Fecking Nickle Souza,
what a fecking loser,
never met a woman he didn’t try to abuse-a.
But there’s a lot of him in this room, isn’t there?
What’s that say about us? We revere
good art by bad men and women? Oh dear!
Eric Gill, Rimbaud, E.A. Poe, Anne Sexton,
etcetera, ad infinitum, anon and a-none.
Why cancel my own pleasure
and half my bookshelf for good measure
when all I’m doing in truth
is shooting myself in the foot?
Add Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, Eunice De Souza,
me and youse, uh.
As for FN Souza, he may be a loser and a boozer
but he’s my loser.
Who are you to judge?
Pass the fudge.
Jeet Thayil is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is the author of several poetry collections, including These Errors Are Correct (2008), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award. His first novel, Narcopolis, (2012), won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize.
