Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope

Adil Jussawalla's memory palace is full of fond ephemeral objects, soft and hard

- Harish Nambiar

IN 1989, I had tumbled through science and commerce to a graduate degree in English literature from Mumbai's Ruia College. From being teased about whether ice cream was available in my small hometown, I managed to become a minorly respected student in my class and my professors were pleased with my writing. That fuelled me to land up at the Dr E. Moses Road office of Debonair, which was famous as a girlie magazine and therefore available at men's college hostels. And Adil Jussawalla was the editor. However, it had acquired a reputation by then for a strong poetry page edited by Imtiaz Dharker before Jussawalla took over as the editor.

I gave him a poem for publication, and he very generously and with great finesse took it from me and said, 'We will let you know'. I moved to Delhi to study at the Times School of Journalism and forgot about it.

Somewhere in the mid-1990s, I reconnected with Jussawalla. I went to one of his poetry workshops at the Sunken Garden in The National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), and for some reason I decided it would not help me. I would also see him at some book readings in the city and exchange pleasantries. This tenuous connection developed over the years, enough for me to be visiting him and his wife, Veronik, at his house in Cuffe Parade.

Eventually, as part of a broader private project to interview senior artistes, I zeroed in on him for an interview. And to my good fortune he allowed me to record it on video despite being camera shy. Ironically, Jussawalla has been a photographer since the age of 13, when his aunt, Gool Mehta, gifted him a Kodak Baby Brownie. And most of his still photos are candid rather than posed, and a few have a sense of their own historic value in being caught at a decisive moment.