Incendiary Circumstances by Amitav Ghosh Page B

interior of the elevator; against the background of the songs and voices that were always echoing out of his apartment, even the ringing of the doorbell had an oddly musical sound. Suddenly Shahid would appear, flinging open the door, releasing a great cloud of heeng into the frosty New York air. "Oh, how
nice,
" he would cry, clapping his hands, "how
nice
that you've come to see your little Mos-lem!" Invariably there'd be some half-dozen or more people gathered inside—poets, students, writers, relatives—and in the kitchen someone would always be cooking or making tea. Almost to the very end, even as his life was being consumed by his disease, he was the center of a perpetual carnival, an endless
mela
of talk, laughter, food, and of course poetry.
    No matter how many people there were, Shahid was never so distracted as to lose track of the progress of the evening's meal. From time to time he would interrupt himself to shout directions to whoever was in the kitchen: "Yes, now, add the dahi now." Even when his eyesight was failing, he could tell from the smell alone exactly which stage the rogan josh had reached. And when things went exactly as they should, he would sniff the air and cry out loud, "Ah! Khana ka kya mehek hai!"
    Shahid was legendary for his prowess in the kitchen, frequently spending days over the planning and preparation of a dinner party. It was through one such party, given while he was in Arizona, that he met James Merrill, the poet who was to radically alter the direction of his poetry: it was after this encounter that he began to experiment with strict metrical patterns and verse forms such as the canzone and the sestina. No one had a greater influence on Shahid's poetry than James Merrill; indeed, in the poem in which he most explicitly prefigured his own death, "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World," he awarded the envoy to Merrill: "SHAHID, HUSH. THIS IS ME, JAMES. THE LOVED ONE ALWAYS LEAVES."
    "How did you meet Merrill?" I asked Shahid once.
    "I heard he was coming down for a reading and I told the people in charge that I wanted to meet him. They said, 'Then why don't you cook for him?' So I did." Merrill loved the food, and on learning that Shahid was moving to Hamilton College in upstate New York, he gave him his telephone number and asked him to call. On the occasion of Shahid's first reading at the Academy of American Poets, Merrill was present—a signal honor, considering that he was one of America's best-known poets. "Afterward," Shahid liked to recall, "everybody rushed up and said, 'Did you know that Jim Merrill was here?' My stock in New York went up a thousandfold that evening."
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    Shahid placed great store on authenticity and exactitude in cooking and would tolerate no deviation from traditional methods and recipes; for those who took shortcuts he had only pity. He had a special passion for the food of his region, one variant of it in particular: "Kashmiri food in the Pandit style." I asked him once why this was so important to him, and he explained that it was because of a recurrent dream in which all the Pandits had vanished from the valley of Kashmir and their food had become extinct. This was a nightmare that haunted him, and he returned to it again and again, in his conversation and his poetry.
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At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed to perfect me:
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory...
There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain
        only to myself.
There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.
If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible in the world?
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    Once, in conversation, he told me that he also loved Bengali food. I