He took a sheet of paper out of his pocket and began.
‘God of pebbles, help us, now the poll is past,
Not to spurn the small bribes but to snatch the vast,
To attack the right cause, to defend the wrong,
To exploit the helpless and protect the strong.
To our peculations and our victims add.
Mighty Lord, we pray thee, make us very bad…’
There were three more stanzas, referring among other things to a few local contests that Amit had read about in the newspaper – one of which made both Pran and Lata sit up: it referred in a flippant manner to a landowner and a land-snatcher who had first come together and then bounced apart like billiard balls in the cause of garnering the vote.
Most of the audience enjoyed the poem, especially the local references, and laughed. Mr Makhijani, however, was not amused.
‘He is making mockery of our Constitution. He is making mockery,’ said the patriotic bard.
Amit went on to read a dozen poems, including ‘The Fever Bird’, which had so haunted Lata when she first read it. Professor Mishra too thought it very good, listened intently, and nodded his head.
Several of the poems Amit read were not to be found in his books; for the most part they had been written more recently. One, however, about the death of an old aunt of his, which Lata found very moving, had been composed some time before. Amit had kept it aside and rarely read it. Lata noticed that Pran’s head was bowed as he listened to this poem, and indeed the whole audience was quite still.
After the reading and applause was over, Amit said that he would be happy to answer any questions.
‘Why is it that you do not write in Bengali, your mother tongue?’ asked a challenging voice. The young man who spoke appeared to be quite angry.
Amit had been asked this question – and had asked himself this question – many times before. His answer was that his Bengali was not good enough for him to be able to express himself in the manner he could in English. It wasn’t a question of choice. Someone who had been trained all his life to play the sitar could not become a sarangi player because his ideology or his conscience told him to. ‘Besides,’ Amit added, ‘we are all accidents of history and must do what we are best at without fretting too much about it. Even Sanskrit came to India from outside.’
Mrs Supriya Joshi, the songbird of free verse, now stood up and said: ‘Why do you use rhyming? Moon, June, Moon, June? A poet must be free – free as a bird – a fever bird.’ Smiling, she sat down.
Amit said he rhymed because he liked to. He liked the sound, and it helped give pith and memorability to what might otherwise become diffuse. He no more felt chained by it than a musician felt chained by the rules of a raag.
Mrs Supriya Joshi, unconvinced, remarked to Mr Makhijani: ‘All is rhyming, chiming, in his poems, like Nowrojee’s triolets.’
Professor Mishra asked a question about Amit’s influences: did he detect the shadow of Eliot in his writing? He referred to several lines in Amit’s poetry, and compared them to lines of his own favourite modern poet.
Amit tried to answer the question as well as he could, but he thought that Eliot was not one of his major influences.
‘Have you ever been in love with an English girl?’
Amit sat up sharply, then relaxed. It was a sweet, anxious old lady from the back of the room.
‘Well, I - I don’t feel I can answer that before an audience,’ he said. ‘When I asked for questions, I should have added that I would answer any questions so long as they were not too private – or, for that matter, too public. Government policy, for instance, would be out.’
An eager young student, blinking in adoration, and unable to restrain the nervousness in his voice, said: ‘Of the 863 lines of poetry in your two published books, thirty-one refer to trees, twenty-two have the word “love” or “loving” in them, and eighteen consist of words of only one syllable. How significant is this?’
Lata noticed Kabir smile; she was smiling herself. Amit attempted to extricate an intelligent question out of what had just been said and talked a little about his themes. ‘Does that answer the question?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ nodded the young man happily.
‘Do you believe in the virtue of compression?’ asked a determined academic lady.
‘Well, yes,’ said Amit warily. The lady was rather fat.
‘Why, then, is it rumoured that your forthcoming novel – to be set, I understand, in Bengal – is to be so long? More than a thousand pages!’ she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.
‘Oh, I don’t know how it grew to be so long,’ said Amit. ‘I’m very undisciplined. But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they’re bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they’re good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.’