Your Legend, My JM

The love and compassion one encountered in poet Jayanta Mahapatra's company are legendary. The luminary who passed away last month has left behind the undying zeal for life

- Nabina Das

Hi, JM, good morning! Whassup?
Yo, morning, beautiful! Birds are singing in the bamboos. Had coffee?
Yes, and hot hot vadas too, JM.
Yippie, love hot vadas!

SOUNDS pretty much like two teenagers conversing, right? My morning WhatsApp routine–even as a quasi-Luddite–would often start this way for the past eight months. JM, or Jayanta Mahapatra to the world, demanded I give him a nickname, call him a friend, and come to him to talk of all “fun things, not boring books and poetry, please!”

Like many others though, my first meeting with Mahapatra was at a 2016 literary festival in Bombay where he was surrounded by gazillion poets and writers. There was hardly any time for proper conversation. We spoke about the usual suspects– Sky Without Sky and A Rain of Rites–then posed to be clicked by a friend. He must have been photographed many times over at that festival and so, quite naturally, I exited from his memory to surface only in December 2022. However, it was poetry again which was the connector.

A close friend, a documentary film-maker and avid poetry lover, had suggested that I send off some of my books to Mahapatra along with my phone number and address. Usually lazy about such proactive moves, I heeded him. I also included a handwritten letter, reminding Mahapatra that we had met earlier on.

In about 10 days of the missive departing for Tinkonia Bagicha, where his very old mansion of a house ‘Chandrabhaga’ was located, a sudden phone call on my mobile, while I sat dozing in the Hyderabad metro, startled me.

“Nabina, Nabina,” piped the bird-like voice. This is how a legend sounds, I thought. A free and fervourful intonation.