Thayil was born in Kerala, India – almost in the middle of the Muvattupuzha River – due to the Indian tradition of mothers returning to their home village to give birth. This created a connection with water that Thayil carried forward into his poetry and is a notable motif in English (2003) – a collection of poems that excavates Thayil’s years in New York as a journalist, witnessing the events of September 11, 2001. This collection, along with several others, depicts and explores trans-national perspectives; Thayil draws upon his time in international education and employment, including his years in New York, Hong Kong, and Bombay.  

Thayil’s poetic works were not only inspired by his travels around the world, but also by familial figures. Thayil’s father, TJS George, was a reputed journalist and biographer in India and Hong Kong, and as a boy Thayil regularly spent time in his uncle’s study, a lawyer who translated Baudelaire into Malayalam. Yet Thayil’s poetry was perhaps most impacted by his second wife Shakti Bhatt, and his struggle to process and accept her early, sudden death in 2007. The following year Thayil published These Errors Are Correct  (2008) – a moving collection immersed in raw grief, hard-won wisdom and, inevitably, regret. Beyond his family, Thayil speaks of being deeply impacted by the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, as well as Dom Moraes – a poet and family friend. Thayil dedicates his collection The Book of Chocolate Saints (2018), which exposes the overlooked non-Caucasian roots of now white-washed saints, to Moraes – a ‘personal saint’ of his own. 

Thayil is particularly celebrated for his exploration of mental and urban decay. This is reflected in his novel Narcopolis (2012), which immerses the reader in the underground opium world of Mumbai in the Seventies and Eighties, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012.  Conversely, Thayil’s  most recent poetry collection, I’ll Have It Here (2024) focuses on the value of our limited – but joyous – time on Earth, while seamlessly interweaving commentary about our financial and political world, and its many struggles.  The poems of this collection notably shift into a playful and musical tone, with instances of ‘rhymes [that] are over the top, even outrageous’. 

Thayil’s understanding of the significance of rhythm and music is likewise reflected in the recordings of his poetry.  His poem ‘Late Elegy’ (from I'll Have it Here) is accompanied by the long sonorous sounds of a violin, conjuring a hauntingly eerie atmosphere that grips the listener. This calls to the speaker’s anguish and de-stability; his life placed in ‘disarray’, haunted by his wife’s memory beyond her death. The poem ends on a note of loss and confusion with three consecutive rhetorical questions – the void of answers reminding us of the void of his wife’s presence in his life. On the other hand, Thayil’s ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ (from a forthcoming collection) features a much more energising piano accompaniment, providing an uplifting spiritual backdrop to Thayil’s slow delivery of the poem while he delves into questions of religious authority and definitions of God. The speaker subverts popularised Christian assumptions of Caucasian models of God, saying ‘the good Lord has chocolate skin’. The poem’s final lines echo and merge into sounds of static noise and synthesised ocean waves, further reminiscent of the universal yet higher-worldly themes this poem speaks to. With the ambiguous ending that directly addresses ‘You’ – the reader, or perhaps the trapped identities of the chocolate saints – we realise it is not only the spirits of these saints which are being set free, but the true history and roots of the reader too. It is this resonance, this connection of Thayil’s personal explorations to his readers’ understandings of the world, which continues to make Thayil’s poems so evocative and meaningful.  

Credits: Yashas Shetty, musician and producer for ‘Late Elegy’ and ‘Lord is my Shepherd’. Photograph by Ninan Joseph.