The trouble began when I opened Bruce King's Modern Indian Poetry in English in order to refresh myself on Arun Kolatkar and came on the following quoted lines:

i want my pay i said
to the manager
you'll get paid said
the manager
but not before the first
don't you know the rules?

Good God, the letter! I thought. While over the intervening decades I had remembered the poem, titled 'The Three Cups of Tea,' I had completely forgotten that it was Arun Kolatkar who had written it.

Once upon a time back in the mid-Seventies in Dhaka there chanced into the hands of the five or six of us who seriously followed such arcane stuff, one signal copy of Quest magazine, the whole issue of which had been devoted to Indian poets and poetry in English. To me it had been godsend, acquainting me with a more complete range of poets than was available in Dhaka. While I knew about P. Lal and his Writers' Workshop in Kolkata, about Kamala Das (now Kamala Suraiya), Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel and Ramanujan, a lot of the others were new to me. One of these was Arun Kolatkar, whose 'The Three Cups of Tea, an 'anti-poetic' according to King, published in that issue, I instantly liked for its parody of brusque, American tough-guy speech.

Those were bad days for a very young Bangladesh: it was the morning after, 'party over, baby', the revolution felt like a waste what with memories of a famine and political bloodshed, a time of coups and counter-coups, with the slow, bitter-tasting collective realization that freedom and liberation were hollow jokes, of sad, hopeless days filled leaden skies and psychotic evenings. And in those days one wanted poetry that fitted the times. Anything else, any poetry about butterflies, summer romances, waterlilies, ponds, tender skies, nautch girls, exquisite displays of feeling, was nauseating. All poetry was suspect, even Bengali poetry, of which I didn't read much in those days. But I do remember looking beadily at Buddhadev Bose's poem 'Frogs': what was that slimy thing hopping out of its lines, beauty? Aargh! And so this poem by Arun Kolatkar, something about its attitude, with its hints of a way out of this stinking heap of leaden skies and psychotic evenings, with its hard voice and tat-a-tat rhythms (hey, get laid, get paid, I'm just a working stiff, I need a drink, screw everything else...) was immensely appealing.

I lent the Quest to a woman acquaintance who read English poetry extensively, and also had evinced interest in this branching tendril known as Indian-English poetry. With a hearty recommendation of Kolatkar, and I think a couple of other poets. A week later, she called up to say she hadn't enjoyed reading him. Whereupon---yes, dear readers, I know, it made me squirm, too but what can I say, back then questions of literary taste in the context of Bangladesh aroused fire--I opened up with both barrels: the bloody bourgeoisie and their sickening rites of tastes in English poets and poetry, their rancid sensibility harping on roses and dewy dawns, never in touch with nitty-gritty, forever divorced from reality, enclosed within gilded metaphors. She heard me through, then quietly rang off. A week later, I got a letter from her, five pages, front and back, real ink. It conceded that I had a perfect right to my own tastes in poetry, then went on with what used to be called equanimity to define her own, on the delights of traditional English poetry--little things, for example, about Houseman's 'A Shropshire Lad', a bourgeoisie poet if ever there was one--paused to ponder, obliquely, on limitations imposed by categories of class and race, then ended by detailing why she liked Nissim Ezekiel (again, almost preternaturally bourgeoisie!), in terms which made me realize that she read him far more closely and thoroughly than I had ever done. Or could, at that time.

And though shreds of former beliefs clung on, that letter altered my poetry reading, made me reach for Hardy, for Old English meters...

As I said, throughout the years I remembered the letter, I hadn't forgotten the poem either, I even remembered the cover of that Quest (orange and white, with scribbles on it), but I had somehow completely forgotten that Arun Kolatkar had written it. And so today, I write these lines to acknowledge his part in an episode that nudged me forward on the long, rocky road from provincial formulations onto something both wider and truer.

Arun Kolatkar--reclusive, enigmatic--is the poet all other Indian-English poets like to read. Like his friend and fellow Mumbai-based poet Dilip Chitre, he wrote poems both in Marathi and English. His output in English was defiantly slender: stray poems appearing in anthologies and magazines since 1955 and which remain uncollected, and until the publication of The Kala Ghoda earlier this year, his only English publication was the 1977 Commonwealth Poetry Prize-winning Jejuri. It is on this book that Arun Kolatkar's fame rests, and rightly so. Nothing like it had ever been written in Indian-English poetry before.Jejuri is a longish narrative sequence enacting a trip to the pilgrimage shrine of Khandoba, near Poona, the city where he died. However, it is not gods and faith that interest Kolatkar but its opposite: the nothingness at their center. And he attends to this all-abiding nothingness by recording with whimsical accuracy every visual detail, the very recording of which means there is really nothing else to record at the shrine. The noncommittal insouciant tone erases gods, negates the very idea of mythopoeic imagination, places temple priest and temple rat on an equal footing. An example of it is the poem published below, with its two-stress lines--the short lines part of the insouciance--until the final line where a single stress brings the poem to a full stop.

An Old Woman
from JEJURI

An old woman grabs
hold of your sleeve
and tags along.

she wants a fifty paise coin.
She says she will take you
to the horseshoe shrine.

You've seen it already.
She hobbles along anyway
and tightens her grip on your shirt.

She won't let you go.
You know how old women are.
They stick to you like burr.

You turn around and face her
with an air of finality.
You want to end the farce.

When you hear her say,
'What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?'

You look right at the sky.
Clear through the bullet holes
she has for eyes.

And as you look on,
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls

with a plateglass clatter
around the shatterproof crone
who stands alone.

And you are reduced
to so much small change
in her hand.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star