Adil jussawalla biography of william
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Being Here
WHEN IN THE SUMMER OF 1966 I arrived in Bombay from Allahabad to enrol at Bombay University, there was hardly a soul I knew in the city. My parents had found me accommodation in Mulund, in a sort of ashram run bygd a woman we called Maaji. Her name was Brijmohini Sarin, and my parents had great faith in her. She was their guru. A slim, shrill-voiced woman in her mid forties, she wore terry-cot maxi dresses in pastel shades and ruled the ashram with an iron fist. When she was around you wanted to hide behind the nearest pelare. She was married. Her husband, Papaji, worked in the telephone exchange. He had his separate living quarters in the ashram. The other permanent residents of the place included a couple of rik Marwari widows who owned one of the art deco buildings behind the Ritz Hotel in Churchgate. They spent all their time in the kitchen and could easily be mistaken for scullery maids. The ashram often had guests staying for short periods, and when Maaji showed t
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Adil Jussawalla: The Missing Man
Born in Mumbai in a Parsi family, Adil Jussawalla spent most of the years between 1957 and 1970 in England where he studied and got schooled to be an architect, tried to write down plays, read and cultivated English at Oxford after teaching at a language school, this is what his oft-quoted biography says it. Again on the journey back home, he taught English at St Xavier’s College between 1972 and 1975 or a short stint before turning and tuning to journalism. An Honorary Fellow at the International Writing Program in Iowa in 1977, Jussawalla participated in several international conferences and festivals. Historicity, individual personality, private reflection, urban space and its thinking, cosmopolitanism and globalism intercept one another to add to his poetic corpus and verve. His historicity takes him to race and its archetypes, identity being one of the Parsi heritage and ethnicity combined with the hollow and sham modernity of the fract
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Trying to Say Goodbye by Adil Jussawalla
Mumbai. Almost Island. 2012. ISBN 9788192129501
Signs of a new, forthcoming collection by Adil Jussawalla, one of India’s finest English-language poets, had been in the air for some time. A small but significant crop of “new poems” in the Monsoon 2009 issue of the online magazine Almost Island; an email from Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, mentioning his longtime friend and fellow poet having enough material for a whole new volume of verse. Finally this new volume, Jussawalla’s third collection in fifty years and his first in thirty-six, materialized as the debut title in the newly launched Almost Island Books.
Like other Indian poets of his generation, Jussawalla found his literary calling and motivation as a student in England, a bittersweet experience that lingers in the first part of Trying to Say Goodbye. Meaningfully titled “Vacant Possessions,” it features people and places from the poet’s London years as well as a few remarkable poe