspective on his location, real and, in the case of many of these new poems, historical. Which is why some of them are succinct summations of nothing more than being present somewhere at a certain time—whether it’s in a drawing room, watching an “ironing lady” count clothes, or in a palace during a particular historical epoch, ruling a kingdom. The incredible quality of the transit, or of being present, doesn’t change whether the speaker is in a palace, kingdom, or a drawing room. The muted astonishment arises from the very fact of inhabiting these situations, of finding oneself in them, as in this short-lived reflection on one of the slave kings of the Delhi sultanate from the early thirteenth century:
Histories may not remember him.
His reign, in which he lost
The provinces his father had won,
Barely lasted a year.
Long enough, though,
To strike a copper coin,
Bearing on the obverse the legend,
“The victorious Aram Shah, the Sultan.”
(“For a Slave King 2”)
The same fleeting intuition of presence inflects and troubles this poem, which catches the poet Ghalib in “old age,” in Delhi in 1868:
His eyesight failed him,
But in his soldier’s hands,
Still held like a sword,
Was the mirror of couplets.
By every post came
Friends’ verses to correct,
But his rosary-chain
Was a string of debts.
(“Mirza Ghalib in Old Age”)
There’s that word “mirror” again, pointedly referring to poetic form. Indeed, neither the portrait of Aram Shah nor that of Ghalib is very different from the sighting in the cheval-glass or in the unwiped mirror. This is not to say that the historical snippets are disguised autobiography; instead, both kinds of poems record the habit of glancing at and noticing—not just the poet’s usual objective, detail (though Mehrotra’s poetry undoubtedly enshrines and transforms detail), but wherever one happens to be in the midst of transit. Given that transit takes place both in life and in history—that is, the moment is at once epochal and personal—both its expression in words and its span are abbreviated. What Walter Benjamin says in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” about the nature of the present moment is pertinent not only to Aram Shah and Ghalib but to the shapes of Mehrotra’s poems:
“In relation to the history of organic life on earth,” writes a modern biologist, “the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.” The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
Thus (without making any large claims on behalf of Messianic time) Ghalib, Aram Shah, the man watching the ironing lady, and the form of Mehrotra’s eight-line poems: not linked emblematically or mimetically to their subject matter or to the moment in time but imprinted with the troubling accident of being there, just as the reflection in the cheval-glass is.
What the speaker sees may or may not be the figure in the mirror, but many of his sightings have that quality of accidentally noticing some mutation of his own existence—as with the man on the train in “To an Unborn Daughter,” watching a woman from the window during a pause in the journey:
If writing a poem could bring you
Into existence, I’d write one now,
Filling the stanzas with more
Skin and tissue than a body needs,
Filling the lines with speech.
I’d even give you your mother’s
Close-bitten nails and light-brown eyes,
For I think she had them. I saw her
Only once, through a train window,
In a yellow field. She was wearing
A pale-coloured dress. It was cold.
I think she wanted to say something.
Again, I’ve quoted the poem in its entirety. The impossibility of its composition—“If writing a poem could bring you / Into existence, I’d write one now”—which shrinks even as it’s being executed, and the unlikely event of its actually coming into the world, aren’t unrelated to the event described here: the train stop as hiatus; the undecipherable nature of the sighting (“I think she wanted to say something”), as was the case with the person in the cheval-glass; and the sense of—even the desire for—kinship. The image described in “Approaching Fifty” elided the business of who the person in the unwiped mirror was by remarking in him, instead, the past and future: the “mocking youth” and the “grey-haired man.” Here, too, what’s noted in the here and now of the train stop is the past (“For I think she had them”) and the realm of what is still to happen, in which lie the unborn daughter, the inexpressible (“I think she wanted to say something”), and the poem that wasn’t, apparently, written (“If writing a poem could bring you / Into existence, I’d write one now”). The mystery is the poem at hand, and the third face in the mirror (“my own”), neither of which elicits comment. The desire and longing for the world, the feeling that one is related to what’s beyond the train window or to the person in the glass, provides a justification—only a partial one, mind you, as it did for Das—for the question that both Mehrotra and the Bengali poet appear to be preoccupied with: “What am I doing here?” As with Das, but less scouringly, and sometimes leading to conjectures that are playful and absurd, for the speaker in Mehrotra’s poems there’s no satisfying answer to the query: what he must take away from the moment is the experience of recognition.
