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.
Homi K Bhabha once said of VS Naipaul that whatever subject he concerned himself with, he “inhabited the subject fully”. The same, I think, could be said of Dilip, whether his subject was culture (about which we argued a lot), Marxism, the meaning of poetry or the potential of cinema. He fully supported the anti-Congress Jayaprakash Narayan movement in 1974-’75; his poem “Homage to Pataliputra” was a direct result of that involvement. Tipped off that he might be arrested during the Emergency, he left for Iowa City to be part of the International Writing Program. Two years later, in 1977, Dilip was instrumental in getting me there.
Winters in Iowa can be long and bitter, icy winds across the prairies (the dreaded wind-chill factor) making temperatures drop to -60 degrees F. Financial factors bothered Dilip but wind-chill factors never seemed to. On the contrary, he was as lively and argumentative in Iowa City’s cold as he was in Bombay’s heat. It was in his poems and later, in his letters to me from different European cities, that he indicated that winters depressed him profoundly.
In one such letter, written in Bamberg, he says: “Looking out, I don’t find the prospect’s very bright for me. It isn’t snowing but the sky is overcast. It is a very depressing day. And winters in the West have always brought my latent crises to the surface.”
 It’s difficult to think of Dilip without, at the same time, thinking of his wife Vijaya (Viju) and their son Ashay. During the early ’70s, when they lived in Bombay, my wife Veronik and I would frequently meet the three of them together. They were inseparable. (In Iowa City, in a different context, the family had other roles to play. Viju continued to be supportive of Dilip with the added responsibility of protecting him from some very tenacious hangers-on; Ashay, in his teens, was trying to win his independence; and Dilip had become something of a guru to a variety of lost and found souls, of many different nationalities and colours.
There’s a black angel in Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City, a tall angel. Dilip, Ashay and I tried to photograph it. My effort was unsuccessful. Perhaps Dilip and Ashay got it right. Thirty years later, Dilip recalled the angel in a poem. Visiting it produced “The subtle dread which touches even the most youthful:/ We feel it in our bones, winter’s first threat, just the hint of snow.”
When I tried to photograph the angel, the cemetery was very quiet. If it wasn’t winter, it felt like it. That was in 1977.
Fourteen years later, in a letter sent to me from Dossenheim, Dilip writes: “Here now this winter I am extremely apprehensive. For the first time in years I am really afraid …”
And as he nears the end of the page, fully alert to the cold and darkness of Dossenheim: “Do write to me. It is so quiet here. I would hear every word of a letter more clearly than ever.”
Several cultural organisations in Mumbai will come together on Sun Aprl 11 to put together a day-long event titled “Remembering Dilip Chitre” at Prithvi Theatre in Juhu. |
Click here for Time Out Bengaluru
Subscribe 
Register
