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Hindustan Times

St Xavier's to celebrate Eunice de Souza's birth anniversary as Poetry Day

MUMBAI 'In dreams, I hack you,' wrote Eunice de Souza and dismantled millennia of Indian mother worship. She knew what she was doing. The face on the cover of 'Fix' (Newground), her first book of poetry, stared out at me in the mezzanine floor of New & Secondhand Book Centre and illuminated the space with its peculiar mix of self-knowledge and challenge. Eunice Desouza - Taught English Literature at St. Xavier's College - HT Photo It was such a special and privileged time, those decades at the close of the twentieth century. Bombay was a nest of singing birds; and its colleges were particularly blessed. Eunice was at St Xavier's; Adil Jussawalla had taught there for a few years. Saleem Peeradina ran an Open-Air Classroom at Sophia College. Nissim Ezekiel was at the University of Bombay. Elphinstone College had Vasant Abhaji Dahake. Jai Hind had Popati Hiranandani and Arjun Shad. Prabodh Parikh was at Mithibai College. You could be walking down the road one day, as I was, and meet Gieve Patel with someone you did not immediately recognise. 'Hello,' Gieve said. 'This is A K Ramanujan and we're on our way to see Nissim Ezekiel.' I had work to do so I told AK how much I admired his work and hurried away. It was stupidity, I should have gone and witnessed this meeting. But we were spoiled by our anytime access to these poets. Late in her life, I met Eunice de Souza at her home. There were parrots, dogs, cigarette smoke and junglee tea. (She had a way of creating Bohemia in Kalina, just as Jussawalla in his later years made a patch of Cuffe Parade into Narnia.) I told her I wanted to do a long interview about her poems and that quintessential Bombay novel, 'Dangerlok' and perhaps something on the great acts of documentation and retrieval that represented so much of her post-retirement life. She exhaled plumes of smoke and said, 'Somehow the writing doesn't seem to matter much now.' I was shocked but I managed to ask: 'What does then?' 'The teaching,' she said. 'That mattered then, it matters still.' 'Isn't that sweet?' sighs writer and publisher Meher Marfatia who was her student. 'I remember her being a mesmerising presence in class. If I were ill or otherwise prevented from attending her class, I would be resentful, counting every lost minute. It wouldn't be about notes or anything like that. It was about how she taught.' Lawyer Reshad Forbes remembers Eunice de Souza for her ability to recite poetry. 'I went out and bought a cassette of T S Eliot reciting 'The Wasteland'. She made poetry come alive; she recited it in a way that was so compelling, you were drawn into the recitation, into the poem. She made it impossible for me to read poetry quietly; I have to read it aloud.' It was the age of the teacher who brought you to literature but it was also the age of the teacher whose tongue was savage. If Dr (Miss) Mehroo Jussawalla could strike you down with 'Gog and Magog, the guardians of the underworld', Dr (Miss) Homai Shroff would eviscerate you with, 'Plum puddings who have achieved mobility through some Darwinian mystery'. 'Stuck dogs,' Eunice would grit out between clenched teeth. She introduced us to Sangam poetry and to Dorothy Parker. She gave us the gift of Jane Austen but she also would savage us. 'This is not a waiting room where you bide your time for marriage,' she would say. And add, 'Learn Chinese cooking instead, it will help your marriage,' says Imran Ali Khan, writer and scholar. From the vantage point of Elphinstone College, we watched with awe the boundaryless behaviour of Jussawalla and de Souza who spent evenings with their students. We were sometimes invited to Baug-e Sara where Dr (Ms) Soonu Kapadia lived for lunch ('There's strawberry fool for afters!') but that was about as Bacchanalian as it got. No nights out, no dive crawling. No wonder Eunice de Souza clashed time and again with the Jesuits—Ali Khan remembers her lighting up under a No Smoking sign—but they must have known how much the divine discontent that fuelled her was working to their advantage. Eunice inaugurated a publishing programme which brought out books of poetry; she ran a literary festival 'Ithaka', named for a Cavafy poem rather than the fabl'd city, but most of all, she dusted off literature and made it exciting. It was no longer something you studied, it was something you became, it invaded your being and changed you completely. You could not walk out of her class without wanting to be someone else, something else. Your city was now a wasteland, your boli carried traces of her drawl, and perhaps she block-printed her sense of style (striking in red and black with a necklace of skulls) into you too. St Xavier's College has made a magnificent gesture in recognising her birthday and celebrating it as a day of poetry. In that, it pays real tribute to the poet, the editor, the columnist, the novelist but most of all to that alchemist of the interior, the teacher Eunice de Souza was. (St Xavier's College Library celebrates Eunice de Souza's birth anniversary on August 1 as 'Poetry Day'. Venue: Reference library, 2nd floor, St Xavier's College. Time: 3pm)