When A Poet Dies

With Test over just before Christmas holidays, school was practically over for the 1973 batch. With the turn of the year, new things were coming to light such as tie-ups that were not noticeable in the all too gregarious school days. And new interests were surfacing too, other than football and film.

It was at an unsettled time like this, with the school leavers sandwiched between a past not yet dead and a future not yet born, Subrat first became aware of a stranger in their midst.

To call him a stranger would be a misnomer, for he had been studying with them all along. He had a name too, Saroj. But not having distinguished himself by eye-catching result in examinations or by any other feats or antics – oh, how mistaken they all were — he can be said to have fallen into that limbo that is the fate of a great majority of students. However, with the cacophony and clamour of school having ceased, he was now beginning his slow rise from obscurity.

It was first the company he kept that struck everyone. There were three of them — Michael, a Christian boy, Harish and him.

Saroj was slim and short, while the other two had heft and girth. And they rode treble on the bicycle, Harish on the front bar, Michael on the rider’s seat and vice-versa, and Saroj always on the carrier. They were often seen riding speedily through the playground towards Roxy cinema or KMBM talkies. The reason for the dash was to make it to the evening show of the new film minutes before the show. Saroj would invariably flash his wide-mouthed, toothy smile as the rider trio wheezed past the cluster of boys in the playground in the waning sunlight.

Subrat noted happily that Saroj seemed the extrovert type, as his association with Harish and Michael suggested. But he was mistaken. In a couple of months, he was seen in the company of the younger of the famous twin brothers of MKC. The twins were tipped to top in Matriculation in Odisha for 1973 – and in fact, they did.

It was Kishore, the younger one – younger than Ashok by 10 minutes only — with whom Subrat had struck a friendship first. Saroj had, however, displaced Subrat in his attention. And from Kishore came the report about an intriguing aspect of Saroj. That he was a loner and fancied writing stories and poems.

It was an unheard of thing in school at the time. In their literature books they routinely read poems and short stories. Under the influence of teachers and guardians, they wrote effusively and vaguely about the high sentiments and noble values to be inculcated through them. But to have a flesh and blood poet among, and next to, them — moreover, one who dashed to the cinema every other day riding pillion — was beyond their belief. Subrat would soon have his first taste of what a poet was really like. And at first he would receive a jolt.

Although they were crushed under the harsh regime of studies and instruction to be a man, nature couldn’t be stopped from taking its course in them. That meant ‘yang’ yearning for ‘yin’, or, in simpler terms, MKCians mooning over MPKians. There was hardly any MKCian of their batch whose heart didn’t flutter big time at the sight of the navy blue wave cascading through the gates of the Maharani Prem Kumari Girls’ School after the tolling of the last bell at 4.30 pm.

The wave surged down the market road and turned right at Banthia Jagannath Mandir to cut through the Jubilee Library to flow along the main road that stretched from Bhanjpur through the Hospital to Balasore Golai. The procession would invariably pass in front of the wide school playground. Its roadside perimeter was not secured by a wall or fence. MKCians would get their eyes full.

Subrat was not sated, however. He, of late, was agonizingly moon-struck over one navy blue-frock clad MPKian who had invaded his fantasies. He confided his secret agony to Kishore, who, in turn, shared it with Saroj who reportedly wrote a story about it.

Subrat was initially thrilled that he had figured in a story. But his joy was dashed when he learned about the unflattering portrayal of Chandru, the character based on him. For Saroj’s story showed Chandru as being deluded about himself – that he was in fact in love with love itself. ‘How dare he reduce me to a character in a story, and that too to poke fun?’ Subrat thought. He distrusted Saroj.

Fast forward to 1977. The scene was MPC College. Subrat was in BA (English) final year. Kishore, the topper of Matriculation, pursued History. Saroj himself was studying Political Science. Kishore and Saroj, sharing confidences as before, were preparing to go to Delhi for their Masters. Subrat was continuing to plough his lonely furrow outside the brief time in late afternoon when he played cricket. It took Bijoy, a boy who came from Raibania to MPC for his BA English, to change the dynamic among the group, and especially, to help lift the blinkers off Subrat’s eyes.

A dazed Subrat discovered in Saroj a person far ahead of his time, someone who read Camus’s The Outsider and Kafka’s The Trial in the cramped and overcrowded two-room Government quarter his father had been allotted in Amala Colony. Like the poignant existentialist literature he read, he wrote poetry in Odia that, like Kafka’s, was ‘an axe to the frozen sea inside us.’

But then he was averse to publicity and publication, again very much like his hero, Franz Kafka. Subrat had been granted, thanks to Bijoy, a glimpse into a poet’s passionate and tender heart in those few months that remained before the four musketeers split up to pursue their separate destinies after the summer of 1977.

(A story penned in memory and honour of Saroj Kumar Mohanty, who died in January, aged 65)