Column

Death is no news but it is always a bad surprise for the living,” wrote Dilip Chitre, who passed away on December 10.

His death was a very bad surprise. Never mind that he was 71 and had cancer, you didn’t expect Dilip to die. In spite of all his recent poetry about death, especially after his son Ashay passed away in 2003. And the disturbing images in his recent paintings. You believed in his trust in new technology, in the cyberknife that had zapped his liver tumour this summer, in his being forever Dilip, the rebel, the whizkid.

The one who was “reluctant to die/or to accept my ageing with grace.” The one who epitomised the possibilities of life, who could be —and was — anything he wished to be: poet, painter, filmmaker, editor, critic, translator, teacher, journalist, copywriter, music director, screenwriter, lover, father, husband, grandfather, friend. And “the would-be author of that still unwritten masterpiece/ Making Love Like a Hindu/ a profane wanderer of the sacred universe.”

Dilip’s wandering in the sacred universe was an exploration of the self and the world. He wasn’t particularly religious but his poetry sparkled with the spirituality of the believer. A fierce critic of sectarianism, he was so comfortable with his personal belief and his deep understanding of the Bhakti tradition that he could be irrepressibly irreligious, often making fun of constructed divinity, as he did of practically everything else.

Take this poem Chitre, which starts off all serious, “Chitre’s forte is Indian ink,” and goes on to declare, “He’s tired, is Dilip/ He wants to go to sleep/… Just rest his bones; no prayer on his lips./ His quill tranquil, his ink going dry/ His eyes about to open on the ultimate sky/ Have mercy on him, O troubled ancestors,/ angry contemporaries, disturbed near ones,/ Dilip would like to retire unsung/ Where the Lord sucketh His own thumb.” But he does claim his rights: “And Chitre, after all, is some sort of Hindu/ And like every Hindu/ he expects his karma’s due.” Elsewhere, he asks: “Will I ever find heaven’s f--- light?”

Dilip was a communicator. He connected through his poetry in Marathi and English, his films, paintings, photography. And he was hungry for new ways of communicating. My email is full of ‘Dilip Chitre wants to connect with you’ messages — inviting me to keep up with him on Facebook, on Twitter, ibibo, indyrocks, friendster, bigDevil, xanga and netlog.

I tried to explain to him that I have difficulty keeping up with friends in real life, that I didn’t have his energy or his enthusiasm, in short, that I clearly was not as young as him. The venerable communicator continued through SMS messages, phone calls and most of all emails with copies to others, sharing thoughts, giving news, inviting views. Sometimes with a quick apology for the round-robin mail: “I’m now getting older and must conserve energy and save time.”

To Dilip, language was just another tool of communication, between the writer and the reader, the writer and his thoughts. So he wore his multilingualism lightly. Sure, he wrote in two languages and spoke a couple more, but all Indians are multilingual, he would shrug. It’s just the way we are. And he used his natural command over English to translate Marathi poetry and share it with the non-Marathi world.

From medieval saint poets like Tukaram to his contemporaries like Dalit writer Namdeo Dhasal to the young poets of today like Hemant Divate, Dilip took their voices across the language barrier. And his films on contemporary poets introduced language writers to an all-India audience. Yet there was loneliness in this sparkling communicator that perhaps only his wife Viju could touch. Now that is over. As Dilip wrote: “This universe is now closed.” But his thoughts will remain, in poetry, art, film and memory.