Many moons ago, Anita Pratap came up with a few delicious insights in her review of Feroze Gandhi's slim volume of poetry, 'The Otherness of Self'. 'Many of us would have written poems or essays in our youth - tender or furious outpourings that seemed so important, profound, even earth-shattering at the time," she penetratingly observes, "but re-reading these adolescent emissions after a gap of 20 or 30 years could be seriously embarrassing". Bang on the money, Anita, and I can tell you from personal experience that poetry was injurious to one's health even way back then. I have no idea where Feroze schooled but at my boarding school, 'staying alive' had very little to do with John Travolta: it meant staying far from wussy stuff like Yeats. James Hadley Chase was about as poetic as one was allowed to get.
Forget composing, merely being caught with an anthology of verse qualified you as 'one of those swishy types sashaying down the corridors of time with an imaginary handbag on your wrist.' Poet meant gay, according to the school bully, Timms, although the political incorrectness of the era stipulated the use of an abbreviated four-letter word rhyming with Como. Despite Timms' aversion to poets and pansies, our English teacher, Pereira, or Popeye, as he was affectionately known, did his best to inculcate a love of verse in his unfeeling class.
Suppressing a heartfelt wince whenever one of us said 'poyum', he would coax us to look for nuance in lines like, 'Come dame or maid, be not afraid, Poor Tom will injure nothing…' What does Dryden mean by that?' he would ask in a sibilant whisper, drawing out the vowels. Up went a sea of hands with Timms's fist the most prominent. 'Please Sir. I think he means he'll make sure she loses her virginity painlessly, 'he would venture to Popeye's anguish and of course, the considerable merriment of the class. Our hapless mentor would purse his lips and say, 'Well my boy, you're on the right track, but on the wrong lane.'
Thanks to Timms, shmoozing with Shelley or feats with Keats were a no-fly zone until I reached college and began to worship from afar an intense, bespectacled dish I'll call Vidisha. According to my sources, only literary guys got to first base with V, so I expended several quarts of midnight oil brushing up on Browning, Wordsworth et al. Only to discover subsequently, to my shock and horror, that the Ice Maiden hated them all with a vengeance. Her tastes ran to the modern: you know, pseudo stuff like, 'I wandered endless passages of time pleasured by my purple bedspread…I know what you're thinking, dear reader: not just fake, but kinky as well. But I was seriously smitten and puppy love, as we all know, affects the mind and the gonads with equal intensity.
Determined to prove myself, I attempted the impossible - no mean feat, given the shortage of words rhyming with Vidisha. Naipaul was briefly considered and rejected as too arcane and after much furrowing of the brow I composed a small poesy to her most striking features (not the ones you're thinking of).
Ultimately, my old fashioned adherence to rhyme resulted in this pallid effort:
O Vidisha dearest, maiden fair
I love the way your nostrils flare
And the way your brows knit
As thoughts across your mind flit
With me baby, you're a hit.
She smiled sadly through the recitation and remained aloof despite several long, meditative walks through the leafy groves of the nearby museum. Subsequently, after much urging from yours truly, she finally deigned to give me a glimpse of her treasures: er, her manuscript that is - a slim volume neatly bound in mauve leather. I remember the haiku on the first page like it was yesterday:
'When first I met you
You were like virgin, grey clay,
And then I fashioned and moulded you
Into what I wanted you to be
But then, alas
I am no longer what I was.
'Nuff said, Feroze we know who to blame… it's all Mummy's fault. If only she wasn't running around the country saving all those poor, dumb creatures and banning ice-cream, she could have introduced you to the kind of women who'd have smacked your poetic aspirations for a six, just as Vidisha did for me all those years ago. Bless her.
Ajit Saldanha has a finger in the pie, and another on the political pulse. And when he writes, he cooks up a storm
