RE: [GOABOOKCLUB] Dom Moraes
Nazareth, Peter
Folks,
I just found this obituary of Dom Moraes by Ranjit Hoskote online from The Hindu in July 4, 2004. It is a profound, and profoundly moving, buy a fine poet, whom I got to know in the International Writing Program in 1995.
Peter
Dom Moraes dead
By Ranjit Hoskote
MUMBAI, JUNE 2. The celebrated poet, Dom Moraes, who had been suffering from cancer for several years, passed away at his home in Mumbai this evening. Having refused to submit to the rigours of diet and treatment demanded by his affliction, Mr. Moraes decided, in the words of Dylan Thomas, a poet with whom he shared a love for the archetypal myth and the richly arcane word, that he would "not go gentle into that good night." Instead, with the sentence of extinction hanging over him, he travelled widely across India, a country that was both intimately familiar and forbiddingly strange to him, and producing several books in collaboration with Sarayu Srivatsa, his companion on these geographical journeys that were also expeditions into a complex self.
Throughout his life, Mr. Moraes was alternately attracted and repelled by India, its people, its culture: this tension afforded him one of the most vital impulses of his art, the others being a sense of abiding loss, a search for redemptive love, and a feeling of being permanently in exile, no matter where he went. By a strange paradox, Mr. Moraes travelled far more widely in the jungles, deserts and backwoods of India, in the course of his varied career as a journalist, writer of travel prose and director of documentary films, than many of the critics who attacked him for what they saw as his Westernised contempt for Indian customs and his colonial attitude of aloofness from local realities.
Mr. Moraes was born in Mumbai, then Bombay, in 1938. His father was the journalist and writer Frank Moraes, who became the first Indian editor of The Times of India after independence. Mr Moraes' childhood was exceptionally rich in experience, since he followed his father on his journeys through South-east Asia, Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand. That childhood was also shadowed by the dissensions between his parents, and the gradual descent of his mother into a mental illness that would culminate with her confinement to a care institution. Poetry announced its claim on Mr. Moraes very early: his first poems were written at the age of 12, and came in a stream when he went up to Oxford. At home, Nissim Ezekiel gave him bracing advice on tone and direction; in Britain, which would soon become more of a home than India, W.H. Auden offered him praise and Stephen Spender published his poems in Encounter. The Parton Press in London brought out Mr. Moraes' first book of poems: he was 19, and the book bore the appropriately workmanlike title, A Beginning. It won him the Hawthornden Prize for the "best work of the imagination" in 1958, and Mr. Moraes remains the first non-British winner of this prestigious award, as well as its youngest recipient.
Mr. Moraes became established as a serious poet with his third volume, John Nobody (1960) and followed this with a chapbook, Beldam & Others (1967). He then passed into a phase of poetic silence, during which he felt the energies of mystery and lyric had deserted him; he could not shape thought and image into verse, although he remained haunted by the memorable characters he had created, the sinister gardener, the innocent prince, the wizard trapped in glass, the innocent sinner, the self-mortifying saint. In these years of exile from poetry, Mr. Moraes edited magazines in London, Hong Kong and New York, covered the first mass-media trial (that of the Nazi death-camp commandant Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem) and several wars, spending time in Israel and Vietnam and working for the United Nations. During the 1980s, Mr. Moraes returned to the city of his birth, and gradually, the poetic impulse returned. Even while he kept up an astonishingly prolific output as a columnist for the daily newspapers, he wrote accomplished poems that were all the sharper for his prolonged dormancy. These have since been brought together in his Collected Poems (1987), while his more recent poems have appeared as Typed with One Finger.
Mr. Moraes never quite overcame his repugnance at the regressive features of Indic culture, the bigotry and violence of the sub-continent's social formation. Towards the end, even as he regarded the rise of majoritarian intolerance with horror and thought the country's future bleak, he achieved a certain compassionate equanimity towards its people, a positive sense of identification with their struggles and aspirations. In a reciprocal gesture, the literary culture that had long rejected him, to the extent of excluding him from anthologies of Indian literature, recognised him with awards, and more importantly, with a revival of serious attention in his writing.
The Long Strider is the title that Mr. Moraes and Ms. Srivatsa gave to their book on the 17th-Century English traveller and mystic, Thomas Coryate, who visited the court of the Emperor Jehangir and died in Surat. Considering the distance that Mr. Moraes covered, from his early position of self-declared alienation from India, and his intricate negotiations with the conditions of home and elsewhere, self and the other, this would serve as a fitting description of his own life. Mr. Moraes was a poet who nurtured his gift despite the workaday demands of prose, who fought his inner demons and gave a candid account of these encounters, and who distilled these struggles into haunting phrases and compelling images. His candour, just as much as his brilliance, will ensure that he is remembered by generations of readers of poetry.
Nazareth, Peter
Folks,
I thought someone would respond to Ranjit Hoskote's fine tribute to Dom Moraes but nobody has.
I recall Ranjit Hoskote telling me that he had a Goan connection. I forget now whether it was that his family was Goan but left for Bombay, where he was born. At any rate, he is someone Goans shoiuld be proud to claim: read Wikepedia's entry on him.
As for Dom Moraes: when I was writing my first novel in Uganda, I looked through Dom's poems and his first autobiography to see if I could find a suitable title and epigraph for my book but I did not find any. It may be ironical that I subsequently found my title in TS Eliot's classic "The Waste Land", from which I also took my epigraph. There is an echo of this epigraph in the last in a series of epigraphs I used for my critical book "In the Trickster Tradition: The Fiction of Andrew Salkey, Francis Ebejer and Ishmael Reed", taken from the Trinidadian poet and scholar, Wayne Brown.
