Adil Jussawalla

Adil Jussawalla, the missing man, I have been searching, searching him For quite a long time, The man and the poet, As have only heard about him, The man who made a beginning decades ago and vanished out From the literary scene And was traceless As a poet for many years But resurfacing again with his Trying to Say Goodbye and The Right Kind of Dog. But as a journalist he had been there Doing the journalistic write-ups, tidbits, Editing and compiling, Compiling and contributing Rather than feeling poetically A poet lost and uncertain of His literary stance. After Land’s End and Missing Person, he too vanished Out of sight, traceless as a poet, Nowhere to be found, searched around A poet of broken lines and sentences He was going by Eliot and The Waste Land, Going by W.H.Auden and Stephen Spender, But was not. A poet of Bombay, a Parsi at heart, he has His race, heritage, lineage, ethnicity, culture and tradition To draw from, A poet of Parsi heritage and lineage And genealogy, Searching roots, Striking the theme of nativity. Instead of, he is a poet of the busy capital, the commercial hub, The mega city, metropolitan town Of malls, plazas and mutlticomplexes, Sea beaches, bars and restaurants, International airports, bars and restaurants, Apartments and skyscrapers, Ships sailing far with the cartloads and cargoes, Floating far off. And apart from Parsi historiography and dislocation, Adil turns back to Indian thought and philosophy By taking Eklavya, As he cannot say goobye to poetry And returns back to it again, A poet resurfacing again, Back to his fluting and jarring tunes After a break, An interval of many years, Collecting and re-collecting the older notebook jottings. There is one trouble with the modern poets That they pass on from modern to mod, modernistic and to post-modernism And it is really tedious to understand them, Using broken statements and terse vocabulary; They themselves understand their poetry most. Similar is the case with this modern poet Who made a beginning long way And after that turned to journalism As for his career, Barring sporadic literary activities. Mainly England, the tings of English culture and living, Foreign tours and travels, sojourns and stays Connected with cosmopolitanism and globe-trotting Take the canvas away from And the second thing his being a Parsi, Secluded from our ancient lore And the other a cityman, a townsman not But one from the metropolitan hub Has nothing to delve in the countryside. Urban life and living, values and manners, ways of expression, City culture and dwelling, Beaches, plazas, shopping malls, skyscrapers, Theatres, art exhibitions, yoga therapies, Parlours and multigyms, These are but the things of any modern poet That we seek to interpret for modernism sake.