Waiting For Verses

“He has been too ill to meet anyone for the past couple of years, but people stopped visiting him even before that,” says Reba, Vilas Sarang’s wife. “He would like to meet people but it is too tiring for him. Also, it is difficult for others to und­erstand his speech.” Reba spoke to Outlook on the phone, after we got lucky gate-crashing at Sarang’s residence in Kandivili for a photo. We did manage to get a picture, but poor health prevents Sarang from interacting with people. He suffered a paralytic stroke in 1999 and underwent a bypass operation in 2000. He published four books after that, but did not stay in touch with anyone—his publishers, acquaintances, the media and perhaps even his  friends old and new.

“He needs help even to turn and sit up on the bed. We disconnected his mobile phone because he simply could not talk,” Reba says. She is the only one looking after him as their children are studying or working abroad. Publishers or people in the literary circle are all eager to hear from and about him, but nobody has spoken to him in a long while. Whether the paradox of this total lack of voice of an artist productive till recently is Kafk­a­esque, a quality that doubtless influenced Sar­ang, or reminiscent of the The­atre of the Absurd, where “nothing ever really happens”, is hard to tell. Incidentally, Samuel Beckett himself had admired Sarang’s work.

Any event is an aberration. “When he was conferred a state government award for his Gandhijichi Makde (Gandhiji’s monkeys) in February this year, I went and collected it,” said Reba, 61, herself is a double post graduate in Hindi and Economics. What about literary festivals? Does Sarang get any invites? “No, not really.” Perhaps, because Sarang is no longer enmeshed in the network—by phone, e-mail or social network. Once, Dilip Chitre wrote about Sarang and his The Dinosaur Ship in 2005: “Is The Dinosaur Ship just a message-in-a-bottle sort of book, hoping to be accidentally retrieved by one sympathetic reader among a billion? It’s a terrifying thought.” What he wrote about the book seems to hold true for Sarang himself now. Yes, a terrifying thought.