Jayant Da….Many Milestones and Many Memories!

I have many fond memories of Jayanta da – mostly personal recollections of his humane persona and some of his milestone glories.

I met him last in October 2021. He was 93 then and his mind reflected nothing of his age. His thought process was crystal clear. His was still writing spectacular poems. He lived in the same 83-year-old house in which he had resided most of his life, often settling into an armchair on the verandah that faced his little courtyard with its flourishing trees, watching the Sunbirds and Taylor birds hopping in their branches.

He often used to say that Orissa spoke to him through its dialect, culture, rites and rituals. All these were reflected in what he wrote. He could not and would not write beyond what he did not know, beyond what he had not lived.

And the town of Cuttack where I was born,

Its lanes scarred by ruts from whose clay

The goddesses take their sacred shapes.

 I remember him recounting an incident related to our country fifty years after its independence, he said he had once met an old woman in the remote regions of Orissa. She said she hadn’t had rice for a month. “What does one do then?” he asked, looking me squarely in the eye. “Sit back and feel sorry? Pick up a pen and write a poem that nobody ever reads? Life is full of struggle and pain. Full of injustice.”  Perhaps these realities made him restless deep within. Perhaps this was reflected in his poetry.

Once in 2019, we were in the car and it was a long drive from town to the suburbs of Mumbai, he shared that he had a lonely childhood. He was bullied in school. His relationship with his mother was strained. She didn’t understand him, was in fact suspicious of him. She took away his precious personal diaries which he wrote as a teenager. That wounded him a lot. He ran away from home to Mumbai. His father came looking for him and took him back to Cuttack otherwise his life story would have been vastly different from what it is now.  “Maybe sometimes this feeling of emptiness is soothed by people around you, whom you hold dear… but it doesn’t ever really go away.” Perhaps it never left him.

I also remember that one moment in the car, when he turned towards me and looked me in the eye and said, “I am, quite frankly, waiting for death. All I want is to die in my sleep…die peacefully. I also wish to donate my body organs before I go. If they’re still of any use, that is…” and smiled wryly. He confessed to missing his wife a lot and said he felt her presence everywhere, especially in his house in Cuttack.  I tried to gulp down my engulfing wave of empathy and requested him to share a quaint trait about himself. He chuckled and said, “I use leaves as bookmarks and collect a pebble from every new place I visit. So that way, I have quite a collection of leaves and pebbles.”

Now that he has left this world, I wonder what will become of his precious collection. But that’s a passing thought. The greater regret is that he didn’t get the kind of death he aspired for. I regret that he couldn’t donate his organs. Somethings are just not meant to be. The forces of life are way too complex for wishes to become reality.

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