Gieve Patel Poet | Painter | Playwright | Physician 1940-2023 (left: Gieve, right: Sudhir) The year was 2005. Aditi tells me that the next show at Bose Pacia in New York was a joint show of lifelong friends and contemporaries - Gieve Patel and Sudhir Patwardhan. Both were practicing doctors during the day and prolific artists by nights and weekends. It was when I first met Gieve, during the last of my years in NYC. He was 65. I was 32. I have recounted a story to him many times over the 18 years of friendship - that I studied his poetry for my ICSE boards. His was one of the 20 poems on the syllabus in the, then imposing, little book called Panorama. I’m sure he heard that from a thousand students at least. And the corollary: I would tell my school friends that the poet we once studied is now one of our dearest friends in Mumbai. We moved back to India soon after that first encounter, to Mumbai, in 2006. There was a kinship between Aditi and Gieve that was one of a mentor, a friend, a fellow painter, and a rare shared depth of love for poetry and literature. While I enjoy my share of indulgences of all art, Gieve and I perhaps discussed more of western classical music and film noire. But the overriding joy and passion of our catchups was over the love of food and lengthy discussions on the state of the country and the world, arriving at characters who have an undue influence on our daily lives. The innocence and honesty with which the fundamental questions would be asked of me in those conversations spoke of how he liked to understand the world - seeking the truth, the depth of that seeking, the rawness that a poet and painter yearns before he embarks on his next work. With each passing year, we became closer, our tiny nuclear families bound tighter with a string of connections. He, a Mumbai original who was losing his city to the burgeoning new appendages of it, and I, a Mumbai immigrant diving deeper into its past through his glasses, gleaning from his renderings of its vivid artistic history and the kali peeli charm of everything that’s Gieve. I was glad he could make it to my milestone b’day in May - my close Mumbai circle would witness his last dance, a toast to humanity’s best, so much of it embedded in one man in Colaba. They don’t make them like him any more is what I’ve most heard most often these past few weeks. He even fought cancer as nobly as he would handle himself within his artist and poet collectives, with his gallerists and collectors, his family, friends and of course, his work. It was always with the highest dignity and utmost respect for everyone around him. As I visited him in late October, in palliative care, in Pune, about 10 days before his final departure, he mustered up a courageous smile. I told him I was going to the US for a long work trip. We both caught the other’s eye, smiled, hiding our tears, knowing it would be the last time. The daily whatsapp updates thereafter from Avaan spoke of the inevitable, it was just a matter of time. As I boarded that Friday morning from LaGuardia, and the sunrise behind us hit the wing flap, there was a cosmic shine off it. I landed to the news that he had breathed his last. Every work and image and moment that he left for the world to inherit is embodied in this poem. It’s exactly what he would have read to celebrate his last moment. GOD OR God or something like that shot through each part of you, down to your small fingernail, well into pits and wells you did not know of, beamed right into all of that, and into your crude meanness, and your fruitlessness; flooded might be the word for it; trans lucence, the sun blaz ing through, lift ing the most of you out of sight, save for a persistence of veins. © 1991, Gieve Patel From: Mirrored, Mirroring (continued)