What Is In A Name? (For Nissim Ezekiel) Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Nissim Ezekiel a Maharashtrian Jew
One of the descendants
Of the shipwrecked ancestors
Who came to Bombay by chance
And settled here
Failing to take the journey back home
Is definitely not an Israeli,
But a diaspora Indian,
Not a Parsi, but a Jew.

To assess him as a poet
Is not to designate him
A modern, a modernist or a post-modern,
As he is not,
But simply modern,
A man with the bicycle, the radio,
The wrist watch,
In the suit-boot
And the necktie,
A modern man,
Wanting to be modern.

To read him is to come to feel
Gandhiji in London,
One imitating the English ways and manners
In the early stage of life,
In the pants and the shirt,
Wanting to be an Englishman
Ditto in the coat,
Not the latter Gandhi
Looking like a fakir and a yogi,
Half-naked fakir
Attending the Round Table Conference
In dhoti and kurta.

Nissim is a Bombayan,
A poet of Bombay,
One from the minority community
Telling of urban India,
Not the India of villages,
But the urban and city spaces,
Not the solitary and secluded countryside,
But of man and manners,
Irony, joke and caricature
After rubbing salt on,
Cracking jokes.

Nissim tells of the theatre, the park,
The cinema hall, the cafe, the restaurant,
The sea beach, the picnic spot,
The airport, the art galleries,
The exhibitions, the programmes
And the shows,
Modern art and sculpture,
Trend and tradition,
The cigar and the trails of smoke
And the ash-tray.

In the cinema hall he sees the films
With the beloved
Whom dates he stealthily
Fearing his conservative dad,
But likes her,
Failing to express in words,
Everything but within
The Jewish heart
Lying suppressed and unsaid,
A lover in love.

At the airport he sees off,
Waves at, sends flying kiss,
Handshaking and saying goodbye,
Hi-hello, how are you,
I am fine, how you,
You too saying, I am fine,
The foreigner girls
He is stunned to view them,
Goes to, returns back
From London too
And boasts of being to it.

Without doing Ph.D.,
He teaches the post-graduate students,
A man of literature writing plainly
The verses
Resembling the Elizabethan
Sonneteers and song-writers,
Wyatt, Spenser, Drayton,
The metaphysicals,
Donne, Marvell,
Sometimes love poetry,
Sometimes light verses.

A poet of the marriage-party,
The tea-party,
He blushes on seeing the face
Of his bride,
Newly-wed bride,
I mean the coy mistress,
Not the purdahwalli, the ghumtawalli,
The beauty under the veil,
Do not see her with the bad intention,
Look you not piercingly
Into her eyes,
The eyes of my burquawalli bibi.

Nissim smoking a cigarette,
Not the leafy hard Indian beedi
And giving tips in cigar-smoking,
The fire is lit
And the fringe is given,
Puffs taken,
Embers reddening,
Ashes shaken off,
Smokes coming out of
The nose and the mouth
And you saying,
It’s my technique,
It’s my style.

Nissim is a poet of the love-affair,
Will like to have,
But will not marry,
Fearing upheavals and repercussions,
Social taboos and restrictions,
A college boy exchanging
Love-letters
Under the pretext of studies,
Giving roses stealthily,
Wanting to kiss,
But fearing the backlash
To happen
After the strange fits of passion
Felt within.