Mehrotra is more autobiographical than Das, but the personal details, like the historical ones, merely accentuate contingency. Like the reflection in the unwiped mirror or the cheval-glass, the particularity of the past is both irreplaceable and accidental: this image in the mirror, these details of a life, belong to Mehrotra or the speaker but—you increasingly feel—needn’t have. (This uncertainty about the need for—and guarantee of—absolute, foolproof identity covers the physical, too, and questions the assurance that it’s necessary to believe one’s body is one’s own, or that the poem is the shape and form it was meant to be: “If writing a poem could bring you / Into existence, I’d write one now, / Filling the stanzas with more / Skin and tissue than a body needs.”) The details catalogued in the beautiful early poem “Continuities” are intended to delineate the poet’s Allahabad childhood; it opens with the boy heroically creating a place for himself in a make-believe world:
This is about the green miraculous trees,
And old clocks on stone towers,
And playgrounds full of light
And dark blue uniforms.
At eight I’m a Boy Scout and make a tent
By stretching a bed-sheet over parallel bars . . .
But “green miraculous trees” is at odds with the boy’s conviction that the world can be mastered, measured, and inhabited: “miraculous” introduces an element of incredulity to this consciousness of 1950s middle-class Allahabad and the encounter with “old clocks” and “dark blue uniforms.” Although the boy’s imagination attempts to encompass the national (Mehrotra is a midnight’s child)—“In September I collect my cousins’ books / And find out the dates of the six Mughals / To secretly write the history of India”—by the end of the day he is meditating alone, sans parents or bearings, upon, probably, the undisclosed sequence of events that has brought him to a place where he can’t go to sleep: “I sit on the railing till midnight, / Above a worn sign / That advertises a dentist.”
If one’s name (even a monarch’s name, embossed on a copper coin), identity, background, past, and location at any given point of time are accidental, then why not one’s place in history? What is it that ties us to an epoch? Mehrotra’s poems about slave kings, court painters, and nineteenth-century poets arise from the opposite of the impulse that instructs us that we belong to a particular tradition, or that the tradition in question belongs to us; rather, the poems demonstrate the chanciness of the relationship. At one point, I’m here, sitting on a chair, writing a piece in 2014; at another, I’m Ghalib, receiving letters and poems from friends. This might be unsettling, but in the order of things that the poems are attempting to establish, it is also, predominantly, normal. Given this air of normalcy, no special significance or weight of authenticity is placed on history. Ghalib is not a forefather, or even a quasi-contemporary. He is an instance of a consciousness confronting the world, acknowledging it as familiar before that air of familiarity fades; the man looking out of the train window at the woman in the “pale-coloured dress” in a “yellow field” is another such instance; the man who notices the figure in the unwiped mirror is yet another.
The poems often use personal pronouns—mainly the first- and third-person singular—in ways that make identity and epoch go off-kilter; the “I”s and “he”s are spotlit moments in time, which swiftly diminish into darkness again. In the new poems, Mehrotra employs these pronouns, as well as, once, the second person singular, to great effect—not, in the case of the latter, for conventional lyric reasons to do with addressing a beloved, or for the purposes of dramatic monologue, but to estrange us, to open us to the makeshift nature of the autobiographical and the historical. The “you” turns out to be the “I”—that is, the author of the poem, albeit at many removes from himself, and in incomplete possession of his name and historical moment (the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). The poem is “Number 16,” about an old house and a family with the address of 16 Old Survey Road—a street in Dehra Dun that is invoked, we’ll find as we proceed farther into the book, several times, and, as we discover more about Mehrotra’s own biography, that we’ll realize is his and his mother’s Dehra Dun address. Two locations recur in the poems, as they do in Mehrotra’s life: Dehra Dun and Allahabad. If “Continuities” refers to the Allahabad childhood, “Number 16” is an unraveling of that early poem via the old house in Dehra Dun:
Where your neighbour has built his garage
Was the tennis court, and to the right
Of the street-light on Old Survey Road
The main gate. It was sold as scrap,
For almost nothing. I was born here, in
Number 16, and know this property,
Every pit and slope, like the back of my hand.
Tenants lived in the main house then
And your uncle, who came to escape
The heat of Allahabad, was a summer visitor.
He stayed in the same rooms
You stay in now . . .
