The Community Of Imagination

By coincidence, I happened to be having breakfast with Anantha -- U. R.Ananthamurthy -- in his hotel room in Pune when I switched on my cell-phone tomake a call home.

Nirmal, Anantha, and I made a journey together in the spring of 1980 that wasmemorable for all three of us. Nirmal was the oldest among us, followed byAnantha; I came last.

Nirmal wrote fiction and essays in Hindi, Anantha wrote fiction, poetry, andessays in Kannada. I wrote poetry in Marathi and English; but did much elsebesides, that was outside the limits of literature.

Chronological seniority apart, we were like the Hindu triumvirate of deities.Nirmal was Brahma, the creator of the universe; Anantha, true to hisname, was the preserver, and I was Shiva--the destroyer? I prefer to think ofShiva as the sam of a musical cycle, the beginning and end of all rhythm,Shankara, the quieting one. This was a private joke among us.

It was Nirmal who was asked, by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (acultural extension of the Ministry of External Affairs), to choose two othercontemporary Indian writers and form a delegation of writers to visit the thenSoviet Union, the then Hungarian Peoples’ Republic, the then West Germany, andFrance to explore the possibilities of literary translation as cultural exchangebetween India and the nation-states we were to visit. It was Nirmal who choseAnantha and me as his accomplices in this adventurous mission. All three of ushad peripatetic pasts and our paths had crossed more than once for about adecade earlier.

Anantha and I boarded an Air India Boeing flight to Moscow via Delhi inMumbai on (I think it was) March 31, 1980. Nirmal was to join us in Delhi.

From Delhi we were to fly non-stop to Moscow and land exactly on All Fools’Day, Inshaa’Allah!

In the larger world that we shared, it was the beginning of a historic seachange that would have seemed unbelievable to most people.

The Soviet Union had just launched its own Vietnam in Afghanistan. In fact,both Anantha and I had contemplated declining the invitation to visit tothe Soviet Union at such a time, in protest. But Nirmal persuaded both of us notto make that kind of stupid gesture. Nirmal argued that precisely because of theSoviet campaign in Afghanistan, our meetings with fellow-writers and publishers,and Indologists and scholars, would become a significant opportunity for adialogue with them. There was wisdom in Nirmal’s advice. Both Anantha and Ifelt a little foolish; and we readily dropped our proposed ‘protest’. Theforbidden world behind the Iron Curtain beckoned us. We could barely contain ourfluttering anticipation.

I said fluttering anticipation. But the phrase does not convey thecomplex state of mind as I vividly recall it. External journeys often turn intointernal voyages in my case and I am sure something similar must be in Nirmal’sand Anantha’s case as well. There was a steadily escalating premonition, analmost occult awakening of faculties kept in check, a rising subliminalawareness of a universe larger than all our individual egos and routine mundaneconcerns.

We were all born in India and in three different mother tongue cultures thatmade us siblings of sorts. Nirmal arrived in 1929, almost on schedule tocoincide with the ominous rise of the Third Reich in Central Europe and inIndia, the launch of Mahatma Gandhi’s momentous Non-cooperation Movement.Anantha joined the world in 1932, just three years later. I came in 1938, theyear in which Europe was plunged deep into pre-World War crisis; the Munich pactwas signed; Germany demanded the annexation of the Sudetan borderland ofCzechoslovakia. World War II commenced when I was barely one year old.

We were all destined to carry, individually, these historic terrestrialburdens that would shape our worldviews as writers and artists and globallydefine a generation and its world-image. We were contemporaries within thecompass of a decade. Reporting Nirmal’s death one newspaper headline says, "Endof an Era". It’s a cliché to put it that way. It would be moreappropriate to say, quoting Daniel Weissbort’s response to the news of Nirmal’sdeath in an e-mail to me:

"Very sad to hear about Nirmal. I was sure I would never see him again. At least I got to see him, once more, after Iowa, when he told me-- I think it was a party, or something like that, in The Mayflower: Danny, there’s nothing that depresses me so much as a celebration! I also remember fondly, if freezingly, an evening with him in Delhi, on his roof, as we sat sipping and I believe finishing a bottle of not the very best whiskey. A wonderful writer, a deep thinker, and rare individual. Can you send me Gagan’s e-mail address--I’d like to send her my condolences? We are getting fewer."

Bereaved--and bereft of Nirmal, I am bewildered, almost like a philosopherfacing the obvious. A part of me is frozen forever; as has always happened whenI have lost a loved one whose lonely trajectory ran parallel to my own for anilluminating while.

After receiving the SMS from Delhi, I could not help calling ManzoorEhetesham, the Hindi fiction writer close to both Nirmal and me, and I urged himto write a memoir focussing on Nirmal’s sojourn in the Nirala Srijanpeethin Bhopal--an address we both inherited from Nirmal--and a space that was acamping site in our respective creative writing careers. Nirmal in Delhi, Nirmalin Iowa City, Nirmal in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Germany, France and indifferent cities and with, what the American poet Paul Engels called, thecommunity of imagination…

Thank you, Nirmal, for making me an intimate witness. Now I will recall evenmy quarrels with you with a tinge of wistfulness.

Dilip Chitre is Honorary Editor of New Quest---a quarterly journal of participative inquiry into society andculture--and this piece is slated to appear in the coming issue, number162