Jejuri–Bandra–Jejuri ——— ጓ

Jejuri–Bandra–Jejuri Strolling with Kolatkar ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA ——— ጓ ——— N A VISIT TO P UNE in September 2004 to see Arun Kolatkar, who had been seriously ill and who died that week, I read in the Times of O India a report on the changing face of Jejuri. Until then, although I knew that Jejuri was a town in western Maharashtra, I had not seen it in this way. For me, as for many others, it had always been associated with a book of that name. It came as a shock, then, to read that Jejuri also existed outside the imagination of its readers, that like any other place on the map it had ordinary people walking about its ordinary streets and living their day-to-day lives. This ‘real’ Jejuri, which city newspapers reported on and information technology was transforming, had seemed unreal and abstract to me at the time; it still does. The main attraction of Jejuri is the temple dedicated to Khandoba, a folk god popular with the nomadic and pastoral communities of Maharashtra and north Karnataka. Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri 1 is a record of a visit to the town. Here are the opening verses of “The Bus”: The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down on the windows of the state transport bus all the way up to Jejuri. A cold wind keeps whipping and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin at your elbow. You look down the roaring road. You search for signs of daybreak in What little light spills out of the bus. 1 Arun Kolatkar, Jejuri, intro. Amit Chaudhuri (1977; New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2005). 130 ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA ጓ After “a bumpy ride” when “all the countryside you get to see” is “Your own divided face in a pair of glasses / on an old man’s nose,” the bus comes to a halt “in front of the priest” who has been patiently waiting for it all morning. And here is why: “purring softly,” the bus has A catgrin on its face and a live, ready to eat pilgrim held between its teeth. (“The Priest”) Only incidentally is Jejuri about a temple town or matters of faith. At its heart, and at the heart of all of Kolatkar’s work, lies a moral vision, whose basis is the things of this world, precisely, rapturously observed. So, a common door- step is revealed to be a pillar on its side, “Yes. / That’s what it is”; the eight-armed goddess, once you begin to count, has eighteen arms; and the run-down Maruti temple, where nobody comes to worship but which is home to a mongrel bitch and her puppies, is, for that reason, “nothing less than the house of god.” The matter-of-fact tone is easy to get wrong, and Kolatkar’s Marathi critics got it badly wrong, finding it to be cold, flippant, at best sceptical. They were forgetting, of course, that the clarity of Kolatkar’s observations would not be possible unless he had abundant sympathy for the person or animal (or even inanimate object) being observed; forgetting, too, that without abundant sympathy for what was being observed, the poems would not be the acts of attention they are. The last poem in the book is “The Railway Station.” In it, from the stationmaster to “the young novice at the tea stall,” no one is prepared to tell the narrator “when the next train is due.” The book had opened with daybreak; it closes with sunset: the setting sun large as a wheel Apart from a “young woman” who arranges “A Little Pile of Stones” in the belief that if the pile does not topple over she will have a long and happily mar- ried life and a “teen age bride on her knees” who performs a ritual under the watchful eyes of a smiling priest, ready-to-eat pilgrims are absent from Jejuri. The opposite was true on the day I visited the Bandra Fair in Bombay. Held every September for one week to coincide with the feast that follows the nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I had gone there on the evening of the last day, which explained the rush of pilgrims on the roads that led to Mount Mary Church. The BEST bus I was in kept getting stuck in the traffic and it seemed quicker to walk the rest of the way. The crowd that had looked like a mass of slow-moving ants from my window seat in the upper deck felt more like a.

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