We see now what the word “miraculous” in “Continuities” was gesturing at: the state of impermanence that characterizes the world. But, immediately, despite the compressed portrayal of dissolution, we are given a categorical statement, which bears the hallmark of the autobiographical and soothes us: “I was born here, in / Number 16.” Three lines down, though, the second personal singular is introduced and confuses us: “your uncle.” Who’s the “I” here, who seems to own both the property and the memory he recounts? Who’s the “you,” then, who seems comparatively unmoored? (“He stayed in the same rooms / You stay in now.”)
It turns out the speaker is actually the son of a retainer, making him only indirectly the owner of what he describes: “You were our masters, but we / Had the run of the land.” The “you” he addresses is the poet, who’s inherited Number 16 from his father; to him the retainer’s son narrates the story of the property, its falling away, its piecemeal transformation, the sale of parts of the area (“Where your neighbour has built his garage / Was the tennis court”), the land’s bygone munificence (“You call these trees? / They’re dwarfs compared to those giants, / Whose yield we sold by the cartload”), the death of the poet’s father (“But the bad days lay still ahead. They came / After your father’s suicide, when your mother / Went to work in a school”), the men who tried to take over the property, and its dogged continuance (“You see these walls. They’re twenty-four inches / Thick, and you’re worried about the house falling. / It’s good for another generation at least”). In other words, the retainer’s son, the speaker, is telling the poet, his near-contemporary, his own life story as well as the latter’s. At once divided and brought together by class and patrimony at Number 16, the speaker, the “I,” is looking out of the cheval-glass; the poet, the “you,” is both looking at the speaker and into the mirror.
Among these new poems is the extraordinary “In a Greek City,” which confides in us (as “Approaching Fifty” did) that there’s no proof, at any given point of time, of whether we’re in the present, the past, or the future; at home or elsewhere. The subheading says “Egypt, 315,” which means the poem hints at the flux that came in the wake of the Ptolemaic kingdom, as Christianity began to travel the world. (This might explain the reference, towards the end of the poem, to “The Gospels on the shelf, Matthew and John.”) History, in the poem, is not so much an event or a date; it’s something you open up to in the course of an afternoon. (Such an anomalous ethos in connection to the historical isn’t surprising, given the genteel marginality of Mehrotra’s lifelong locations, Allahabad and Dehra Dun; the almost irrelevant fact that he never studied at a great imperial center of learning, such as Cambridge or Oxford; and given his surreptitious habits as a world citizen and as a translator, hoarding knowledge and traditions from across the board. It’s some such habit, rather than straightforward research, that brings about a convergence between the personal and the epic and creates the frisson in a poem such as this one.) We confront a familiar and a familial situation: an aging mother, physically disabled, suffering possibly from dementia, being cared for by an affectionate but slightly stretched son. We have encountered this process of atrophy with its attendant filial care before, in “The Fracture,” where the son, soon after returning home from abroad, takes his unwell mother to a doctor. The situation in “In a Greek City,” with its theme of the loss of time, of memory, and of physical abilities, exposes, in its opening lines, the limitations of the personal pronouns through which we insist on understanding where we are:
Bringing my face up against hers,
“Who am I?” I say to my mother.
She’s sitting on the edge of the bed,
Her legs swollen, stiff, the colour of white stone.
“Neilos,” she says, “but why do you ask?”
Again, the speaker takes on the posture of one looking into the mirror and noting something unusual there (“Bringing my face up against hers”); but in asking the question “Who am I?” he’s placing himself in the lineage of the time travelers who appear in Das’s poems as well as in Rabindranath Tagore’s, itinerants who are aware of the miraculous passage of history but are uncertain of their place in it. The two queries explored in “In a Greek City”—“Who am I?”; and the one posed in different ways by the ailing mother: “What am I doing here?”—are implicit in Das’s “Banalata Sen,” in which timeless exhaustion and recovery, the banality of twentieth-century life and the ruins of the past, flow into and meet each other:
For thousands of years I roamed the paths of this earth,
From waters round Ceylon in dead of night to Malayan seas.
Much have I wandered. I was there in the gray world of Asoka
And Bimbisara, pressed on through darkness to the city of Vidarbha.
I am a weary heart surrounded by life’s frothy ocean.
To me she gave a moment’s peace—Banalata Sen of Natore.
