Arts_Illustrated_-_February-March_2016

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For Thayil, who was born in Kerala, grew up in Hong Kong, New York and
Mumbai and now lives in Delhi, place is not a physically mapped territory or
city. ‘It is the city that you live in your head,’ he says, and in the language that
it inhabits. In his case, English. Even ghazals, like Ghalib’s once, are teased in
English, about Malayalam. ‘Malayalam’s Ghazal’:

Listen! Someone’s saying a prayer in Malayalam.

He says there’s no word for ‘despair’ in Malayalam.

Sometimes at daybreak you sing a Gujarati garba.

At night you open your hair in Malayalam.

To understand symmetry, understand Kerala.

The longest palindrome is there, in Malayalam.

When you’ve been too long in the rooms of English,

Open your windows to the fresh air of Malayalam.

Visitors are welcome in The School of Lost Tongues.

Someone’s endowed a high chair in Malayalam.

I greet you my ancestors, O scholars and linguists.

My father who recites Baudelaire in Malayalam.

Jeet, such drama with the scraps you know.

Write a couplet, if you dare, in Malayalam.

Jeet Thayil, also a songwriter, musician and a novelist was mentored by the likes
of Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawala, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Arun Kolatkar,
when he started writing poetry in Mumbai. Other influences include Burroughs,
Bolano and most importantly Baudelaire, both an inspiration and a curse. Thayil
was introduced to the French poet by an uncle in Kerala who was translating
him into Malyalam. At fourteen, Thayil was impressionable, eager to emulate,
leading to periods of long addiction and idiosyncratic extremes that even Ghalib
had known: it takes a lot /of cash to keep me / in poverty... And finally, in his
‘Collected Poems’ we find a letter ‘To Baudelaire’.

I am over you at last, in Mexico City,

in a white space high above the street,

my hands steady, the walls unmoving.

It's warm here, and safe, and even in winter

the rain is benign. Some mornings I let

the sounds of the plaza – a fruit seller,

a boy acrobat, a woman selling

impossible fictions – pile up in a corner

of the room. I'm not saying I'm happy

but I am healthy and my money's my own...

IAF - Delhi Connecting Art/ FEB 2016 - MAR 2016 / ARTS ILLUSTRATED /^113