Description

This selection of articles, reviews, and essays, written by Adil Jussawalla over a period of 36 years, deal with body, mind, and — there’s no way of avoiding the word — soul, in environments that both nurture life and destroy it. His spontaneous responses — which Vidyan Ravintharan writes about in a chapter on the author in his book Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022) — occasionally tempered with moody bouts of introspection, mark this selection too. We hope you enjoy it.

Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940. He is the author of six books of poems and two chapbooks. He was honoured with a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2014 and was Tata Literature Lives’s Poet Laureate for 2021. Selections of his prose have appeared in three previous books. He lives in Mumbai.

Contents

Physical
Hungry Children
Granta’s Body
Running Scared
Man with Blue Plastic Basin
Early Hungers
From the Cupboard of the Flesh
If I had a Hammer
Walking Wounded
Heroes
Exile and Porridge
In Your Face
Matters of Food and Poison
Spectre

Intensive Cares
Drakkar Noir
Illness as Compulsive Reading
A Scent of Bay Leaves
Sex in a Compass Box
Sexual Licence
What’s a Man, What’s a Woman?
Days and Nights in the Forest
The Uses of Vomit
The Family Game

Occupying Our Minds
The Information Trap
I Think, Therefore I am Not
I have Nothing to Say but You Know that Already
Is it Only a Matter of Time?
The Persistence of Hatred
What are You Thinking of?
At the Feet of the Master: Work

Victory
What Made Enquist Sick?