Review: The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap by Adil Jussawalla

Hindustan Times

07-06-2025

Given its geohistory, Mumbai has attracted the attention of an outrageously large number of chroniclers. Even someone who has never been to the much-mythologised city can experience it through the art it has inspired. Though Mumbaikars may judge this as an inauthentic way of experiencing their metropolis, I too have learnt a lot about the place through its poetry — those ambivalent delights that one turns to, usually in the event of adversity. 85-year-old Adil Jussawalla is one of Mumbai's, or Bombay's, if you will, best-known poets. Wicked, witty, and wondrous, he writes with an ease that signals an internalisation of the city and its people in all their complexity. Much has been written about his journey, which is therefore no longer intriguing. What is definitely intriguing is this Speaking Tiger volume featuring 35 of the poet's prose pieces written between 1980 and 2002.
The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap: Writings from Bombay convinces the reader that when poets turn to prose, each word illuminates as nothing is rendered uncalibrated. In his introduction, An Enduring Unease: Adil Jussawalla in the City, poet, novelist and translator Jerry Pinto writes, 'I remember the exhilaration of seeing a Devnagari letter in an English book and thinking, 'Is this allowed?' But then Adil wasn't very interested in what was allowed and what wasn't. He was interested in words, he was interested in where he was, he was interested because that was another habit of mind: the belief that everyone mattered, and hierarchies were there only to be challenged.'
This is evident in the first piece, The Bombay Within, which begins with a bitter truth: 'The waiters of the Bombay Gymkhana remain invisible.' Jussawalla follows this up with: 'So, when you think of it, does most of the city, most of the time. Do we ever look at its details?' Notorious for noticing things, the fine print interests him the most. How the protagonists of this piece — the historian Sharada Dwivedi, poet Rahul Mehrotra, and Jussawalla himself — exit the club is quite telling.
The reader is compelled to also appreciate the writer's sense of foreseeability. The titular piece exemplifies this, though many may claim that it developed solely out of a mix of journalistic and poetic impulses. In 1962, at an auction of a 'collection of jewellery and antiques', his friend, Sunil, gifted the poet a late 19th-century article, a 'diamond-encrusted rat trap' which contained a 'tightly-rolled scroll'. Jussawalla wondered if this was Sunil's way of jokingly 'calling [him] a rat'. But when he opened the scroll, there was a 'repetition of certain forms, the gaps between each set of designs clearly indicated'; it was some sort of encryption. He sent it to 'Father Schiller of Ootacamund, an expert on Hindu family codes' and received the decoded text 20 years later, which is reproduced in full in this 1984 piece. The story reveals much: the cyclical nature of karma, an obsession with the foreign and the forbidden, a personal account of the Bombay plague of the 1890s, and the tangential story of Waldemar Haffkine, who was brought to India by the Governor of Bombay to create a vaccine for the epidemic. Interestingly, it was the same institute where 'the plague used to kill [Amarendra Chandra Pandey] had come from'. The concluding paragraph signals that Jussawalla reads the city better than most: 'It's a hot month and my wife and daughter have left the city. Looking at its lights from my balcony, I think a lot of the diamond-encrusted rat trap.'
In O City, City from 1993, he writes that Bombay, like every megalopolis, is cruel. But cruelties and tragedies play out differently in life and in the arts. Of the latter he states sombrely, 'We may or may not be moved by what we see.'
There are moments of hilarity too. In Want to Get Away? Let Others Do It for You (1997), he writes, 'I've come to believe that the best way of taking a holiday is to stay put; let others do the getting away for you. It can be wonderfully relaxing.' Heeling Process, another example of a succinct piece with a clickbaity title, ruminates on how the individual falls apart when their shoes fall apart. 'That's why I've written several poems on shoes,' Jussawalla concludes. In A Change of Light, he writes that he seems 'to attract a lot of attention through no fault of [his]', leaving readers wondering if there's a subtext, something more to the piece than meets the eye.
The collection also includes Baby Talk, in which Mulk Raj Anand visits Jussawalla. Mostly, though, these articles are about the poet himself, the lapsed architect, who imagines the city by the sea one word at a time. The period in which these were written witnessed the renaming of Bombay to Mumbai (1995). Somehow, the difference in what Jussawalla noted about the city and its people is telling of the transformation of the place and of himself too.
The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap: Writings from Bombay is a pleasant read and, as Pinto notes, these pieces are 'a way of giving witness to the bigness and the strangeness of the city.' Adil Jussawalla, he writes, 'does not provide any potted histories; those are for others to write and to believe in. His city is built of chance encounters, of laughing liftmen, of departed friends and other ghosts.'
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.