Essentially a Poet of the City:
The metropolitan city of Bombay figures most prominently in the poetry of Nissim Ezekiel. Indeed, he may be described as essentially a poet of the city. As a critic (Harish Raizada) points out, no modern Indian English poet has given a more comprehensive picture of the various facets of metropolitan life than Ezekiel has done. Another critic (Urmila Varma) has given us an able analysis of Nissim Ezekiel's interest in depicting the people and the life of the city which he regards almost as his native city even though he belongs to a migrant Jewish family who had settled down there and made the city their home. According to this critic (namely Urmila Varma), Ezekiel has identified himself completely with India and, more particularly, with the city of Bombay; and this identification sustains him as a writer and as a human being. In fact, Ezekiel has said that India's backwardness coincides with his own. He has further stated that India is his environment and that a man can do something for his environment not by withdrawing from it but by remaining in it.
A Critic and a Censor of City Life:
It may here be made clear that Nissim Ezekiel is a critic and a censor of the city life as he sees it, and not a champion or a sponsor or even an apologist of it. In poem after poem, he has exposed to ridicule the ugly spots of the city and the failings, shortcomings, and deficiencies of city life. He finds the city of Bombay to be a sick and ailing city, inhabited by people who are sick too. The sickness is not just physical and environmental but also mental, requiring the attention of a psychiatrist. He finds Bombay to be poverty- stricken, noisy, and polluted. He calls it a "barbaric city", full of slums, deprived of seasons, cursed with a million purgatorial lanes (meaning dirty, abhorrent, repellent, narrow streets). He refers to its hawkers, its beggars asking for charity in loud voices, and its many-tongued labourers who get their wages not in cash but in words and in crumbs. In one of his poems, he gives us an aerial view of the city, including its civilized as well as backward parts of it.
Miscellaneous, Detailed Imagery of City Life in Ezekiel's Poetry:
In another poem Ezekiel tells us that the city remains within him wherever he goes. He says that, after a night of love, he left the city with an intention to come back to it but that somehow, he carried the city within him—its markets and courts of justice, its slums, its football grounds, its entertainment halls, its residential flats, its places of art and business houses, its harlots, its basement poets, its princes, and its fools. Thus, he takes notice not only of the pleasant aspects of the city but even more so, of the unpleasant aspects of it. In another poem, he builds up a very vivid city scene, referring to the newspapers, cinemas, speeches demanding peace by men with grim, war-like faces, posters selling health and happiness in bottles, and promises of large returns to small investments in football pools. Here again we have miscellaneous imagery covering the good and the bad features of city life. The reference to posters selling health and happiness in bottles is evidently intended to remind us of the quacks who sell bogus medicines to make money for themselves rather than to cure the people of their maladies.
Men of Straw in the City, Without Comfort or Peace of Mind:
In the city the people search for solace, comfort, and peace of mind but they fail to achieve this aim. In fact, they feel lost in the city to which they belong and in which the author himself dwells as "an active fool". In the city the fog is thick, and the men get lost. This metaphorically refers to the ignorance of the people and their lack of direction. The people there do not realize the growing cost of cushy jobs and unloved wives. These people can be described as men of straw, having no feeling or sensibility.
Examples from Particular Poems:
The people of Ezekiel's city lead sterile, dull, monotonous lives. In the poem entitled Occasion, Ezekiel describes the routine of a South Indian, a middle-aged, balding man without a face or a figure. This man has to wait for half an hour in a queue to catch a bus; then he has to spend fifteen minutes in the bus; then he has to travel by a train for forty minutes, and finally he has to walk a long distance from the railway station to the slum in which he lives. In the poem Hangover, Ezekiel depicts the people of both the upper and the lower middle classes, including the ordinary people such as typists, drunkards, and harlots. He speaks here of a non-drinker drinking, a non- smoker smoking, the red-coated waiters of Harbour Bar, and the dancing girl in the red-light district.
The Poems Entitled Quarrel and To a Certain Lady Respectively:
In the city, according to Ezekiel, a man fails to establish a lasting relationship with any woman; and so, there is a general feeling of frustration and of discontent among the men. In the poem entitled Quarrel, a man goes in search of a woman in order to establish an emotional bond with her, but these efforts prove futile. He talks to her during the night but his talk resembles a troubled dream of many words, unaccompanied by a single kiss, in another poem, To a Certain Lady, a man's encounter with a woman proves to be a disappointing exercise in sex. Ezekiel here depicts the woman as a kind of leech sucking the man's flesh; and he describes the sexual act in this case as a crude acceptance of the mutual physical need, referring to it as a tasteless encounter in the dark, a kind of companionship with neither love nor hate.
A Love-Hate Relationship of Ezekiel with the City:
Ezekiel's own relationship with the city may be described as a love-hate relationship. He hates the many unpleasant and disgusting aspects of city life in India and yet he feels attracted by the city life because of his feeling that by making the people aware of the miserable conditions in which they live he may be able to bring about some improvement. And his desire to improve the conditions of life shows his Indianness or his commitment to, if not love for, this country.
A Poem Entitled Urban:
In a poem entitled Urban, Ezekiel describes the urban sensibility and a city-dweller's reaction to Nature. The city-dweller neither sees the morning sky nor feels the darkness of night descending upon him. He welcomes neither the sun nor the rains; and he sees no ups and downs in the landscape before him. He dreams of morning walks; but in his mind is the city traffic away from the beach and tree and stone. His world of dreams and the world of stark realities stand apart; and his sense of mystery or novelty is swamped by the urban environment. The more he stares, the less he sees among the individual trees.