At seventeen, in the year 1957, Adil Jussawalla left Bombay for London, in search of something brighter and grander. Thirteen years later, he returned to the city of his birth, and it was the beginning of a lifelong bitter-sweet love affair. The great metropolis became a defining presence in his poetry and prose, and he an important and distinctive part of its literary landscape.
This book brings together Jussawalla’s prose pieces on Bombay-Mumbai, written between 1980 and 2002. ‘His city,’ as Jerry Pinto writes in the introduction, ‘is built of chance encounters, of laughing liftmen, of departed friends and other ghosts’, and his writing on it gives witness to its ‘bigness and strangeness’, its ‘absent-minded cruelty and sometimes an absent-minded kindness’. Jussawalla writes about Gukulashtami pot-breakers and drummers who take over the streets, and sewage workers in deep pits whom no one notices; about a young woman who drowned herself in the sea, and pilots who would wave to weekend crowds on the beach from the Tiger-Moths that once lifted off the Juhu aerodrome. He writes of the epic drama of the monsoon, ships and dhows on the glittering Arabian Sea, the ‘dis-housed’ and the property sharks, dead flowers and angry parrots on his balcony, a wall of books hiding a bookshop, a sledgehammer on an ageing building, a diamond-encrusted rat trap in a wealthy lady’s collection of jewellery and antiques.
In this splendid anthology—intimate, informed, humane and entirely free of both despair and easy celebration—Jussawalla pays his city the ultimate compliment: concentrated and clear-eyed attention.
Poet and critic Adil Jussawalla was born in Mumbai and educated at Cathedral and John Connon School. He spent the years between 1957 and 1970 in England, where he studied architecture at the Architectural Association School in London, earned a master’s in English at Oxford, and taught at a language school. Thereafter, he returned to Mumbai, becoming a lecturer in English literature at St. Xavier’s College. Later, he served as the book review editor of The Indian Express, literary editor of The Express Magazine and editor of Debonair magazine. He also co-founded Clearing House, a poets’ publishing co-operative. He has written three books of poetry, Land’s End (1962), Missing Person (1972) and Trying to Say Goodbye (2014), for which he received the Sahitya Akademi Award; and edited a landmark anthology, New Writing in India (1974). His other works include The Right Kind of Dog (2013); Maps for a Mortal Moon (2014) and I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky (2015).
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