‘Sometimes I feel I have to be completely invisible as a poet’: Adil Jussawalla
The Hindu
‘Before I close, I would like to have three more books of poems published,’ says Adil Jussawalla, who has been crowned poet laureate of Tata Literature Live! 2021
An interview is an artificial conversation between two people. It is shaped in three tenses — the future expectant, the present imperative and the past perfected — so it is a revenant with more than the usual freight of inequity and mischance. Things get even more complicated when you have known someone for nearly 30 years and are trying for cogency.
In his 18th floor eyrie, Adil Jussawalla looks at home. This is a good sign, for his uncertain health had meant he rarely made too many forays to the ground level even before the pandemic began. During the lockdown he lost his wife of 50 years, Veronik. But as William Blake reminded us, “Joy and woe are woven fine”, and out of this weaving comes news of new work and new accolades. The Magic Hand of Chance (Paperwall) completes a trilogy of prose anthologies, which began with Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments (Aleph) which I edited, and went on to I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky: Poems, Fiction and Non-Fiction (1962-2015) (Hachette). Then came Gulestan (Poetrywala) a chapbook of extraordinary power, a lament for spaces defiled and chances lost. His first book Land’s End was reissued by Copper Coin, followed by meditations on the liminal spaces of Shorelines (Poetrywala). And now we have another collection of poems for those who are young at heart, The Tattooed Teetotaller and Other Wonders (Poetrywala). Meanwhile, the Mumbai lit fest, Tata Literature Live! declared Jussawalla its poet laureate for 2021.
Excerpts from our conversation (expletives deleted):
The election authorities are gearing up for the counting of votes cast in the simultaneous elections to Lok Sabha and Assembly seats in Andhra Pradesh, scheduled to be held on June 4. The Collectors and Election Officers of Visakhapatnam, Anakapalli and Alluri Sitharama Raju (ASR) districts said on May 23 (Thursday) that their teams were ready for the counting of votes.
Responding to the prolonged water scarcity, the residents of the area took to the streets in protest on Wednesday. The protest, which drew attention to their plight, stopped only after the intervention of the police. It was not until 1.30 p.m. that a 4000-litre tanker was finally delivered by BWSSB, providing relief to the water-starved residents.