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India Today
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Three fine books to read this week
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated July 7, 2025)The Diamond-Eencrusted Rat Trap: Writings From Bombay by Adil JussawallaSpeaking Tiger | Rs 499 | 160 pages advertisement There are many things that The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap does not do. It does not tell a comprehensive story of Mumbai. It does not pretend to capture the soul of the city, or even to understand its moods and slim and occasionally eccentric volume—made up of a collection of Adil Jussawalla's prose pieces about Bombay-Mumbai—does something else altogether. It records the fleeting moments that add both beauty and horror to our city. In it, we encounter a city that 'smells of the powder on the carrom board' and reverberates with the 'sledgehammers of demolition crews'. Where life often involves moving through a 'box within box above box out of box inside box'.'The pieces gathered here do not attempt to understand Mumbai-Bombay...,' writes Jerry Pinto in his Introduction. 'They are a way of giving witness to the bigness and the strangeness of the city. His city is built of chance encounters, of laughing liftmen, of departed friends and other ghosts.' Jussawalla has shared a complex relationship with Mumbai. He left Bombay for London in 1957, seeking somewhere grander than the grey, peeling city of his birth. Thirteen years later, he returned to this place of stray dogs and Gokulashtami pot-breakers. After which he stayed on to write poetry, edit newspapers and magazines and observe his city by the writes about the annual exodus when the city's cobblers and fruit sellers and Mafco stall assistants pack up and leave for their 'native places'; about the change of light after men on a scaffolding hang up a jute curtain outside his window; about the drummers who are part of the Ganpati processions and who seem to 'erupt out of the earth just to take part in the celebrations, and to sink back into the earth once the celebrations are over'.This is like a lucky dip: you never know what you will come up with. Some pieces can feel dated and random. But others remain fresh, funny and a reminder that some things—like the disappearing waiters of posh clubs or the 'De daan, de daan' cry after an eclipse—are here to stay.—Shabnam MinwallaA Stranger In Three Worlds by Aubrey MenenSpeaking Tiger | Rs 499 | 280 pages Aubrey Menen was born in England in 1912 to an Irish mother and an Indian father, a doctor—and brought up as an Englishman. The mixed upbringing makes him a stranger in three cultures, or the very opposite—an insider-outsider, which lends a unique flavour to hiswriting: a sage-like perspicacity and playful literary acuity mark every sentence. This edition is a two-in-one boombox—Dead Man in the Silver Market (1953) and Space Within the Heart (1970)—that jolts the reader autobiographical essays here are classics of the genre. In 'My Grandmother and the Dirty English', we meet his maternal grandmother who considers herself superior to the British in all aspects: bathing ritual, food habits, even furniture: 'she disliked chairs and thought them vulgar.' In 'The Dead Man in the Silver Market', the author witnesses an Indian protester being shot dead in Chandni Chowk; later, he dines with a soldier—'from an industrial slum near Liverpool'—who 'had been in the party that had done the shooting.'In the second book, Menen reads the Upanishads after the death of his parents. The titular space within the heart, the void inside the onion, is 'only an empty space to be used as a post for observation'. Menen writes about sex and the spirit, the Gita, Rigveda, Descartes and the Bloomsbury set with wicked humour and in tone-perfect prose. The writing voice is involved yet maintains an arm's distance—it's both participant and observer. 'The best way to stop thinking about yourself is to talk about yourself, and that is why so many people do you know yourself for what you are—or what the world has made of you—you prefer to shut up about it.'advertisement—Palash Krishna MehrotraUnmyth: Works and Worlds of Mithu Sen, Edited by Irina AristarkhovaMapin | Rs 3,500 | 364 pages Is it possible for an artist monograph to feel like a live art performance? Capturing the essence of Mithu Sen's work— installations, moving images, sculptures, word art, performances, and drawings—over two decades, Unmyth: Works and Worlds of Mithu Sen is as untameable as her practice also in line with Sen's ethos behind 'Unlanguage,' a creation where she uses nonsensical phrases and incorrect syntax as an act of dismantling the conventional rules of language. The first comprehensive study of the artist's wide-ranging oeuvre, Unmyth is thoughtfully edited by scholar-writer Irina Aristarkhova and innovatively designed by Anusha Yadav. Along with being an archive, the intention is to underline the individuality of Sen's practice, which provokes us to envision new worlds built around negotiating ideas of lingual anarchy, mything, 'un'mything and postmything, radical hospitality, 'un'taboo sexuality, and 'un'monolith identity. It is what Sen describes as 'a testament to 25 years of love and playbour (play + labour).'advertisementThere are QR codes inserted within the book which when scanned reveal work that unfolds in real book also features contributions from curators, academics, and critics who have engaged with Sen's work over the years. Yet, the book's breathless centrepiece is the 'Fictional Interview' by Sen herself. The questions asked resemble some of the inquiries posed at her practice over the years. But in form and scope, they replicate the playful provocation that makes Mithu Sen truly singular.—Poulomi DasSubscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends
Hindustan Times
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Review: The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap by Adil Jussawalla
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.
