My friend Jai Verma, who has died aged 75, was a poet, a writer and cross-cultural organiser who served as a bridge between her country of origin – India – and Nottingham, her chosen home.
In 2003, Jai co-founded Kavya Rang (Colours of Poetry), a multilingual poetry group with a focus on south Asian languages. Kavya Rang hosted several events each year, including a Grand Kavi Sammelan, which featured English-language poets alongside Hindi voices: you were just as likely to hear Keshari Nath Tripathi, the governor of West Bengal (a keen poet), recite as you were to see Henry Normal. Poetry, to Jai, knew no national boundaries.
Kavya Rang, under Jai’s stewardship, played a role in Nottingham securing the status of a Unesco city of literature in 2015, and worked with the then fledgling Nottingham Poetry festival to bring multilingual poetry events to venues across the city.
Born in the village of Jiwana in rural Uttar Pradesh, Jai was the daughter of Sohanveer Singh Solanki, a farmer, and Angoori Devi, a housewife. A prodigious reader from an early age, Jai went to a series of schools in Uttar Pradesh, but her educational ambitions were put on hold in 1967 when she married, at 17, Mahipal Verma. Shortly after having her first child, Roopam, she followed her husband to the UK, where he had been working for several months in the NHS. She always remembered the date she arrived in the UK: 2 October, which was Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday.
The Vermas briefly lived in Gateshead, before the birth of another child, Vipin, and then settled in Bramcote, Nottinghamshire, where they spent the rest of their lives.
While raising her children, Jai continued to study and write. She translated dozens of children’s books into Hindi, while working towards a qualification in practice management to support her husband, who ran his own GP practice in a deprived inner-city area of Nottingham.
She wrote and published poetry widely. It was incorporated into the curriculum and course reading lists of several Indian universities, as was her short-story collection, Saat Kadam (Seven Steps, 2017). Lines of her poetry, in Hindi, are displayed in Nottingham’s new Central Library.
After Mahipal’s death in 2018, Jai divided her time between Bramcote and India, where she gave speeches and lectures on poetry and language.
She is survived by her two children and three grandchildren, Ellie, Niamh and Tara.
