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BOOKS

AUTHORSPEAK
Makarand Paranjape
Professor of Poetry

The dusty, arid curves to the School of Languages at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University can be spied through the windows of room 222, currently occupied by Makarand Paranjape, professor of English. Inside, cool air is sweeping across the

R.K. Narayans, the volumes of poetry and essays, over the large table stacked with papers and across the low chairs, and the pictures made by a 10-year-old daughter who used to call her father-author of 17 books and come September, a fellow at Ball State University, Indiana-mummy.

Paranjape, 40, produced Used Book (Indialog) like others create progeny. It took nine years though, not months of time and tide: the resignation of "Hymn to Her", the avaricious "Miss Gobble", the cool moistness of "Umbrellas", the embracing cynicism of "soul wrenching struggle" and, at his best, after bringing home from university four cases of literature, "the same story repeated all over again". "Undies and Neurotica" are unexpected insights for a man, but the poet, made to suffer the ignominy of a "lesser citizen (man) because I studied English" drew from a latent androgyny, staggering with "when I awoke they had scoured my womb" ("Lost Cause"). "As a student, I loved books and wanted, if possible, to write them," says Paranjape, whose belief in the unseen hand of the "heavenly chessmaster" and the blanket comfort of rebirth allows for a strenuous but amiable Indo-Anglian literary existence. So his one great book will be written, and while waiting for that to happen, "life will be my greatest work of art", each day spent in pleasurable anticipation.

Paranjape was born in Ahmedabad and studied in Bangalore before heading for St Stephen's, Delhi, a college whose alumni writers forever bear the insignia of the Stephanian school of literature. After a PhD from the University of Illinois, he returned to India and to a customs officer who insisted that "philosophers don't need computers". So I'll keep this, thank you very much. "I wanted to turn right back," says Paranjape. "But I'm glad I didn't." And the muse hasn't stopped since.

--Sonia Faleiro

MetroScape

Delhi Beauty Treatment: American Laser Centre

Delhi Cinema: Women

Delhi Coffee Bar: Qwiky's