Keki Daruwalla (1937-2024): The police officer turned poet

Another poem in the same collection, ‘Death by Burial’, used farce and tragicomedy to depict the madness of communal riots. The hapless, cornered man at the heart of the poem contemplates a cruel choice: ‘death by fire’ (Hindu funerary rites) or ‘death by burial’ (Muslim funerary rites). His 1971 collection Apparition in April featured the haunting, much-cited ‘Routine’ where Daruwalla condemns state and police complicity within the context of Hindu-Muslim violence. “It is well rehearsed: I alone / point my barrel into them as I squeeze the trigger / The rest aim into the sun!" The ‘well-rehearsed’ role played by the narrator’s colleagues thus allows the perpetrators a free hand.

As the years of police service piled on, Daruwalla’s verse became even more withering in its assessment of Indian society and politics. The trifecta of corrupt politicians, opportunistic elites and craven-obedient policemen started featuring more prominently. ‘Jottings’ from the 1980 collection Winter Poems provides ballast to this theory. In the first stanza, Daruwalla hits us with “Hunger is an empty nest / to which birds fly back in the evening." He then runs with the metaphor of a bird struggling to feed her younglings to describe a famine-stricken area. There are no buffer lines, no breathing space in sight, as Daruwalla delivers a coup de grace of unspeakable cruelty: “Cables are flashed from the outposts / ‘Food riots! Send Rice Specials at once!’ / From the capital word bounces back / ‘Silo owners have gone off for the night. / Dispatching armed police instead.’"

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Daruwalla was a poet of great range, perpetually in imaginative conversation with world literature. The collection Night River (2000) is perhaps the best example of this habit. Here, we come across ‘Meursault’, a six-page poem about the protagonist of the classic existential novel The Stranger by Albert Camus. Other verses in this book are based on lines written by CP Cavafy and Paul Eluard. A particularly masterful sequence of poems re-imagines the life of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) and his persecution by Stalin. There’s a Faiz translation and an original ‘Partition ghazal’ thrown in for good measure. In his late-career works, Daruwalla drew upon a lifetime of reading and writing to expand his canvas further—the 2013 collection Fire Altar consisted of poems about the Persian Empire, specifically its status as the birthplace of Zoroastrianism.

His interest in the trajectories of empire—how and why people are guided by ‘movements’ of capital, faith and politics—culminated in his debut novel For Pepper and Christ (2009). An ambitious novel marked by Daruwalla’s elegant, lyrical prose, the book followed an expansive cast of characters (priests, merchants, soldiers, voyagers) across the globe during the 15th century, the time of Vasco Da Gama and Christopher Columbus. Some of these themes can be observed across Daruwalla’s short fiction as well, albeit on a smaller scale. In the story ‘Amphibious Train’ (from the 2014 collection Islands), the embattled president of the island Santa Xavier wants to build a rail track for his people, despite mounting protests from a section of the populace. This is an experimental story with an unreliable narrator and has more in common with Garcia Marquez-style magic realism than the ironic realism of Daruwalla’s poetry. In the 1996 short fiction collection The Minister of Permanent Unrest, the title story is set in a fictional Latin American dictatorship.

In person Daruwalla was genial and generous with his time, although he seldom suffered fools gladly. He always had a few extra minutes for young writers. I interviewed him several times over the last decade, starting in 2013. Fire Altar had just been published and we were talking about his early career, specifically the spate of rejections (by publishers, agents, literary journals, and so on) that young people in this world have to get used to.

In his usual self-deprecating manner, he told me, “Nissim (Ezekiel) did me a favour by rejecting my poems in 1968. I was not good enough and I was certainly not ready to mount a full-length collection. I went back to the (writing) table and improved myself. For us (writers), where complacency begins, curiosity ends."

By that metric, Daruwalla was the ultimate writer’s writer, because till the end, his curiosity about the world and all its inscrutable wheels and gears never dimmed. He will forever be remembered as one of the titans of Indian English literature.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.

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