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Gieve Patel is a practicing doctor, and his experiences reflect a pre-occupation with the body, that gives these poems a taut quality. The theme is actually continuing a pattern from his earlier poems, along with a fascination with death -- e.g. Post Mortem, 1966: "It is startling to see how swiftly / a man may be sliced / from chin to prick" (read whole poem in our excerpts from Nine Indian Women Poets, Jeet Thayil's 60 Indian poets).

During the riots, a patient arrives with a slit belly, "Bewildered, but firmly holding / a loop of his gut / in his own hands". Or, "What is it between / a woman's legs" that draws destruction, and the attention of "kisses, knives"?

Definitely one of the defining books of Indian English poetry, one of the first four books published by the Clearing House press formed by Adil Jussawala (the others were Adil Jussawala's Missing Person, Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri, and Arvind Mehrotra's experimental Nine enclosures).

Excerpts

Public Hospital : p.15

How soon I've acquired it all!
It would seem an age of hesitant gestures
Awaited only this sententious month
Autocratic poise comes natural now:
Voice sharp, glance impatient,
A busy man's look of hurried preoccupation -
Not embarrassed to appear so.
My fingers deft to manoeuvre bodies,
Pull down clothing, strip the soul.
Give sorrow ear upto a point,
Then snub it shut.
Separate essential from suspect tales,
Weed out malingerers, accept
With patronage a steady stream
Of the underfed, pack flesh in them,
Then pack them away.

Almost,
I tell myself
I embrace the people:
Revel in variety of eye, colour, cheek, bone;
Unwelcome guest, I may visit bodies,
Touch close, cure, throw overboard
Necessities of distance, plunge,
Splice, violate,

With needle, knife, and tongue,
Wreck all my bonds in them.

At end of day,
From under the flagpole,
Watch the city streaming
By the side of my hands.

What's In and Out (And Round About) p. 17-18

... when I think
Of deep sea it is as though
I were now talking of
Untouched organs - my awareness
Of liver or spleen - mute, blanketed.
[...]         Though at times of riot
I watch intently the man
Who comes to hospital with a slit belly,
Bewildered, but firmly holding
A loop of his own gut
In his hands.

2
My body constituted of organs
Their limits prescribed
By me, l_say I have a liver,
A heart. Heart and liver
Do not feel exclusively. Yet
Before I die I should like
To have known me each way
All over. I know the stomach affords
A pleasure different from
The prick.  And a different ache.
Each arterial angle
Could so make my acquaintance.
Between pleasure and pain
The subterranean splinterings;
And then the sensation
Pitched out of the body's boundary
To the air around!  I walk today
An integral man,
Yet suspect I am
Battered and ground.  Atoms
Follow me in hunches,
Like trailing flies.

Say Torture : p20

Say torture: It is event.
It is stake, fire, instrument,.
A man tortured is
Embalmed in the boundaries
Of an hour, an afternoon
Of swans and foliage
But in screaming and rage,
It cannot be he does not think
Of perpetual torment, a fancy
His nerves now believe
Could well be a fact:
Flesh endlessly replicated,
And divided as often.

Forensic Medicine : p22

Text Book

A case in point, the expert says;
A woman thrust glowing faggots
Where properly
Her son’s sparrow should nest.
Puerile in-law practice, he says,
But good as any other
To set the story rolling; begin
With a burn in the sparrow’s nest
To extend over all therefrom emerging
Fan and flourish of the world:
Hold the foetus tumbling through,
And before it may express
Surprise at a clean new blast of air,
Lay subtle finger over mouth and nose.
Watch it blue.
If rather you would be coarse, go ahead,
Use rope and hatchet, knife, stone, bullet,
All you would on the more aged;
Bodies whose gel of blood and skin
Have not exchanged years against sweet air
Will not relinquish with ease.
Against these devise infinite means,
The pictures in my book will instruct.
Change vantage point inch by inch
To discover them all: recall grace
Inherent in each new part, find
Weapon against it. Lop off limbs.
Smash teeth. Push splinters
Underneath nails and lever them
Off fingers; offer acid in a drink of wine,
The house of song is blasted. Soft skin
That clothes the gentlest dunes will retract
Before knife and bullet. Proceed.
Flick pages. The regal column of the neck
Upholding the globe of sight and sound
Is often undermined; or straight
Charge at speech and sight, chop off tongue,
Gouge eyeballs out, hammer nails into the ear.
When you have ravished all, missing
No entrail, do not forget
To return where you started: with a penknife
Strike at the rising sparrow’s neck;
With ends of twine strangle the orbs
That feed him seed;
And outrage the sparrow’s nest.