(trans. Clinton B. Seely)
Banalata Sen, the name suggests, is an early-twentieth-century middle-class woman (of kayastha ancestry). The traveler has ended up in her drawing room. She gives him a moment’s peace—which means that she hasn’t entirely allayed the turbulence of his journey. The protagonist’s incessant time traveling has robbed him of any conviction about the recognizability of the past and of tradition, and about these being sufficiently distinguishable from the present. In other words, the time traveler has a perspective on history quite different from the historian or historical novelist, for whom its details and features exist in the archive, from whence it awaits to be reconstructed into narrative. For the time traveler, there’s the fitful knowledge that he’s been in history, experienced it, lived through it, but what this knowledge adds up to, besides an incomplete awareness of the epochal and a lack of directness about biographical detail (the speaker in “Banalata Sen” doesn’t name himself), isn’t clear.
Das inherits this time traveler from Tagore; he may be a version of Odysseus or perhaps Kalidasa’s yaksha, but in his preference for the inchoate over the rounded-out, the sensuous over the factual, the incommunicable over the easily comprehensible, he’s largely a modern, and in some ways Indian, figure, the sort of Indian who’s related to the past not because it’s an inheritance but through desire (as is the speaker in “To an Unborn Daughter” to the scene outside the train window). Name and man, reflection and observer, the world outside the train window and the one within the mind, history and the consciousness will not be easily made one and the same thing. As Kalidasa’s yaksha longs for Alaka, where his beloved lives, Tagore yearns for Kalidasa’s Ujjain but finds he can’t possess it. This puts the question of who he is, and where he is, into doubt. Tagore enacts this bewilderment several times in many ways in his poems, but it’s in “Swapna,” or “Dream” (1897), that the time traveler probably first appears:
A long, long way away
in a dream-world, in the city of Ujjain,
by River Shipra I once went to find
my first love
from a previous life of mine.
Lodhra-pollen on her face,
dalliance-lotus in her hand,
kunda-buds perched on her ears,
kurubaks pinned to her hair;
on her slim body
a red cloth waist-knot-bound;
ankle-bells making a
faint ringing sound.
(trans. Ketaki Kushari Dyson)
The speaker, searching for his first love’s home, makes his way past a Shiva temple and “empty/ shopping arcades” on which “gleamed . . . the last of the evening sun.” On a “narrow winding road” he finds the house, on whose “either side stood a / young kadamba tree— / growing like sons.” When the woman finally makes her way out, the two are unable to establish where it was they’d last seen, or what they meant to, each other:
Seeing me, my love
slowly, ever so slowly
put her lamp down . . .
and without words
asked with her tender eyes,
“Hope you’re well, my friend?”
I looked at her face,
tried to speak,
but found no words.
That language was lost to us:
we tried so hard
to recall each other’s name,
but couldn’t remember.
This relationship with history, self, and place, animated by desire, faint memory, the thwarted impulse to communicate (Mehrotra’s “I think she wanted to say something”), and an intuition of transit, of the familial and the familiar, characterizes “In a Greek City,” and it informs the anxieties besetting son and mother:
. . . No one now comes, except
The wind blows, the windows rattle, and she asks,
“Where’s Mama? Where’s Papa? Where are my sisters?”
“They’re dead,” I tell her, matter of factly,
As though reporting an incident in the street.
“Is that so,” she says, her mind somewhere else.
“Get me something to eat. What do we have?”
“But you’ve just eaten. See, you forget.”
She forgets that she forgets.
“Whose house is this?” she asks. “Where’s my bedroom?
When are we going back to Number 16?”
“You’re in your own house,” I tell her.
“You’re in Number 16, where you’ve always lived . . . ”
Mehrotra’s aesthetic of normalcy, where the past and present both lack recognizability but where that lack isn’t unexpected, is perfectly captured in the line, “As though reporting an incident in the street.”
This curious itinerary through history, the everyday, youth, and age—the recurrent relationship to these via desire and chance—brings us to Mehrotra’s work as a translator, where, especially, he is a wanderer, and where the speaker’s presence in different eras and locations is the primary revelation and mystery of the translations.
