de Kooning's Smile

“Khiwani is a polymath who infuses his lyric reflections with painters, philosophers, poets and photographers; with Greek mythology, French dramaturgy, German phraseology, Bombay’s profane and holy urban landscape; with longing and love and anguish and immaculate craftsmanship . . . Whatever else art may be, Khiwani writes, it is ‘a dark condemned space with the door unlocked,’ where we wander in unsure of what we want and sometimes never finding what we need. On other occasions, however, as when we read Khiwani’s virtuouso posthumous collection De Kooning’s Smile, we find exactly what we need, even if it’s not something we particularly realized we wanted; and instead of being condemned by the encounter, we give ourselves ‘up into the brightness’ and emerge entirely, irrevocably redeemed.”
Ravi Shankar, Pushcart-prize winning author and poet 

“The intimate, revealing later poems underline our loss: Deepankar Khiwani left us just as he’d come into his indivisible own. This book represents all the poems he wished to keep—and it is invaluable. I am under its sway.”
Jeet Thayil

“At once lyrical and intellectual, reflecting the present and the past, Deepankar Khiwani’s poems speak to us in an original and wide-ranging voice unusual in Indian poetry in English. Many of these poems reveal themselves differently after successive readings and contain arresting and enduring images such as: ‘the radio . . . / pitched to the frequency of a static bewilderment.’ It is also a poetry of place with Bombay coming alive and turning vibrant in ‘Bombay Sequence’. Not just restricted to Bombay, this is a cosmopolitan poetry, that reflects his own life: ‘. . . with a father from Pakistan, and a mother from Bangladesh, / growing up in Bombay, married to a Jat woman.’ The strict formalism (rare in Indian poetry in English) of  much of Deepankar’s poetry comes through strikingly  in poems like ‘Two Photographs’, ‘Photograph at the Lodi Gardens’, ‘Delhi Airport’, ‘Business Lunch’, ‘Poet Shaving’ and ‘Homeward Bound’; and in this prophetic image: ’Art provides closure / while, of course, it doesn’t; Art, whatever it is / is a dark condemned space with the door unlocked’. Deepankar’s own art  is, however, unlocked into light and colour in this wonderfully produced book.”
Manohar Shetty

~

Deepankar Khiwani was born in Delhi in 1971. His father came from Multan in Punjab and was forced to flee from Pakistan during the partition of British India. His mother was a fine connoisseur of English literature who taught him the rules of scansion at an early age. Khiwani was raised mainly in Mumbai, where he received his early education at Cathedral School and earned a BA in Economics at St Xavier’s college. He obtained a postgraduate degree in chartered accountancy and a master’s degree in business management from IIM, Bangalore. He then launched on a career as a business consultant with Capgemini, a French technology consulting firm—a career that took him to many parts of the world. He married Ritu Yadav in 2000. In 2013 he moved to Paris for several years as CEO of a few verticals of Capgemini. While he was based in Paris, he also spent much of his time in Zurich.

During his college years, Khiwani was closely associated with several Mumbai poets, including, importantly, Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla, and his erstwhile schoolmate Anand Thakore. Entr’acte, his first collection of poems, and the only collection to appear during his lifetime, was published by the Harbour Line collective in 2006. He took early retirement in 2019 and died of a wholly unexpected and virulent illness in the following year.