Saturday, April 10, 2010

Dealing with winter

Adil Jussawala remembers his friend, the poet Dilip Chitre.


The bhang had been slow to take effect. When it hit us, we were out in the street, not far from the flat where we had ingested it, but far enough, it seemed to us, to believe we were in bedlam. There were three of us: Dilip Chitre, R Parthasarathy and myself; and we couldn’t stop laughing. We had stumbled upon a hemp-inspired line, collectively concocted, and we found the line funny: “Tickling the teats of the tattooed teetotaller.”

That was in Sion, Bombay, in 1967, not long after I’d met Dilip for the first time. Dilip loved wordplay, loved alliteration. However serious the topic of discussion (and discussions with Dilip could be very serious), he had a way of thwacking it off its predictable track with a witty or sarcastic sideswipe. He spoke energetically, sometimes flailing his arms about him, as though words alone were too weak to contain his energy, as though that energy were made up of elements that couldn’t be expressed by words alone, that it needed his whole body and mind to make itself felt.

Full report here Timeout Mumbai

No comments:

Post a Comment