In the mellow autumn of 2024, I travelled for work to the State of Odisha, the abode of Lord Jagannath, the principal deity of the region originally worshipped as Neela Madhab by the tribal people. In the intervening night between my arrival in Bhubaneshwar, the capital city of Odisha and the onward journey to Cuttack, in the last quarter of the hour before sunrise, also known as Brahma Muhurtha, the sacred hour of creation when every breath in the universe is in its purest element, I woke with a silent start. In the twilight of a half-wakeful state, I had a vision in which the dark, glowing face and burning eyes of Lord Jagannath bore down upon me with intensity.

Later, on the road to Cuttack at daybreak, a great bull, half black and half white, emerged from the meditative shadows, crossing the road with a slow gait before settling under the thick canopy of trees. Strangely, I was reminded of the lore from the epic Mahabharata, where Arjuna, the warrior prince, lost in the netherworld after waking from poison-induced slumber, came upon the sight of two women spinning yarn on a wheel, the threads alternating in black and white. When asked what it symbolized, he was told that the spinning wheel signified the relentless turn of time and the yarn stood for the eternal cycle of day and night. It felt as though the universe was sending me a silent message about another life that waited to emerge from the deep obscurity of time.  The road was flanked by a dense patch of green breathing silently under the morning sun.

Life unfolded quietly and slowly. In Cuttack, a High Court of Judicature dispensed justice by the banks of a river in stark contrast to High Courts elsewhere in the country, headquartered in the epicentre of the restless energy of metropolis. After completing my official commitments at the High Court near the river bank, I set out on another mission, one that held great personal meaning for me.

I wanted to locate the house known as Chandrabhaga, Tinkonia Bagicha. It was named after Chandrabhaga, the ancient and mythical river that once flowed by the Sun temple of Konark. Navigating through traffic and narrow lanes, I disembarked at the location indicated by Google Maps. A few shopkeepers and their aides informed me that my destination lay further ahead. I decided to walk.

I must have looked quite lost, for a shopkeeper selling biscuits and odds and ends stepped out asking, “Are you looking for someone?” I repeated, “Chandrabhaga, Tinkonia Bagicha.” His eyes lit up with recognition and he led me into an adjacent lane. There it was—the first house at the mouth of the lane. On its moss-covered grey wall, a nameplate in Odia script simply read “Chandrabhaga.”  This was the temple of my quest. Jayanta Mahapatra, the poet who once lived here had already left on his final voyage. The air seemed heavy with the lingering breath of his poems. Poems that had nothing to declare. Poems that stood at the ticket window feeling absence with unfulfilled hands. Poems where the ghost of starlight and the lone drift of half-moon reminded one of the beloved. Poems which quickly learned that within the pain of living and the reality of dying, there is a magic moment that is part of one’s mythology. Poems about a boy in a classroom who did not understand what the teacher was saying but put on a knowing smile for all to believe. Poems that read the silence that danced across the land at dawn.

It was only a few summers ago that, after a great deal of hesitation, I had mustered the courage to write to Jayanta Mahapatra, the grand legend of Indian poetry in English. At that time, I had resumed writing poetry after more than two decades and, unsure about my poetry, felt the need for guidance. Something in my heart said that Jayanta Mahapatra, whom I thought of as a kindred soul, may look upon me with benevolence. His iconic poem “Hunger,” exploring the theme of abject poverty which left an indelible mark on the landscape of Indian poetry, was more than a testament to his sensitive heart. (https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hunger-71/). On an impulse, I reached out to Dr Rabindra Swain, who had a lifelong association with Jayanta Mahapatra. Dr. Swain readily provided me with Jayanta Mahapatra’s address. To my utter delight and disbelief, after a few weeks, I received a handwritten reply to my letter. More letters followed—sometimes simply short notes, but always handwritten and always personal. He spoke not from a pedestal but from the shared ground of a fellow seeker. At the venerable age of ninety-five, he showed a boundless generosity of heart towards a younger poet returning to verse. Here was a man whose greatness of having been the first Indian poet to have won the Sahitya Akademi award for English poetry and the many accolades that followed later made him only more accessible, not distant.

He shared deep friendships with poets of all ages, giving him a stature in Indian poetry in English equal to a huge banyan tree where birds of many seasons came to rest. Mahapatra taught physics before he turned to poetry in his late thirties. Having authored almost forty volumes of poetry, he also founded the iconic Chandrabhaga, a little magazine dedicated to Indian writing that gave home to many works in English as well as translations from Indian languages to English.

