Our Jerry of Perpetual Joy & Woe
TAhimsa here are two Jerrys in Jerry Pinto’s poetry. One who is an utter charmer, who thrives with an audience, whose turns of phrase are designed to delight and disarm anyone listening. He is a people’s person, gregarious and quick-witted.
The other Jerry hides behind this twin. He is vulnerable, noetic, very lonely, has loved and lost and loved again, and sees through most set-ups and charades, sometimes even his own. But he has something rare. He has that quiet place where he can repose trust, however cautiously, but also honestly and playfully, and that is the place of language. With language, he drops the act because his craft demands so. Here, after playing all the parts of journalist and teacher, novelist and translator, he becomes again, of sorts, the “Mahim boy” whose world keeps growing with every sentence he writes.
In a poem, Today My Mother is in the Audience, from his most recent poetry collection I Want a Poem, both these Jerry personas come together. What allows them to meet is a peculiar conceit. For a writer, especially a poet, an audience is a strange thing. It is at once the partaker of the most intimate of your words and yet it is also oddly impersonal. After the smiles and nods, and handshakes and booksignings, they will go home. Without you. Knowing half your secrets. Pinto short-circuits the impersonality of the audience by placing his mother in it. She is there not so much in flesh as she is in figuration. “Today my mother is in the audience,” he opens the poem, “As she never was when she lived / Today, she sits in the audience and I see / Her as whole, as at her best, a mischievous / Twinkle in her eye, a twinkle that says, / ‘Chhuh baba, don’t let these people see / Your pompous side.”
Not only has Pinto raised the stakes of this ordinary reading event for himself by imagining his mother, long gone, as sitting somewhere in the room, he lets the audience into
Asylum and Other Poems &
I Want a Poem and Other Poems this imaginative contract. He tells the listener that “[s]he loves it when / You clap or laugh” (italics mine). This is a remarkable moment. In the room to which he has read his poem, he has both fished for applause (in the most charming way possible) but also, at the same time, he has allowed everyone to enter a tender, figurative space with him, which is as sacred as it is fragile, in which his mother’s apparition accompanies him, gives him courage even in her absence. Briefly the sociable performer and the solitudinal poet have come together. They have found respite in each other. And his mother has been the bridge.
Along with his collection I Want a Poem which carries this poem, Pinto has also come out with a revised edition of Asylum, his debut poetry collection which was published 18 years ago. In both these books, we find Pinto turning his gaze to Bombay at its most minuscule and monumental, to his mother and her persistent traces, to his loves and their long shadows, to death and its detritus, and, more so in his recent collection, to the selfconscious treat and tribulation of writing poetry.
He is at his most gutwrenching when he writes of grief and how it both depletes us but also gives us a vocabulary for our common frailties. In a poem titled Grief, his concrete image and its brush with two big abstractions is deeply affecting. Grief becomes “a shell, lying on a beach, / Stranded by the tide, as if out of the reach / Of grace and faith’s consoling illogic”.
Some of Pinto’s favourite lines are William Blake’s when he writes that “It is right it should be so / Man was made for Joy & Woe... Joy & Woe are woven fine / A Clothing for the soul divine / Under every grief & pine / Runs a joy with silken twine”.
If indeed there are two Jerrys, we can say with some certainty that both of them are holding this gift of twine. In the palm of their hands is both that which buoys us up but also that which sends us hurtling down. These strands are continually interlaced in Pinto’s poetry collections. Their touch is both fraying and silken. We will do well to take hold of what he’s offering.