You are now full circle
With nothing
Not thought of, not done before.

University : p.24

	Is there reason to believe the students
	Of Dacca University were better
	Than those of our own?  Need I repeat
	What I know so well from my college days --
	The dull corridors, the vacous library,
	The children of the poor in
	Ill-fitting clothes skulking
	In corners, those of the rich
	Brilliant and febrile, their sparrow brains
	Ringing like jingles in their skulls?
	To be brutally shot, why not, is a kind of fate.
	-- And the professors! O professors,			
	Stale, malodorous, with yesterday's coats
	And neckties!  A small family
	Tucked away in the grimiest part of town
	Pitiful bank balance, tame sheep at home,
	At work holders of the flaming
	Mark sheet to terrify
	And subjugate monsters;
	And gently to amuse the affluent
	Who know them harmless and by their first
	Name -- freddy, eddie, peddie --
	Safe toys to smile at for two years
	Before one puts away college
	And goodfellowship to join the beastly roaring outside.
	They too were shot.
	To the last threatening to fail the assassins.
	And why should I moan?
	Yesterday's chicken meal saw
	No less significant a slaughter.
	Can domestic fowl calculate
	Right done them from wrong?  What
	Was butchered?   Not a
	Fierce choir of learning.  Not
	Any newness that ten years from now would
	Spread alluvial across a parched country.  Students,
	Dolls emptied into untimely graves,
	May your odour rise and trip up
	Our brains.  Tell us
	To change our thought.

Urban : p.29

the old crone
slurping up
essence of chicken
soup
        as though
it were chicken soup
itself, mis
taking the hum in
her veins
for the ima
gined chicken’s part
ing gift
            while
I know it to be
                        no more
than hot
water’s mo
mentary warming,
                             and how mo
mentary when even naked
flame would howl
and wiggle
an in
        jured fing
er, frost
bitten, coming
too close
              to the
waft of de
               parting chill.


--The ambiguous fate of Gieve Patel, he being neither muslim nor hindu in India--     

To be no part of this hate is deprivation
Never could I claim a circumcised butcher
Mangled a child out of my arms, never rave
At the milk-bibing, grass-guzzing hypocrite
Who pulled off my mother’s voluminous
Robes and sliced away at her dugs.
Planets focus their fires
Into a worm of destruction
Edging along the continent. Bodies
Turn ashen and shrivel. I
only burn my tail.

What is it between : p37

        What is it between
        A woman's legs draws destruction
        To itself? Each war sees bayonets
        Struck like flags in
        A flash of groin blood.
        The vicious in-law
        Places spice or glowing cinder
        On that spot. Little bird-mouth
        Woman's second,
        Secret lip, in-drawn
        Before danger, opened
        At night to her lover.
        Women walk the earth fully clothed,
        A planetary glow dispelling
        The night of dress,
        A star rising where
        Thigh meets belly: target spot
        Showered
        With kisses, knives.

author bio

Bio from  strangertime : an
anthology that includes five poems by Patel.

	b. 1940 in Bombay.  St Xavier's High School and Grant Medical
	College.  Is a GP.  First book, Poems, publ Nissim Ezekiel
	(1966).  Just out: How Do You Withstand, Body (1976).  Also
	written plays and a painter with several exhibitions

Contents

  The arrogant meditation                             11
  How do you withstand, body                          12
  Public works                                        13
  The sight hires a boat it sees                      14
  Public hospital                                     15
  Soot crowns the stubble                             16
  What's in and out                                   17
  O my very own cadaver!                              19
  Say torture                                         20
  Day to day gauge the distance                       21
  Forensic medicine                                   22
  University                                          24
  The ambiguous fate of Gieve Patel, he being
      neither muslim nor hindu in India               26
  City landscape                                      27
  Dilwadi                                             28
  The multitude comes to a man                        29
  Rural                                               30
  Urban                                               31
  To make a contract                                  32
  Should one come to me                               33
  Bodyfears, here I stand                             34
  Audience                                            35
  Continuum                                           36
  What is it between                                  37
  I am no good                                        38
  ... Nobody is good enough for me!                   39
  Just strain your neck                               40
  'One tattoed his initials on my right breast'       41
      [quoted from a prose piece by Kamala Das,
       who is mentioned in the poem.]
  License                                             43
  Rumba                                               44
  Growing                                             46

From the back  cover: