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 15 Granta’s Body 18 Running Scared 22 Man with Blue Plastic Basin 25 Early Hungers 29 From the Cupboard of the Flesh 34 If I had a Hammer 40 Walking Wounded 44 Heroes 47 Exile and Porridge 51 In Your Face 54 Matters of Food and Poison 58 Spectre 61

Intensive Cares
Drakkar Noir 67 Illness as Compulsive Reading 71 A Scent of Bay Leaves 75 Sex in a Compass Box 79 Sexual Licence 83 What’s a Man, What’s a Woman? 87 Days and Nights in the Forest 91 The Uses of Vomit 94 The Family Game 99

Occupying Our Minds
The Information Trap 105 I Think, Therefore I am Not 109 I have Nothing to Say but You Know that Already 112 Is it Only a Matter of Time? 115 The Persistence of Hatred 118 What are You Thinking of? 121 At the Feet of the Master: Work 124

Victory
What Made Enquist Sick? 131