MAYANK BHATT (1962-2022): In Search of the Examined Life

                                                       Mayank Bhatt at the launch in Mumbai of the Marathi edition of his book Belief

Ashoak Upadhyay

On August 1 2022 just turned 60 years, Mayank Bhatt passed away after a protracted battle with cancer in Toronto, Canada. A friend for over thirty years, journalist-colleague in Mumbai in the 1990s, Mayank migrated to Canada  to seek, what he temed a better life for his young son. In Toronto, he worked his way up the economic ladder like any other immigrant, even educated ones. He worked as a security guard then found a middle class job. With his wife Mahrukh and son, Che, he settled into a restless but materially middle class existence; not just because he had his roots still in India but because an invisible vocation was germinating in his consciousness. After years of business and social reportage in Mumbai, he found a voice for fiction, partly based, or perhaps largely based on his experience as an immigrant from the ‘Third’ world. It was also a form of awakening; he came from a line of literary and soialist poets/writers in Gujarati, his mother tongue.

He honed this incipient craft, he took courses in writing and in 2016 Mawenzi Press published his debut novel “Belief”. Mayank would not write another; but he delved into the short story genre and planned an anthology of his shorter prose. In the meantime he immersed himself in the multi-racial literary and writing scene and began a blog, Generally About Books that showcased books and writers he read or came across.

In 2017, he collaborated with me and a couple of other colleagues in giving shape to an idea for a webzine that would get away from the banality of both the mainstream media (from which we all came) and the drabness of academic writing to offer a platform for reflective thought underscoring the idea that there is no single reality.

Mayank Bhatt’s contribution was seminal. Just a while before we began, he had sent me an essay on his fraught marriage to Mahrukh, not only a Muslim but also pious believer even as he was a Hindu by birth and a self-declared atheist. It was a love marriage, as the cliché goes; what love is became clear in his articulation of it in Married to a Believer:

Why was a person who was not dissimilar to me in most ways be so completely different in one crucial aspect, and be so committed to a belief system? It led me to explore religion—not just Islam, but also Hinduism, Christianity and other religions of India. It made me understand India and Indians better.

The essay did more than countless discussions in illuminating what we were searching for. An India of cpmpassion, love, celebration of multivariedness of cultures and religions/faiths even while adhering to one’s own. In hindsight the essay did more for Mayank in a personal sort of way. It would begin a long day’s journey into his soul.

In 2018 Mayank Bhatt accepted the position of Executive Editor, adding value by bringing  writers from among the Toronto-based multiracial community and even from India with which his ties did not slacken.  His essays and fiction appeared from time to time on this platform. His engagement with the webzine was critical;; we disagreed often, our long-distance talks were edgy; he was a blunt speaker not given to politeness or the socially correct but always open to another view , facet. He was engaging in a way that left me (and I hoped him too) satisfied at the birth of new ideas, new ways of thinking.

Then cancer struck

Late November 2020, Mayank called and gave me the shocking news; he had been diagnosed with level 4 pancreatic cancer in May 2020, in the midst of the first lockdown, I had wondered at the long intervals of silence. But Mayank did not follow routine chat courtesies; he also told me that he was refining his short fiction and adding to the collection. He was needless to say, shocked and even traumatised by this plague on his house he had built so assiduously. But true to form, he had called with a purpose; he had taken time to compose himself to make an extraordinary proposal. He would write a diary, for The Beacon on the discovery of his pancreatic cancer and how he had coped since May. Not just a one-off essay but a series that would chart his experiences. I was stunned; it was clear he had taken the time to not just grapple with the series of tests and visits to hospitals and the trauma his loved ones would have been confronted with but something more procrustean: desire to articulate that suffering. To understand it.

Perhaps he believed in hope. He ends his essay with some optimism.

The First Six Months – Diary of a Cancer Patient

Over the next year and half Mayank would pen three more chronicles of his battle with cancer till the final one June 10:

My First Cancer Birthday: A Diary of Coping

Cancer Patient’s Inevitable Dénouement: A Bad Scan Result

On the Night Side of Life: the Malady Spreads, the End Is Nigh

The articulations of his cancer coping are not just records of his battle with the disease wasting away his body. Even as the inevitable begin to darken his horizon, and you can sense the clouds of foreboding if the essays are read chronologically, something more profound than the will to cope with the debilitating life-sucking disease is at play. Mayank was not chronicling his trauma or that of his family and loved ones in a fog of despairing and helpless confusion.

Something in his collapsing nerves was ignited, a question, perhaps a series of them sparked off by that early rumination on being married to a believer, a self-appraisal dormant, perhaps waiting for the moment. Mayank Bhatt saw the disease as that moment, an urgent telegram from the soul to examine his life; facing the inevitability of death, he sought illumination in a life, however brief, of self-questioning. It would become an intense examination of the self. After decades of forensic interrogation of the social and political as a journalist and as fiction writer, Mayank turned that critical gaze into his Self; in the waning years he wanted to understand his life, his loves, cast a light on the dark corners of his existence and its anxieties. And I would like to believe he did that with relentless courage as his body was failing him and family obligations were tormenting him; piling up even while agonsisng over Mahrukh and his son’s impending loss of the breadwinner. He persevered in his searches; not as philosophical inquiry but as existential self-interrogation. And that required courage, the capacity to rise above temptations for pettiness, bitterness, disappointment, rage. To examine without pity; with compassion. In these essays the reader will be put in mind of Yeats’ observation that “It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield”

Goodbye Mayank. May your soul rest in peace You will always be a source of inspiration for us in this ‘blinding absence of light’ and dense fogs of illusion flailing at moving shadows.

“What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,

And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?

What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop…”—W.B. Yeats : The Gyres

 *****

W. B. Yeats from. The Collected Poems.of W.B. Yeats The Last Poems (1936-1938) p 2 49. Wordsworth Editions Limitd. 1994,