Sea Breeze, Bombay | Poem Explanation | Adil Jussawala

About Adil Jussawala

Adil Jussawala (b. 1940) went to England after his early education in Mumbai. He studied English at Oxford, taught at a language school for four years in London and returned to India in 1970. He taught English at St Xavier's College, Mumbai. He was a member of the International Writing Programme, Iowa in 1977. He has worked for different magazines including Debonair and Sunday Times of India. Land's End (1962) and Missing Person (1974) are his two books of poems. He also edited an anthology, New Writing in India in 1974. Jussawala's poetry presents a consciousness shaped by cosmopolitan culture. Themes of exile, alienation and contemporary realities dominate his poetry. The cityscape is the locale of his poems. They are modernist in their use of such techniques as irony, fragmentation and imagism.

'Sea Breeze, Bombay' is selected from his second book Missing Person. It reveals his characteristic style of piling up concrete images of social reality in order to communicate an impersonal theme. It is one of the celebrated 'city poems'. In this poem Bombay is viewed as a city that accepts and accommodates people from diverse backgrounds. The island has became a sanctuary for the refugees who are torn away from their native land. In providing these uprooted people with opportunities to rebuild their lives, Bombay acts as a surrogate city. "Torn' communities are 'reformed' here. Just as breeze soothes a tired body, the city heals the wounds inflicted in the past on the lives of those who flock to it and enables them to find new routes. The kindness of the city is symbolised in the image of sea breeze.

'Sea Breeze, Bombay' Poem

Partition's people stitched
Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind.
An opened people, fraying across the cut
Country, re-knotted themselves on this island.

Surrogate city of banks,
Brokering and bays, refugees' harbour and port,
Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work
Loose like a skin spotting the coast,

Restore us to fire. New refugees,
Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat,
Come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north,
Dazed, holes in their cracked feet.

Restore us to fire. Still,
Communities tear and re-form; and still a breeze,
Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,
Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,

And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories.

Glossary

Line 2. Shroud a cloth used to wrap a corpse for burial

Line 3. fray become worn, make worn by rubbing so that there are loose threads

Line 3-4. cut/Country divided country, i.e., the Indian subcontinent

Line 5. surrogate substitute

Line 6. brokering buying and selling by an agent

Line 6. refugee person forced to flee from danger (for example from floods, war, or political persecution)

Line 11. scan look at attentively; run the eyes over every part of

Line 12. dazed stupefied, bewildered

Line 13. garrulous talkative

Line 17. adrift drifting, at the mercy of circumstances

Explanatory Notes

Line 1. Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 into two independent nations, India and Pakistan

Line 2. Sind: a province of southern Pakistan, formerly part of 'undivided India'.

Lines 1-2. stitched shrouds from a flag: during the partition, the country witnessed a bloody riot in which thousands of people were killed; in this context, the description of people using the country's flags as shrouds to cover the corpses is ironical

Line 3. Opened people: people, refugees, rendered defenceless, homeless

Line 3. fraying across the cut/Country: the refugees spread and settled all across the country, 'Frayed' refers to communities which are broken into loose groups of people settling in new places.

The first stanza consistently uses tailoring images: stitch, scissored, fray, cut, re-knotted. It presents a picture of dislocated people (torn away from their native land) and the process of their relocation.

Line 5. Surrogate city: for the emigrants, Bombay is a substitute for their native place

Line 8. skin spotting the coast: like spots on skin, the brick buildings cover the coast of Bombay; also, the unplastered brick buildings resemble the texture of such skin

Line 9. Restore us to fire: ('Surrogate city... Restore us to fire'): here an appeal is made to the city of Bombay; 'restore' is a verb meaning to bring back to the original state; fire is associated with the process of re-moulding -it refers here to the rebuilding of one's life; also, note the significance of fire in the Hindu and Parsi religions

Line 10. Wearing blood-red wool: the blood-red coloured woollen clothes worn by the Tibetan; it focuses on their traditional vocation of selling woollen materials; the reference to blood also suggests the violence in their country from which they have fled (the Chinese aggression on Tibet)

Title: The title may be read as: 'The Sea Breeze in Bombay' or 'Bombay is Like the Sea Breeze'