Oh, Adil! The little black book on my bedside table could be a diary, it felt very personal, it felt like letters one had hoarded for 20 years. Adil Jussawalla’s diary-letters somehow sneaking out of his Bombay apartment, I have so clearly visualised in my head and coming to rest on my tabletop. It was not black originally, the peeled off cover is a beautiful blue and black, two dogs on a fence-top looking away as day breaks in Bombay. The blue turns black where the title begins: The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap, Writings from Bombay by Adil Jussawalla. Perhaps the only hiccup I have with the book is that title. Dear Adil, with a magic wand for a pen (or a typewriter he keeps bringing up), why didn’t you borrow another of your essay titles for the cover. Why not ‘Want To Get Away? Let Others Do It For You’ - such a catchy one that outlined the story of many of our lives in 10 words! Why not ‘From The Dog House’ since we have got two of the fellows modelling on the cover anyway? Or perhaps one among the several you wrote for bookshops, ‘And Go Who Knows Where’ would have been perfect. But it is in ‘The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap’ that one notices (rusty as one is) your inclination to sprinkle, coat or drop a layer of humour over all that you say. When a friend sends a scroll and you find a crude drawing of a rat, your first thought is “He’s calling me a rat”. If a reader is entirely new to your writing, and didn’t take Jerry Pinto’s warnings in the introduction seriously (these writers call everything funny), they would likely rub their eyes before they laugh. All they knew was that Adil was a poet in Bombay, and opened the book expecting lyrical essays to fall on their lap, converting them too into literary stars. They could be ambitious that way. But here is Adil, finding topics such as a 19th century rat trap to talk about, or else his city of dreams, his ‘carrom-board’ city, his concentration city. Even as the book is full of Bombay, one gets the feeling that Adil never really got out much. He mentions the meetings with his friends, the walk on the street and of course the bookshops with suspicious walls. But in my head he is always sitting before that typewriter, somehow always surrounded by the noise of people building on or scraping away at his apartment. Adil’s thoughts occasionally stray to the workforce, non-preachy but acknowledging of privileges and differences. The clanks of his chisel and the clacks of my typewriter make a certain kind of music but not a joyful one, nor even a harmonious one. I don't envy him; I suspect he envies me. The only thing that will make us equal for a while is the fine patina of dust his chisel throws up and which will soon cover everything in the flat, him more than me. City yours, Footpath ours Likewise in ‘Voices from Homeless Areas’, he makes his point simply by dropping a few poems. The best, collectively written by a group of street children, he keeps for the end: City yours, Footpath ours Language yours, Curses ours Price yours, Work ours Earnings yours, Labour ours Medicines yours, Illness ours… You cannot help it, can you Adil, words of others and titles of books you like keep pouring out of you, the way another might name-drop famous men and women they know. Only for you, this is as spontaneous as saying hello to answer a phone. It might even surprise you that there are people who don’t accidentally end up in bookshops on random afternoons. The way you put it, who will want to move if every nook and corner of the world has a bookshop. Oh Adil, do you have to bring that adorability with you into every thought. If one reader can relate so much, there must be something for everyone. He sounds like a recluse when he concludes that the best way to take a holiday is “to stay put” and “let others do the getting away for you.” It can, he says, be wonderfully relaxing. Of course, it can be. Even if he isn’t a recluse he has gauged so many years ago that others may turn into one and not want to be “on a network.” In his essay from 1996, just when the world wide web was stretching its legs and making itself comfortable, Adil wrote: The problem is that there are millions of people in this world who don’t want to be talked about, don’t want to be online, don’t want to have even a pencil, leave alone a camcorder, pointed at them. No, they don’t. But little has changed, Adil. You have written your essays between 1980 and 2000. Nearly 30 years after you wrote it everyone is still “trying to deconstruct and reconstruct Arundhati Roy in globally mediocre prose.” We are still wondering “what will happen to Donald Trump.” And sadly the world is still hanging on to the ‘everything human has got to do with genes’ theory, so you were right, the madness of ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘communal clearing’ was not far away. (As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)
