aren’t you?” (All these new bookshops

and shopping malls—Crossroads, Crosswords—

where books and CDs and stationery and toys

are sold in busy neighbourliness. And exhortations

to go to Lotus. “Have you been to Lotus? It’s quite

far away, but it’s a real bookshop. The books

are fantastic!”) I’ve been trying to track down this

man to persuade him to let my publishers

reissue his first book of poems, Jejuri,

a sequence, published in ’76, about a visit

to the obscure, eponymous pilgrimage town

in Maharashtra. Arvind Mehrotra says it’s

“the best-loved book of poems by an Indian writer

in English,” or words to similar effect, with good

reason. He confesses his shyness of contracts

while ordering me a coffee. We’re joined

by a bespectacled itinerant from the ad world, who

has an omelette and toast. “But if you’re involved …

I don’t mind.” I try not to interrupt as he

drifts lazily into conversation with the spectacled man,

but ask him to keep a signed copy of

Freedom Song: Three Novels rather shamefacedly.

He does not demur; he studies its cover.

I tell him I must retrieve wife and daughter

from Rhythm House, and brave the traffic

to Mahim, to take part in a “live chat”

on rediff.com. “I’ve never done this sort

of thing before.” He suggests I protest

too much. “I think Amitabh and Jaya

Bachchan were on it the other day,” he says, smiling

smokily; I see myself in a mirror,

dishevelled, late. What is it exactly

that I want from him? Neither he nor I

quite know, and we know that we don’t know,

and this lack of certainty, in which he has the mild

upper hand, this bogus talk about

contracts, I suppose, gives us some

leverage with each other, or is that only my

fancifulness? We agree to meet for lunch

on Monday, a day before I fly

back to Calcutta. For twenty-five years

he’s published nothing, or little. This doesn’t mean

he’s not been writing. In fact, for many years,

he’s been composing poems about the Kala Ghoda

he sees from his window at the Wayside Inn,

the parking lot now cleared of cars for the ten-day

festival. He writes about the woman

who washes herself and her children, and cooks

on the pavement, or the homeless stringing their string cots,

or odd-job men and their paramours

and quick lunches. As I discover on Monday,

when the Wayside Inn’s full, and we crowd

round a single table, lunch is a great

unspoken theme. People enter, leave,

sated or still in search of satiation;

Arvind will send me some poems a couple

of months later, by Kolatkar, describing the slop

eaten by the odd-job man on the pavement.

We are united by orders of dhansak and fish

and chips, and kachumbar, drowned out by cries of “Waiter!”

and “Arrey, Udwadia?” I think of Frank O’Hara,