`I was born here and belong’

As a student who was afflicted with the desire to write verse, I have often sat behind his desk in Bombay University, proffering remarkable poems by the yard. His literary help was an education in itself, but the more important education was to see the attitude with which he gave it. That attitude was not kind, or dutiful, or conscientious, or any such thing. It merely assumed, as a given, that his time belonged to others as much as to himself.

The same matter-of-factness informed his attitude to the country in which he, who is Jewish by race, happened to be born. With our present globalised values, we assume that it is everybody’s right to escape its shores if they can. In the Sixties and Seventies, the battle had not been lost to that extent; it was assumed that there was merit in staying back if you could; and whether to `go’ or to `stay’ often became a touchy debate. For Nissim, the debate, touchy or not, did not exist. A single line in one of his poems says it all – `I was born here and belong’. But again, there was no sense here of duty heavily performed or service self-consciously done. In the same poem he contrasts himself with others who `choose to give themselves/to some remote and backward place/…My backward place is where I am’.

Behind these bland sentences there is a feeling for his surroundings which can only be called love. This became apparent when he wrote his famous answer to Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness. But — and this is an important but — never would he countenance a refusal to see the truth, about India or about anything else. I remember one of Nirad Chaudhuri’s stinging articles about India which upset me so deeply that I said I wished Chaudhuri would restrain himself. The severity of Nissim’s reprimand shocked me into an early understanding of the fact that affection which refuses to see flaws is not affection.

Like so much else that we learned from him, that lesson only seems to become more important as time goes on. Now that he is ill and helpless, and a prisoner of mental darkness, I hope that he may still have some way of knowing how much he has given, and to how many.