In Memoriam – Jayanta Mahapatra: The Sense of Sound, by Christopher Merrill

Jayanta Mahapatra’s fellowship to the International Writing Program (IWP) began not long after the United States Bicentennial celebrated the 200th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration Of Independence, in 1976. The poet was part of a cohort of twenty-two writers from around the world who arrived in Iowa City during the final months of the first post-Watergate presidential election—which is to say: a complicated moment in American history.

Asked what he recalled of his stay in the Midwest, Mahapatra replied, “It was a silence I’d never felt before in India. From a noisy, crowded town where I’d lived for more than forty years, right into the noiseless haze of Iowa, where the sky seemed to hang from the many farewells that wounded me, was unnerving. It was a silence that was full of the sense of sound, or perhaps did not carry any sense of sound at all, I cannot say.”

What I can say is that the wisdom he gained from his exploration of the various ways in which silence can shape a life in poetry was what marked our single conversation, in an alcove reserved for writers during the Jaipur Literature Festival. It seemed to me he had created or discovered a special zone of silence, a place apart from the overflowing crowds, in which he explained some of what he had learned from his encounters with writers in the IWP. And since I cannot remember exactly what he said that afternoon I will let this prose poem retrieved from his stay in Iowa fill the silence that always attends the death of a great man:

Through the windows of the Mayflower, the Iowa River looked so still as though
its heart had stopped beating, small streaks of white appeared motionless on the
surface. The morning was dull, yet clear, and clouds looked down upon me with
their faceless gloom. A vast white cover of cloud. And the river. There it was;
maybe, I told myself, it had felt the winter already. I finished my letter to R,
dressed, and went down to mail it. Something led me to the Iowa River; it was
cold. Ah, as I approached it, it looked so still, the waters heavy and idle. Yes, the
river was frozen, a crust of ice had formed, and there, so real, in front of me.
Something which I had only imagined, a wild dream. It was more powerful than
snow. So still. I threw a stone, it did not go in, it lay pathetically on the surface. I
walked along the river, watching the dead leaves, maple and oak, in the ice;
somewhere a long stick thrust out its free end into the air. A second stone at
another point broke the thin crust and sank in, in fierce display of its power.
Something moved inside me, through the same blue-green and banal water that
had not changed its visage, and held more power, grim, scornful, like the face of
some funeral priest from my land.