Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: New Poems From ‘Lockdown Garden’

I typed up the first poems I’d written on my Royal typewriter, one to a page as the poems were short, and took the sheets to a bookbinder in Colonelgunj, Allahabad, whose one-room establishment I passed on my way to the university. He had a round face and puffy eyes and was always dressed in a dhoti and vest. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by stacks of sheets, some of them folded and kept in another stack. There was a hand operated paper-cutting machine in one corner. Books in various stages of binding were in a shelf built into the wall. There were a couple of rolls of cloth, red, blue, lying around. Beside him, on a piece of paper, was a lump of glue, greenish white in colour and made from rice. I handed him the sheets I’d brought and we decided on the size, four and a half inches by six. He’d bind it in boards and asked me to choose the cloth. I chose blue; not Oxford blue but close. He told me to come back the next day. 

I laid the book on my table and switched on the lamp. The binding was on the top so it opened like a note pad, but inside was a title page, a page of contents, a preface, followed by about 20 poems. Compared to the luxury liners in my uncle’s library — the hardback volumes of the English poets printed in double columns — my vessel was not even a paper boat. I felt utterly defeated. It was terrible.

from Author’s Note to Collected Poems by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Giramondo).