Remembering Pain: A One-Word Conversation with Jayanta Mahapatra

A copy of Anna Karenina was placed on a small bedside table. On the bed lay an old man with his eyes closed and a faint smile playing on his face. He appeared almost as peaceful as an infant. The light and shadows of the late afternoon framed his bed like an aureole. His gentle snores created their own monophony. The greying house and overrun garden were completely empty. All the doors had been left ajar. One could walk up to Jayanta Mahapatra’s bedroom without being stopped or interrogated. He had set up a bed in what seemed to be the living room of his house in Cuttack city. “So, this is how a poet lives”, I thought. “A carefree life that only loneliness can supply”.

Jayanta Babu opened his eyes. A current of excitement seemed to pass through his body that instantly shook off decades from his frame. He had spotted my companion on this afternoon excursion, the well-known translator and literary critic Jatin Nayak. With surprising agility, Jayanta Babu swung his feet down and stood up. He was soon bustling about the room, rummaging among teacups, indicating the chairs we could use, amidst a flow of happy chatter. None of us, perhaps even Jayanta Babu, knew that he would pass away only a few weeks later.

“All the poetry there is in the world
appears to rise out of the ashes.
The ash sits between us and
puts its arms across our shoulders.”

No poet ever dies.

Long live Jayanta Mahapatra (1928-2023).#JayantaMahapatra #Odia #Poetry pic.twitter.com/ndOJjx4wtR

— Anand ST Das (@anandstdas) August 27, 2023

That afternoon, Jatin Nayak introduced me as the grandson of a Communist Party member, who had passed away twenty years ago but was still fondly remembered by old timers in Odisha. “Of course, I know who that is”, Jayanta Babu said of my grandfather. A rooted poet, he was equally interested in discussing the comparatively unspectacular world of Cuttack as he was describing his experiences at the hallowed International Writing Program at Iowa, where he participated in the year 1976-77.

Mahapatra gave me a piercing look and went back to his animated conversation with Nayak and his son, who was also present. Throughout the afternoon, Jayanta Babu never directed a remark or a question specifically towards me. But his sentences invited me into his conversation. “I am reading Tolstoy again, at the age of 95”, he said to us. “I find I read it so differently today than I did decades ago”.

I noticed another book that lay on the bedside table. The Man Outside by Wolfgang Borchert seemed to be a significant choice by Jayanta Babu that raised many questions in my mind. A nonagenarian poet reading the book written by a writer, who had died at the age of 26.

“Trümmerliteratur”, he almost mumbled under his breath, giving the book a quick glance, while not even looking at me. Later, I looked up the word, which was the only one he said to me over an entire afternoon. The German term, meaning rubble literature, represented a literary movement that rose after World War II. It featured stories of loss and rejection – lives that had turned to rubble. But I suspected that as a poet and humanitarian, Mahapatra was more drawn to the kinds of pain that loss can produce. Mahapatra had taught physics for a living, but as a poet he was obsessed with human experience, especially pain.

RIP Jayanta Mahapatra. Wonderful man, great poet. Many vivid memories of visiting him at his home in Cuttack. https://t.co/f8XbbCC4mF

— Amitav Ghosh (@GhoshAmitav) August 27, 2023

In several instances when he had written or spoken about his own life, Mahapatra had implied that pain is the metaphor of time. It is pain that keeps the past fresh in our minds. Happy and joyous memories can only be cherished because they offer some respite from painful memories. Mahapatra’s boyhood, in his own words, was defined by a viscerally painful incident when he was around nine years of age. In this case, the crippling memory of the pain stayed with him for at least half a century.

Jayanta Mahapatra was educated in Cuttack city’s iconic Stewart School, a British missionary run institution. Though a stellar student, Mahapatra was not liked by a section of his own classmates, who happened to be superior to him in wealth and bodily strength. He had once recalled in vivid terms how his bigger classmates crushed his spirit through raw power and brutality. They had cornered the frail and young looking Mahapatra during lunch break. Dragging him against his will, they had pinned him on a desk, while rough hands started pulling down his shorts. They wanted to verify whether his body’s most private parts appeared as young as the boy himself did. Fifty years later, Mahapatra had written about the incident for an American publication. “I had been stripped down to the wound of sex…My body has grown, a snake curling about its pain”.

Jayanta Mahapatra (22 October 1928- 27 August 2023)

Poets never die as long as we read them, and Jayantada will live in our hearts forever.

{Photo by Bishweshwar Das} pic.twitter.com/SGwpLp1uH5

— Red River (@iwriteriot) August 28, 2023

For Mahapatra, pain also proved to be generative and had helped him birth a poem he had cherished the most. The verses offered tribute to the memory of his grandparents, who had converted into Christianity as their world crumbled in the devastating 1866 famine in Orissa province.

Mahapatra’s grandfather, just 17 at the time, had saved himself when he stumbled into a camp set up by Baptists. Mahapatra had, in his writings, reflected upon the agony his young grandfather must have experienced in a world taken over by hunger, disease, and death. His grandmother, a little girl at the time, was rejected by her family for accepting food from the common relief kitchens, where all caste restrictions had been suspended for survival. She was picked up by a caretaker, who was making his way to the same camp that had sheltered his grandfather. The caretaker discovered one of the children under his charge was missing. He forcibly took the little girl, who, he saw, was abandoned by her family.

His poem 'Grandfather' laments that mere facts are of little use while imagining someone’s pain.

We wish we knew what it was to be, against dying,

to know the dignity

that had to be earned dangerously,

your last chance that was blindly terrifying, so unfair.

Pain was not Mahapatra’s prison. It also expanded his consciousness and gave him the capacity for hope. It made him sensitive to the pain of others. From the terrified bleating of goats being led to the slaughterhouse to the cries of a newly wed girl as she was burnt by her in-laws, from the loss of his wife, his only son, and his beloved caretaker to a lifetime of severe migraines and asthma, Mahapatra kept discovering and distilling the sombre lyricism in pathos.

Jayanta Mahapatra
(22 October 1928 – 27 August 2023) pic.twitter.com/RsFHLmcz3n

— Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario (@rtdrozario) August 28, 2023

However, pain can also numb the senses to an extent, becoming its own analgesic. It is possible that a life singed with painful memories can also find pleasure in discomfort. Once, Mahapatra was asked why he chose to spend his life in Cuttack town rather than settle anywhere else, especially when he had opportunities to establish a good life in the United States. “You see”, he had said with a mischievous smile, “I am rather fond of the smelly, open drains of Cuttack town. My liking for stench and sludge must have something to do with all the dirt my mother said I used to eat as a child. But to me, it was a taste of the sweet soil of my beloved Cuttack”.

Sampad Patnaik is a freelance journalist based in Odisha.

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