Remembering Gieve Patel: Poet, painter, playwright, translator, doctor

When his closest poet friends, Nissim Ezekiel and AK Ramanujan, died, Gieve told me he lost the motivation to write poetry, because his primary readers no longer existed. We were at our Udupi haunt in Nariman Point, quaffing filter coffee, when he mentioned this. I wondered about that. Did poets write only for each other?

Today, I see what he meant. Gieve and I weren’t united by the same poetics. But I knew he was that rare thing—an artist with an unfaltering nose for the authentic, a fiercely independent traveller, resistant to hopping on easy cultural bandwagons. In the literary world with its share of power-play and cliquism, Gieve was his own person. As long as there were people like him around, it felt all was not rotten in the state of Denmark. When he died last Friday, it felt like one was suddenly plunged into a world of opaque street signs, without anyone to approach for directions.

Poet, painter, playwright, translator, doctor, Gieve was never a flashy collector of identities. He preferred to find his versatile habitat in verbs, not nouns. My earliest memory of him is of hearing him read his poetry in my classroom. Little did I know then that I would write the preface to his Collected Poems decades later. As a young collegian, I watched his play, Savaksa, directed by Pearl Padamsee, and was fascinated by the festering complexity of its characters. Later, as a young poet myself, I met him. Our relationship deepened over time. Today, I have an audio file in my head of the distinct timbre of his poetic voice, its determinedly staccato non-lyrical rhythms, its muscularity. And then there is the Gieve guffaw. As inimitable as the broad smile and the clear-eyed gaze.

Born in 1940, Gieve’s first book of poems was published in 1966. There were subsequent gaps, the longest between his third volume in 1991 and his Collected twenty-seven years later. The hiatuses were filled with much else: an active life as a painter; a bustling medical practice (until 2005); the writing of three plays; and his immersive translation project of the Gujarati mystic poets, Akho and Vasto.

Gieve was the quintessential Mumbai artist. He walked the city’s seething streets, inhaled its contaminated odours, and relished, with an affectionate ethnographer’s delight, the diverse patients who turned up at his Bombay Central clinic. His poetry also valued this sense of being ‘interpenetrated/ with the world’. Perhaps even death, he wrote, was welcome if it happened on Indian Railways ‘in a third-class carriage/ with open windows’. His daughter tells me that the cubicle in the Pune palliative-care centre in which he died felt like a railway compartment—self-contained, yet connected to the world. That sounded deeply appropriate.

He often described himself as ‘bedeviled’. Certainly, his plays and poetry, from Poems to How Do You Withstand, Body?, were fevered, dark, haunted by questions around body, mortality, injustice, unredeemed pain, unhealed inner demons. And yet, there was nothing bedeviled about the man I grew to know. His third book, Mirrored Mirroring, suggested that some of ‘that difficult baggage’ might have been resolved. There was an embarrassed wondering here about how we got ‘caught up/ in God’s effort/ to understand Himself’. Gieve’s imagined God was something like himself—passionately curious about the besieged body, ‘embroiled in detail’, and ‘puzzled, puzzled’. In later years, that curiosity deepened. Our recent meetings invariably revolved around subjects of karma, meditation, death.

This April, I asked him if he felt he had any unfinished creative business. Only the translations, he said. There was no point suggesting that he hurry. Gieve approached his work like Akho, the goldsmith-poet he loved. He polished, crafted, dusted unceasingly, and worked only when he was seized by ‘inner necessity’ (a Kandinsky phrase he liked). Churning out a book to retain the cultural badge of ‘poet’ was unthinkable.

In his last days, it was drawing that consumed him. A year ago, he sent me a sketch of a tree—a serrated explosion of lines and gnarly wrinkles. It resembled a wild tree from his recent poem, ‘All Night’. Unlike Gieve’s earlier tree, this new counterpart is not mutilated or massacred by external forces. Instead, the tree itself yearns for oblivion, an ecstatic uprooting.

Was the poem prescient? Did it indicate something that Gieve unconsciously knew, or desired? We will never know.

No, the body does not withstand, friend. Nor does the tree. What we do know is that your many branches live on in your work, green-leaved and fiercely radiant.

The writer is a poet and author