But before addressing the translations, let me come to the question I’ve evaded, so far, tackling head-on: Who is Arvind Krishna Mehrotra? The facts are easy enough to come by: his mother went to Lahore for his birth in 1947, and journeyed back to Dehra Dun—where Mehrotra’s father had his dental practice—when the child was a few weeks old. His mother is the daughter of a public health doctor who is portrayed by her brother, the memoirist Ved Mehta, in the book Daddyji. He is married to Vandana, who’s from a family of art historians and writers: Mehrotra has translated some of her brother Pavankumar Jain’s poems, and one of them is to be found in this volume. He has a son, the writer Palash Krishna Mehrotra. As a young man, Arvind Mehrotra was already a cosmopolitan. He was learning from the Americans the virtues of concreteness in writing (a devotion that was further instilled in him by Ezra Pound) and the attractions of free, immediate, colloquial English, which, for him, was identical with American poetry. He embarked upon his lifelong mission as a poet, critic, editor, and anthologist by inaugurating, at seventeen, a little magazine, damn you / a magazine of the arts, its title a riff on Ed Sanders’s New York–based journal. He then got over the influence of the Beats but never abandoned his quest to fashion an idiom for himself. In order to bypass the language of literature, the King’s English, or the “language of skylarks and nightingales,” he turned to, among other things, the translations he was reading of the French surrealists. As a consequence, one of the features of the astonishing poems in his first collection, Nine Enclosures (1976), but a characteristic of the oeuvre overall, is a mismatch between object and word, statement and meaning, that’s not only reminiscent of the playful charge of surrealism but presages the dislocation recorded in “Approaching Fifty” and “In a Greek City.” Here are a few lines from “The Sale,” which is a salesman’s pitch to a potential buyer, and is set in a rather odd antique shop:
Would you mind if I showed you
a few more things?
Be careful, one river is still wet
and slippery; its waters continue to
run like footprints. Well, this is
a brick and we call that string.
What creates the aura of dislocation is not only the mismatch between word and referent but the aesthetic of normalcy—the calmly unsurprised tone—with which Mehrotra approaches the business of being here, whether that “here” is a shop, a house, or a particular era. For Mehrotra, accidentality is a feature not only of language but of history, the personal, and the situational. It’s a condition of presence.
The sighting in the unwiped mirror or from the train window and the knowledge gathered thereof—to do with kinship and desire—is a secret, not a public, knowledge. And so, logically, the erotic serves as a metaphor for such an order of things, and we are led naturally to Mehrotra’s remarkable versions of Prakrit love poems from the first and second century CE. Here, in the very first poem, we find the succinctness with which Mehrotra’s various speakers record their place in the world, through the prism of recognition, incredulity, and longing:
At night, cheeks blushed
With joy, making me do
A hundred different things,
And in the morning too shy
To even look up. I don’t believe
It’s the same woman.
The economy of the language—Mehrotra has made a comparison between the language of the originals and Pound’s—is not just a rewriting or an updating, as in A.K. Ramanujan’s versions of poems from the ancient Tamil, or Arun Kolatkar’s “translations” of Marathi bhakti poetry, both of which make use of, in different ways, the American vernacular (as do, for that matter, Mehrotra’s translations from the Prakrit and also, more pointedly, of Kabir). The Prakrit poems lead us into Mehrotra’s realm of normalcy, where at one point you’re in an old house with a cheval-glass, in a Greek city in another, and in yet another in a bedroom in a Deccan village in the first century CE. The Prakrit love poems are testament to the curious way in which Mehrotra’s speakers—like Das’s and Tagore’s travelers—inhabit time and history. The Prakrit poet is not a sensibility that needs to be contemporized, or an echo of the man in Allahabad or Dehra Dun, because the figure in the unwiped mirror is difficult to pin down.
That figure, in the cheval-glass, the train compartment, and on the platform, reappears—at once comical and despairing—in many of Mehrotra’s translations from twentieth-century Gujarati, Hindi, and Bengali literature. This is translation as an opening out onto something that’s not quite autobiography but is not unrelated to the various sightings in Mehrotra’s poetry. Here’s that moment again, the speaker unable to solve the obstinate accident of location and identity, in “Black Bag” by Pavankumar Jain:
I have a desire
To put an end to my life,
But not today,
There’s nothing special
About today.
Moreover,
I have two glass bottles to clean,
A haircut to get,
My cataracts operated,
Plants to water
(They’re flowering at the moment) . . .
