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BOOKS
Authorspeak
KEKI N. DARUWALLA
Home and Away
 It's
11 a.m. on a Saturday morning and Keki N. Daruwalla, 63, should by right,
and choice, be poring over "The Writer and the City", an exhibition
of French texts translated into English. Instead, the poet and novelist
sits on a low chair in a room filled with books (Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Anna Akhmatova, Nissim Ezikiel, Jorge Luis Borges), paintings, and photographs,
and discusses Night River (Rupa) a collection of poems that breaks his
five-year-long literary silence. "A time comes when you know the
good from the bad and the indifferent,"says Daruwalla on his selection
in Night River. "I'm not claiming that the poems are good, but these
are less bad than the others."
A fairer
assessment provides that Daruwalla's verse steps skillfully from gentle
to acerbic, hopeful to despairing across 112 pages of political, historical,
professional and personal experience. "I draw from what hits me,"
he says. Hence, Stalking Mandelstam, after which he writes: "I read
Nadezhda Mandelstam's book Hope against Hope where she talks of her husband's
(Osep Mandelstam) incarceration in 1934 because of his poem on Stalin.
The book was so profoundly affecting that this sequence of poems emerged."
The volume closes with Island Poems-18 pages of gentle verse soaked in
the scent of Dragonfly morning, dragonfly noon, dragonfly dusk. Wind roosting
in the palms before it settles down for the night (Ross Island).
Night River
is dedicated to Daruwalla's wife, Khurshid, who passed away earlier this
year. "She had a very calming influence on me," he says sadly.
"But I don't want to eke out my frustration on my writing, and my
world view-if that's not too big a word for me to use-won't become acerbic
because of her death."
And those
who are not exiled from their dreams, are they really far from home? (Exile
and the Chinese Poets). Daruwalla is currently working on several pro-jects-he'd
like to complete a novel in progress; memorise a few of his poems ("It's
so tragic-I can recite so many of Robert Frost's and none of mine");
and yes, make sure the term policeman-poet never precedes or follows his
name again.
-Sonia
Faleiro
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CII’s
conference on Friday on corporate governance is called Independent Directors:
Why, How and Who. Why Not, How Not and Who Not, would have been better,
says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor, V Shankar Aiyar