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| Heraldo, Goa. 26/9/24. |
- Brian Mendonca
It must have been more than 30 years since I had met, seen, or spoken to Professor Raj Rao (Raj to me) when I dialled his number to call him. He was a celebrity now. Would he agree to grace our event?
The warmth in his voice chased away my misgivings. He connected as though we had just met yesterday. I felt so much at ease. We spoke about common friends like Rajan.
He readily agreed to come down from Pune to Goa by train to deliver the keynote address at our national symposium for students on gender diversity on 26 September 2024.
Raj was my teacher in the University of Poona, Pune back in 1991. He taught us Indian Writing in English. I was doing my M.Phil. then.
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| Books by R. Raj Rao. |
We had some nail-biting moments when the iconic Goa Express train from Hazrat Nizamuddin station in Delhi was delayed by around 8 hours. Sudden heavy rain seemed to be the cause. In Goa a yellow alert was declared on 25th which turned to red.
We booked Raj on a flight on 25th itself giving him barely a couple of hours to rush for the airport. He was here a day before the event. He adjusted to our arrangements for accommodation since his hotel booking was from the next day.
As I listened to him deliver the keynote address, I was spellbound by the ease of his delivery. He spoke slowly and with conviction taking us through the notions of gender and sexuality as he demystified the term LGBTQIA++.
In a special session on Lihaaf (1942) by Ismat Chugtai and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) by Hanif Kureishi he opened new routes to teaching these texts to my students.
For the post-lunch session he chose to sit in on the faculty presentations giving his valuable and considered response to each paper. He enlightened me with the Supreme Court ruling in 2013 on the criminalization of homosexuality - which was overturned in 2018 - for my paper on Pushkin.
Raj was always so down-to-earth and unassuming. In one of our telecons I mentioned with glee that he had not changed and that talking to him gave me the feeling that we were having our tapri chai as we used to, in the leafy bower outside the department of English at Pune University, Pune. He seemed eager to put the other person at ease. He listened. He commented on the nature imagery in my recent book of poems titled Jasmine City: Poems from Delhi (2023). It was here that I wrote my poem '15 August' about Pushkin, a gay, who was murdered on 14 August 2004.
As we chatted in the car he told me about life after his retirement, his teaching commitments, and how the next few months would pan out. There is a visit to Tubingen University, Germany in the offing, he said and a whirlwind tour of lit-fests. He is also revising his book. He was pleased that his life was being digitized by QueerInk.
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| Raj in Pune in April this year. |
I realized I was still learning from Raj in the classroom of life. I learned from his simplicity, his thoroughness, his approachability, his skill as an effective communicator and the necessity of a Plan B. He would instantly respond to our messages on WhatsApp and would not hesitate to call to clarify things.
He was full of praise for our efforts. He wrote on the Visitors' Book applauding our initiative on a topic which seldom has currency in higher education. He gifted some of his books (photo above) to us, so that students may become familiar with his work.
On the morning of the symposium came the news that Indian poet Keki Daruwalla had passed on. Raj mentioned this when I went to pick him up. But his legacy remains, as will that of Raj.
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Pic of R. Raj Rao at the launch of his latest novel Mahmud and Ayaz at Crossword Bookstore, Pune in April 2024. Courtesy R. Raj Rao. Updated 2/10/24.
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