Being an Indian poet in English from the early 1960s onwards means that Mehrotra has pondered why he is where he is in history and rejected, constantly, any easy solutions to this question. “Am I . . . to believe,” he asked in 1982 in his essay “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” referring to two other Indian poets, “that had Parthasarathy and Shiv K. Kumar written in their mother tongues, Tamil and Punjabi respectively, their contributions to those literatures would have been any more remarkable?” You lead different lives, and you might have other possible lives—but is there a right life, which you alone were meant for? Mehrotra, in both his poems and his criticism, doubts whether this is the sort of thing we should want for ourselves—since it would comprise, as a consequence, the end of desire and distraction. He’s aware that where we are, the shape of our consciousness, and the creation of traditions all depend on a delicate balance. Note, for instance, this sentence from the same essay: “Between Nabokov’s English and Russian, between Borges’s Spanish and English, between Ramanujan’s English and Tamil-Kannada, between the pan-Indian Sanskritic tradition and folk material, and between the Bharut Stupa and Gond carvings ‘many cycles of give-and-take are set in motion.’” What’s remarkable about the sentence is not really the two entities—say, Russian and English—between which the “give-and-take” is supposedly happening; that’s a fair enough point, but not wholly surprising. It’s what’s placed on a single equal platform in the first half of each comparison—Nabokov’s English; Borges’s Spanish; Ramanujan’s English; the Sanskritic tradition; the Bharut Stupa—that’s odd: especially the air of normalcy that’s bound these unlike entities together and enabled the larger comparisons. We are back again in the antique shop, and a particular intuition of time, identity, and history. The normalcy of tone that leads us patiently to, side by side, Nabokov and the Bharut Stupa once lay behind “The Sale,” with its astonishingly fluent pitch, and creates the groundwork for a poem such as “In a Greek City”—its strange, logical admixture of the intimate and the antiquarian, of the now and the historical.
What do these poems teach us? Certainly, we don’t get to know more about Mehrotra’s thinking from them; what we find, instead, is a way, a pattern of awareness, of seeing and discovering. The poet sees himself neither from inside nor outside; instead, he finds himself in a sort of midway place, between a room and a mirror, a compartment and a window, between autobiography and history, with space on either side. What we learn of is the inexplicably multiple but limited array of locations that comprise both an existence and an oeuvre, with the question “Why is this so?” left open-ended. You feel it’s partly that accidental multiplicity—rather than strategy—that has brought the speaker to all these places, situations, and epochs, as poet, critic, anthologist, essayist, and translator. Mehrotra’s great achievement is to let us, as few other modern writers do, into the speaker’s experience of accident and wonder. Our meeting with him, too, then becomes one of those astonishing chances that arise from any number of contingencies out of which lives and literature are made. This is not to say that Mehrotra is not possessed, fitfully and repeatedly, by an illuminating rage about contingency, about the oddity of finding himself where he is. That rage is related to the tradition he belongs to, Indian writing in English; his challenge to it was contained even in the name of that magazine he edited, damn you, and later in the polemics of “The Emperor Has No Clothes.” The fact of accidentality is embodied by craft and quietness in the poems, but in the prose, it provokes a fierce eloquence. Here is Mehrotra in his introduction to his essays in Partial Recall (2012):
The great betrayal of our literature has been primarily by those who teach in the country’s English departments, the academic community whose job it was to green the hillsides by planting them with biographies, scholarly editions, selections carrying new introductions, histories, canon-shaping (or canon-breaking) anthologies, readable translations, reevaluations . . . Little of this has happened. Writers die, are mourned by other writers, and the matter ends there.
He concludes with this caveat:
After the reviews stinking of far-fetched, not to say Asiatic, phrases; after that very Indian tamasha, the book launch, which is part Monsoon Wedding and part Irish wake; after the initial print run of 1,100 or 2,000 copies is exhausted, the book drops out of sight . . . But do a poll today and ask the Indian reading public whether it is happy with the state of affairs and you’ll get a high percentage of yeses. Were there a literary happiness index, Indians would be at the top, the happiest people in the world . . .
It’s this wonderfully scolding, imprecatory, cutting voice that Mehrotra resurrects by inhabiting Kabir:
Easy, friend.
What’s the big fuss about?
Once dead,
The body that was stuffed with
Kilos of sweets
Is carried out to be burnt,
And the head on which
A bright turban was tied
Is rolled by crows in the dust.
A man with a stick
Will poke the cold ashes
For your bones.
But I’m wasting my time,
Says Kabir.
Even death’s bludgeon
About to crush your head
Won’t wake you up.
This is addressed directly to Mehrotra’s Indian English readership and the “new” India. But despite the scouring, taunting quality of the words, it’s in embracing the brevity of the transit described by Kabir that the pulse of Mehrotra’s poems beats; again and again, they demonstrate to us, through their sudden hiatuses and perspectives, what the academics fail to—the incredible variety of elements that lie in the “Little of this [that] has happened,” and the duration within which “Writers die . . . and the matter ends there.”
—Amit Chaudhuri