I was the sea-driven one
Who landing built a sun-temple
Laughed at a cunt-king s milk-teeth
Went about my sunset marriage
Casting my dead skyward
Everyone tumbles through these pages: parent and prostitute, lover and charlatan, Jew and Turk, madman and saint, fornicator and abstainer, the geisha and the devdasi as well as the Mumbai starlet. Here s God s plenty. Devoured by a voracious appetite, spewed out as poems by a compulsive energy.
This is modernism with its pants down, uncle Ezra lending arse at Wayside Inn, Kala Ghoda, Bombay; this is Bombay pretending to be Paris, paan-stained and all. This is convent English giving Mumbai Marathi a well-deserved kick in the pants; this is the Parsi Queen desperately mimicking Sultan Padamsee if not Jean Genet!
About the Author
Hoshang Merchant (b. 1947) has authored twenty-nine books of poetry, literary commentary,translations, memoirs, and anthologies including Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (1999) and most recently Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant (2016). In the mid-1980s, Hoshang made Hyderabad home and taught generations of students at the English Department of University of Hyderabad till he retired in 2012.
+91 9818282497
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