My love for poetry began in the early nineteen-eighties in the cadences of my mother tongue, Malayalam. Most of my early memories of poetry consisted of reading Kumaran Asan, Balamani Amma, Vailoppili, Edassery and Changampuzha, the stalwarts of Malayalam literature. The verses of eco poet Sugatha Kumari pulsated in my veins. Later came English translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry, originally composed in Bangla. Countless languid noons were spent in the mango orchard of my ancestral home in Malabar, leafing through a selection of Tagore’s songs and poetry titled “I won’t let you go.” Then came Kamala Das with her raw candour, Nissim Ezekiel with his “Night of the Scorpion,” Jayanta Mahapatra writing in the sensibility of Konarka and Mahanadi and an almost boyish-looking Dom Moraes smoking poetry and cigar on the cover page of a volume that I first chanced upon in a bookstore, all of them Indian Poets who wrote in English, firmly rooted to their earth. It was through their poems that I timidly ventured into the world of English verse. Around the same time, I also read Robert Frost, William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman more as part of the curriculum. But it was the hibiscus flowers and monsoon of tropical poetry that drew me into a bewitching spell, more than the daffodils and English summer. Gradually, I moved on to law, occasionally glimpsing poetry in the judgments on equality and social justice pronounced by Justice Patanjali Shastri and Justice VR Krishna Iyer, who served as venerable Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of India.

When, after more than two decades, I returned to poetry, I felt as nervous as a girl joining school mid-term, for the landscape of English poetry in India had shifted dramatically over the decades. The only proof that I had been a poet was a few yellowing journals and forgotten school certificates. It was daunting, this act of resurrection. And then, like a lighthouse to a drifting vessel, came Jayanta Mahapatra’s letters. I hadn’t known him as much or as long as many knew him in the world of Indian poetry. Yet, his kindness was immeasurable. Each word whispered to stay true to poetry. He reminded me that poetry demanded no laurels, only honesty, that poetry lay not in the certainty of declarations but in the humility of questions. In my first letter to him, I confessed that I was not sure whether I could call myself a poet, but poetry was my life breath. I sought his blessings. He wrote back saying,  “I feel so good that you wrote to me at last. And like you, I am a humble student at the feet of poetry too.”  His sense of humor was delightful. He had a deep love for Kerala, my home state, where he had once occupied the prestigious Basheer Chair at MG University, Kottayam. I remember sharing the cover art of my first book with him and he wrote back, “Will you believe me if I say that my letter to you ( which I wrote this afternoon) is waiting on my desk, to be mailed tomorrow?” In his final letter, he wrote that he is working on Chandrabhaga/20, adding, “Life is so unsure when you are ninety-five.”

Editing the final issue of Chandrabaga in his hospital bed a few weeks before he passed on he wrote in the editorial note, I believe I cannot force myself to appear the artist, just as I cannot put on a hockey uniform and be able to compete with international teams. There’s something going on inside me or there isn’t.

I stood barefoot under the evening light at Chandrabhaga on the soil where his footsteps had been a million times. This was a pilgrimage I had long promised myself—to the poet who wrote of children brown as earth, the dawn at Puri and the cold of Mahanadi. The poet who asked not for answers but simply for us to draw close and see. The poet who wrote:

All the Poetry There Is

All the poetry there is in the world
appears to rise out of the ashes.
The ash sits between us
and puts its arms across our shoulders.
It makes the world so emptily quiet.
For there is nothing like the ashes
to remind us how little there is to say.

Because poetry doesn’t have to raise its voice.
Like the death of my father
it lies only a year down the road,
supporting the days too heavy for us.
No matter what game the ashes play,
poetry simply wants to know what sort of thing
war was, or a sunset, even a bizzare crime.

Poetry, I whisper, seeing a picture
of twenty persons gunned down without reason:
their crime, that they were merely in the way.
I could easily understand  the crime of passion.
Men who lived in the ashes knew how
to age more gracefully keeping the strength
they had gathered in the embers of their misery.

Is it poetry always
drawing one toward that distant fire ?
It makes the day seem suddenly colder.
Perhaps it is a stare of the dead empress
from the reign of terrors.
And the ashes turn and wheel through the dance
like birds of prey in awesome grace in the skies.*

* “All the Poetry In The World’” by Jayanta Mahapatra from the book Noon–New and Selected Poems used with the permission of Ketaki Foundation Trust.