The image on the left is the cover of Ezra, a limited edition handmade little magazine that Arvind Krishna Mehrotra edited when he was a nineteen-year-old student in Bombay. There were five issues in all; this one is number 4. Pavankumar Jain, a friend, contemporary, and future brother-in-law of Mehrotra’s, designed the cover. Each one of the fifty copies of that issue had a mask (bought for five rupees in a bunch of 50 from the streets behind Handloom House on Dadabhai Naoroji Road) stuck to its cover; no two copies had the same mask. On the right is an image of a page from the magazine with two English poems by Jain.
To the Memory of Pavankumar Jain
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
For Laetitia Zecchini
In 1966
we had no gods.
The proto-god,
four-armed,
had a lit cigarette
in one hand,
a bottle of rum
in the other.
His pubic hair
came from
the barber shop
downstairs.
Sold in the street,
price unknown,
drawn on stencil,
you could see him
on the cover of
Tornado. Editor:
Pavankumar Jain.
Inside,
mimeographed,
smudged,
were our poems
and those of our
friends, the new
poets of Gujarat.
Some were
in English,
some in translation,
the translations
not called
translations.
Who cared?
We dreamt in poetry
and ran out of shrines
to aim our
slingshots at.
A single sentence
brought down
the Seven Wonders.
The magazine
was short lived.
We stood
in an open field
and licked
postage stamps.
The glue tasted
of ambrosia.
Author’s note: Pavankumar Jain (1947-2013) studied at Bombay University and the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. He wrote in Gujarati and English, and while still a student started the little magazine Tornado (1967-71). His only collection of Gujarati poems, Pasath kavyo (Sixty-five Poems) appeared a year before his death. He observed the minutiae of everyday life, and it little affected the steadfastness with which he looked that the life observed was often not another’s but his own.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra most recent collection is Book of Rahim & Other Poems (2023).
