Unmasking My Pseudonymous Self

Unmasking My Pseudonymous Self During my college days, I grew a beard. Being short, skinny and completely undistinguished, I thought my beard would make me stand out among clean shaven and well-groomed kids. When an extraordinarily clairvoyant person I once came across said to me, “ Shave that beard off and let there be more light on your face. The day you shave it off, you’ll receive a letter of appointment from a foreign country.” For four years, I kept that beard on my face. The day I shaved it off that strange prophesy came true. I received a registered letter from the (then) Imperial Ethiopian Ministry of Education informing me that they had selected me as a high school teacher of English. Pseudonyms are like beards. They conceal one’s real face. In many popular Hindi movies of the 1950s and the 1960s, the hero wore a fake beard to get into the heroine’s proximity. I remember Dev Anand and Shammi Kapoor doing that. I was a serious creative writer and literary critic. I used my real name for all my serious writing, including my serious journalistic writing. However, I am not all that serious as I am reputed to be. There is a comedian inside me that is restless to burst into the open. I love to mark the absurdity underlying most seriously regarded things. I love to expose the pretense and vanity of celebrities. I also love to take the comic as seriously as it often deserves. Quest was a serious journal edited by serious intellectuals and most of its contributors were respectable academics or high literary writers. Quest was so far above popular culture and so disdainful in its indifference to the strange and bizarre events and incidents taking place every day in India that it needed at least one regular column that did some lampooning in its own non-hurtful way. I worked as its Editor, A.B.Shah’s assistant and helped him to copy edit or rewrite the kind of atrocious prose only some of the most learned can write----and most of our contributors were, to say the least, very learned. Of course, among the early and later editors of Quest there were excellent writers of English prose: Nissim Ezekiel, Amlan Datta, Abu Sayyad Ayyub, A. B. Shah, G. D. Parekh, V. V. John and M. P. Rege are some examples. The wittiest of them was easily V. V. John. He had an impish sense of humour and could make devastating understatements. But an editorial chair is like a chair in the judiciary. Quest published some fine creative writing, too; but it gave it fewer pages than it devoted to supposedly more serious issues. It ignored laughing matter. When Shah suggested to me to write a regular column, in his own bania style, he added that I would be paid extra for it. That was a double inducement and incentive. I asked him if I would have the freedom to write on any topic I chose, he reminded me that we in that office were all equally committed to cultural freedom. Since I already wrote book reviews and occasional articles for Quest, I asked him if I could

use an acronym of my first name as a pseudonym, he said it was up to me. I asked him if he would keep it a secret and he nodded with a certain tiredness on his face that usually preceded irritation or even anger. The secret was very well guarded. Initially, only Shah, V.K. Sinha and S.V. Raju knew who ‘D’ was. Later, Antoinette Diniz, who worked in the same office and became a friend who loved to argue and quarrel with me during lunch hour, came to know it. As time went by, my column created its own cult following among the readers of Quest. Shah and V.V. John were among my avid fans. V.K. Sinha and S.V. Raju were my regular companions and I would often bounce off with them my topics and themes during the ride home Raju gave us in his car every evening. I used the column to write on popular as well as art house cinema, painting and artists, populist movements and politics, the upcoming guru and godmen industry, theatre, music, and of course the moral police seeking censorship of literature and art. I enjoyed doing it so much that even in the new avatar of Quest---New Quest---I continued to write that column. Now the column is dead and my pseudonym would hardly ring a bell. Few readers now would dig the archived coffins in the expired journal’s graveyard to find ‘D’. But I know it’s me---of another time and season--grinning back at the present me, older and infinitely boring. Dilip Chitre _____________________________________________________________