Sometime in 1972 (a year after the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Pablo Neruda), an Indian artist named Vivan Sundaram met him in Chile. Although Neruda was expected to visit Mexico (where Vivan was) around that time, for some reason  he couldn’t. A committed Communist, Vivan returned to India the next year and created a series of pen-and-ink drawings of Neruda’s poem The Heights of Machu Picchu. These artworks were exhibited in the Faculty of Arts at Delhi Unviersity. I learnt about the exhibition much later, around ’77 or ’78, when I was studying Neruda at DU. As life or luck would have it, Safdar Hashmi brought Vivan Sundaram face-to-face with me. Sometime in the year 2000 Sahmat digitally reproduced those artworks together with lines from the poem. I was lucky Vivan asked me to design the posters, but that is not the reason I am writing to you, nor am I attempting to show off.

Reading your amazing Hindi translations of Neruda’s love poems my mind kept returning to that major poem, The Heights of Machu Picchu, which, while being political, social, and revolutionary in nature also contains powerful elements of love. I wonder why you didn’t include that poem in your anthology? How else would one define the lines… “the lightning unleashed by a kiss” and “my nuptial homeland” from the poem as anything other than love and to an extent even erotic? Thanks none the less for this wonderful wonderful work “of art”. My favourite of your translation is लिख सकता हूँ आज की रात (Tonight I can write) – मैं उसे और प्यार नहीं करता, ये तय है, पर कितना प्यार उसे मैंने किया – I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her. Feeling sad why didn’t i order this book before.