By Patricia Lee Sharpe
That is Fullness
This is Fullness
From Fullness comes Fullness
Take Fullness from Fullness
What remains is Fullness
Om Shantih Shantih Shantih
The Paramahamsa Upanisad
This has been hard to write, not only because I am sad, but because sloppy thinking and writing won’t do for P. Lal.
I planned to visit him, in Kolkata, this coming January or February. For months I’ve been looking forward to another session of wide-ranging, exhilarating conversation, some heavy literary and philosophical stuff, perhaps, but also the elation of minds meeting in surprising ways, all to be heightened (I hoped) by cups of Darjeeling and squares of cloud-light shondesh from the kitchen of Shyamasree, his wife, whose family had been intimately connected with the Shanti Niketan of Rabindranath Tagore.
That wordfest won’t happen now. P. Lal died on November 3, 2010.
Purushottama Lal (aka Profsky) was, oddly enough, the only mentor this American writer ever had. He hounded me relentlessly until I let him publish my first collection of poetry. The Deadmen and Other Poems appeared in 2002 with the Writers Workshop imprint, gold-embossed, handloom-bound, in a rainbow of colors. Three books have followed that one. Would any of my poetry gone public without P. Lal’s hectoring? I don’t know. But this is the way publishing began for me, and I am grateful.
We met face to face, a qualification whose importance will emerge shortly, while I was Branch Public Affairs Officer at the American Consulate in Calcutta/Kolkata in 1998. He had committed himself to translating (or transcreating, as he immodestly put it) the Mahabharata of Vyasa and, tranche by tranche, he was reading his beautifully—indeed lovingly Englished lines to a small collection of enthusiasts who gathered at 11:00 am on Sunday mornings. Having taken a graduate course in Sanskrit literature at the University of Chicago, I’d nibbled at some tone-deaf Victorian and 20th century translations, so I was eager to know if a readable version might finally be in the works. Off I went, one Sunday, and established myself, as discreetly as I could for the only non-Indian in the room, as far toward the rear as empty seats permitted.
Thus I found a refuge from the pain that went along with the State Department’s gleeful absorption of the U.S. Information Agency. U.S.I.A.’s Indian employees were being squeezed mercilessly. Collegial operations were being replaced by rigid hierarchies. Rapid response was giving way to bureaucratic sclerosis. My efforts to influence the process were fruitless. But Profsky knew nothing of this. I left it all behind on Sunday mornings.

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