Some of those closest to me are very far away. The landmass of the continents, the bend and curve of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic sea keep us apart. Distance is part of the measure of our days.

To mourn a great poet of twentieth century Malayalam I should stand at
the edge of the sea, in Kovalam or Kanyakumari, at the rim of land he
loved so dearly, hearing words that only the sea casts up. On the
telephone from my mother in Tiruvella, I listen to news of Ayyappa
Paniker's illness. It is in the newspapers she tells me, lung trouble.
I listen to her voice carefully. It was so nice when he visited and
had lunch with us, and brought his daughter Meena. She says this
softly. I can hear her. The line is crystal clear.

My father died of lung trouble, and troubles of the heart and blood.
The medical terms for all this escape me. I try to call the house in
Gandhinagar, Trivandrum but my call doesn't go through. I try again.
Perhaps his daughter Meena will hear the phone. But no one picks up. A
few days later my aunt calls from Kerala to tell me of his death. I
knew he was your friend and I wanted to tell you she says. I thank her
and set the phone down on its cradle.

He died too soon. Death in his one hundred and one guises. Professor
Paniker loved the natyashastra, the masked and gestural forms of
kathakali dancing. Theatre was close to his heart, the stage with its
many voices, irony, glancing wit and also the pulse of passion. In one
of our last conversations in Kerala he spoke to me with great
excitement of reading the work of young poets. They send me their
poems on the internet he said, they put their poems up for others to
read, with lightning speed. Poetry will outlive us, he added. And he
was right.

Never one to be taken in by the pomp of the world, his imagination had
an epic quality to it, a way of covering territory, spelling out
ground. I open up my email and see that several messages from him are
still there, part of the lively back and forth we had. He was a mentor
to me, a friend in the world of poetry. From time to time we spoke by
phone. Sometimes it was in a time of grave difficulty. He called me
after September 11th 2001 just to make sure that we were all alright,
at home in New York.

After the tsunami I called him and also sent an email to which he
replied immediately, our emails crisscrossing the different time
zones. But there were other emails too. There was the email he wrote
after I had sent him a copy of my book of poems Raw Silk and then the
playful rejoinder to my query, making me think in a new way, of how it
is that poems might enter the world.

Friday, March 11, 2005
Subject: raw silk
Thank you for your raw silk, which keeps all the freshness usually
associated with your writing. . . redolent of Tiruvalla in an engaging
way. . .the recurrence of Malayalam words reinforcing the cultural
undercurrents. . .I thought of the American presence in a few of my
pieces, which you have already unearthed . . great poems wait for your
kind attention. . .all the best!
****
dear professor paniker, I am so happy the book reached you safely. I was
intrigued by the last words -- great poems wait for your kind attention --
what did you mean? did you mean poems I might myself aspire to write? if we
were closer we would talk of cabbages and queens and you would tell me. my
admiration and affectionate regards as ever, meena
***
Oh, I might have meant just this: the poet does not wait for poems; it is the
other way round, I suppose; poems wait upon you for the favour of getting
written by you--to try out a variation of What Robert the Frost could have
said--it should be the pleasure of a poem to be put into writing by a poet. OK?
Great!

And then there were other emails, evoking the harsh realities of the
world in which we live and move and have our being. After the tsunami
I called him up and sent an email. Voices, unless they are trapped,
disappear into air. What is written down might survive.

December 31, 2004
Subject: our thoughts are with you
Dear Professor Paniker
Just a little note to send our love and thoughts at this time of
devastation cast up by the sea. Hope and pray you are well.
Meena
***
No happy new year, this time dear Meena! One hundred thousand wiped
out in the course of a few hours. Not enough time for counting. One
grave, one prayer, one God(?) for all. No one can live without love,
as you wrote: but what is love worth in the face of Tsunami?

And quick on the heels of this came another email from him, a
postscript as it were –
Remember Sept 11. That was caused by an inhuman agent, this tsunami is
caused by a nonhuman agent. Both are terrible, but very sad, beyond
poetry and tears.

I am left to ponder that line – beyond poetry and tears. Surely this
is what poetry must come to, if it is to survive with its power
intact, an awareness of its limits, silence which fronts all our
attempts at meaning.

To close these reflections on the death of a poet friend, one who went
ahead of us, I would like to quote a few lines from the English
translation of his poem `How Well I Have Forgotten You.' He wanted me
to use it in the anthology Indian Love Poems and it is in that book I
find these lines, beautifully translated by B. Chandrika, lines that
reveal the intense perception of love and by evoking a vanished memory
illuminate what was:

And I have forgotten you, all memories of you too,
the street lamps that burn like moonlight,
the rings of mosquitoes dancing around them,
the night,
the darkness of the night,
its sumptuousness,
the gutters with the slimy flow,
the snake creeping on the road at midnight,
the thousand lines on its belly:
none of these linger in my memory now...