Jerry Pinto on homes and the tragedies that mar them

CP Surendran

As a poet, Jerry Pinto’s words pick their way along the stations of his cross between two selves. Child Jerry and Priest Pinto. The one is a disconsolate witness to the theatre of tragedy that each family — that surreptitious amphitheatre of our formative griefs — potentially is. Father Pinto is cautionary, even officious. When he takes the upper hand, the poet is saved; the poem suffers.

When the child is behind the camera, the poems work like unforgiving miracles of hurt and guilt, blue, bleak, and gleaming dully without hope, like a day in the monsoon in Mahim, a flyblown, fish smelling, black-swamped suburb of Bombay that Jerry has affectionately appropriated (Jerry of Mahim, he often refers to himself), perhaps to compensate for his series of personal dispossessions when yet very young. The Jerry-side of paradise. And you would be forgiven if you thought for a moment of ‘This Side of Paradise’, a novel by Scott Fitzgerald in which another precocious boy, Amory Blaine, observes the relatively rosier life around him.

In Jerry Pinto’s second volume of verse, ‘I Want A Poem’, the sacrificial child makes fewer appearances than in ‘Asylum’, first published in 2003, and now deservingly reprinted. In the interval, the writer has won many honours and much appreciation, and a whiff of resultant complacency escapes, like a heavy scent, from some of the pages, mostly when Father Pinto is wielding the camera.

A case in point is a (prose) poem, ‘On Seeing a Friend’s Post Featuring a Young Man in a Bespoke Suit on His Way to His Standard 10 Farewell Party’: “Young man in the bespoke suit, I would arm you with my experience, but would it dull those eyes? Would it set your jaw or crush the expectant hunch of your shoulders?” It sounds a bit like Polonius holding forth to Laertes after a disappointing dinner. Again, as in ‘My Hotel Room at the Crowne Plaza, Dubai’: “Room, I’m going to bed now. You should sleep too… Stop looking at me. Room, I’d like some privacy, please.” The ‘adult’ voice is in control, telling empty young men and even emptier rooms what they should think or do. These poems might have been ironic as intended had they been less verbose.

And then there are poems where the child wanders around the asylum of his home, his eyes full of longing for the world that could be sensed but was never there for him in room after room, and he finds at the exit, pressed into his small outstretched hands, the heavy dead gift of the desolation of dysfunctional relationships — no reasonable response to demands of love and reassurance, no explanation of insanity and explosions of space and time, the abiding inexplicability of the irrational that guides human affairs; and the signature scrawl of the ghost-in-residence on the wall coming to light years later, an explanation without an explanation, as in ‘House Repairs’: “All it took was the flick of a chisel/And the bathroom wall came sighing down./The new wall came up…overnight…/Only, the next morning … When sleep-clogged, we lurched into it/We found it was our old wall./With a suicide note scrawled on it/The blood still fresh on it.” It is the Stephen King moment in Jerry’s poetry, the singularity point when the laws of tragedy break down into horror.

And the child’s synaesthetic remembrance of another shaping absence in ‘Colours’: “In my father’s eyes/I saw how a man/Who said he was tone-deaf/Could hear the blues.” There are several other poems in this new collection where poems emerge tattered and bruised, and triumphant when Jerry manages to lose Father Pinto in the back rooms of the house. But this is an ongoing fight.

‘Asylum’, on the other hand, is an exceptionally sharp set of poems, a lit map of hurts, a flow-chart of the narrator’s arrival, having survived the past, into the august nothingness of the present, redeemed only by the words that make it whole: a song. The poet’s telescoping eye records images after images of absences that bleed ink in a Rorschach test of aches. Consider ‘Exiled Home from Burma’: “‘We must leave behind/The coal mine and the teak plantation/The trays of sweets sent by debtors/And the memory of morning massages,’ said my grandmother./Her ears … could hear/Hitler goose-stepping (by proxy)/Through melted forests of teak.”

Or the remarkable ‘For Allan, Whom I Never Saw’: “A blue bead glinted in a dark room/And drew your starfish hand./You sent it out to explore/The drumlin of a familiar sofa./Only a boy could be distracted/From the important business of dying./You are going to die tonight, Allan/In the next room your mother sleeps./You reach out a starfish hand/Eager to be lifted by the tide.”

These lines are unrelenting in the pursuit of an origin, a first cause that set it all off, and exude a kind of hallucinatory nostalgia for what actually was not there in the first place. ‘Asylum’ is the lyrical equivalent of a bleak but beautiful conjuration into existence of spirits and places. There is light here, but it is hard to make out if one lives or dies by it. Perhaps it makes no difference: we aspire, as the poet somewhat said, to that entranced state, dreaming of both, and in constant and clear transition between garbled dreams of the day-to-day life.

— The writer’s novel ‘One Love, And the Many Lives of Osip B’ is scheduled to be released in June