Peter Nazareth
Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2011 5:50 PM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [GOABOOKCLUB] Dom Moraes
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Albertina Almeida
(M) 09326137682
" In a world of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" - George Orwell
saxtti viegas
V M
Ranjit Hoskote touched on his Goa connections in an extraordinarily perceptive essay written for the historic art show 'Aparanta' in 2007: http://mattersofart.net/lead68_b.html
Some relevant passages below.
Incidentally,Hoskote has just returned to India from curating the first-ever Indian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, to great acclaim. We are lucky that he too will be in attendance at the ICG Litfest in December: http://www.goaartlitfest.com/galf2011/participatingauthors_2011.htm
Best,
VM
"This is perhaps the place to introduce a forgivably
autobiographical note into this curatorial essay,
since I have been playing among voices in the
foregoing: sometimes acting the part of the
bewildered Indian viewer, sometimes speaking
candidly through the mask of the Goan artist. In
truth, when I come to Goa, I come to one of the
several homelands, along with Kashmir and South
Canara, that my migratory ancestors offer me; I
come, less collectively and more personally, also,
to the region where, though Mumbai-born, I spent
the first seven years of my life.
When I speak of art in Goa, it is as one who is both inside
and outside the frame: my family temples of Mangeshi and
Shantadurga, with their distinctive Indo-Iberian layout and
architecture, are situated here; two of the multiple branches
of the ethnic group to which I belong, one Hindu and the
other Catholic, pursue their destinies here.
the impress of a Rousseau-style early schooling at a
wonderfully, madly experimental school in Margao helped me
withstand the rigours of the formal, colonial-epoch school
that I later attended in Mumbai. And when I ask myself why I
am instinctively at home in the squares, gardens and avenues
of Central and West Europe, it is because these so closely
resemble the public architecture and urban topography that
surrounded me as a child, growing up in the Goa of the early
1970s. "
Jeanne Hromnik
Nazareth, Peter
Dear Jeanne,
I did not know Dom Moraes had come to East Africa.
I had read his selected poems in a Penguin volume of four young English poets. To me, he seemed to have achieved the impossible that I was being trained as an English honours student (at Makerere) to aspire to: to be recognized in England as a writer. (I did not know at that time that studying English literature did not prepare you to be a creative writer--Leeds University was not the slightest bit interested in my two radio-plays produced by the BBC while I was a student there.)
I enjoyed Dom's "Gone Away", but it did not speak to my experience. I thought some parts were amusing but superficial--maybe he took on the pose of the superior upper class Oxbridge student. [Fast forward: I met Stephen Spender at a party at Northwestern University in 1973 and mentioned Dom to him, knowing that he had once been Dom's mentor, but he expressed no interest in Dom.]
I mentioned in an earlier message that it was Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a friend at Makerere and at Leeds, who told me that it was time I started writing about Goans, and he urged me to write a novel. I wanted to write about Goans not as a bubble within Africa but as part of Africa, as a people and culture that could contribute to East Africa and also provide a perspective to East Africans since we experienced (through our families) at least three colonialisms: Portuguese (with old roots), British (in East Africa), British (slightly earlier in India) [in my case, I would add a fourth--British in Malaysia, which was already Independent while East Africa was not]. You will see these different perspectives in my two novels. Of course, as the novelist Raven Quickskill says in Ishmael Reed's novel "Flight to Canada", "It's a mystery, history." The protagonist/narrator of my novel "In a Brown Mantle" uses the history of Goan defeat as an excuse for his moral weakness--in contrast to the saintly Pius who is so morally and politically strong, because he draws from the Goan history of resistance against oppressors, he is willing to die for his beliefs.
Incidentally, there is much Goans and Goan writers can learn from African writers. Edwin Thumboo, the unofficial poet laureate of Singapore, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on African poetry because he wanted to learn how African poets had done it in order to do his own writing. I read and wrote about the work of Wole Soyinka (Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1986) whose plays and poems are very funny and political and philosophical: he is a Yoruba, and the Yoruba people have an old culture of over two thousand years and have produced several writers in the Yoruba language--Yoruba culture is philosophically very complex.)
Best.
Peter
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 4:30 AM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [GOABOOKCLUB] Dom Moraes
Nazareth, Peter
Dear VM,
Thank you for the info. Ranjit has been brilliantly productive since I got to know him in Iowa in 1985! It is significant that he sees his Goan grounding as providing a home and a springbord for reaching out to the world, and at the same time making his discoveries available to Goa and Goans.
My family in Malaysia (when I met some of them in Kuala Lumpur in 1986) seemed to see me as someone who had been absent from them and not as someone who had been positively present in Africa, interacting with Africans and African culture
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2011 10:17 PM
MUMBAI, JUNE 2. The celebrated poet, Dom Moraes, who had been suffering from cancer for several years, passed away at his home in Mumbai this evening. Having refused to submit to the rigours of diet and treatment demanded by his affliction, Mr. Moraes decided, in the words of Dylan Thomas, a poet with whom he shared a love for the archetypal myth and the richly arcane word, that he would "not go gentle into that good night." Instead, with the sentence of extinction hanging over him, he travelled widely across India, a country that was both intimately familiar and forbiddingly strange to him, and producing several books in collaboration with Sarayu Srivatsa, his companion on these geographical journeys that were also expeditions into a complex self.
Throughout his life, Mr. Moraes was alternately attracted and repelled by India, its people, its culture: this tension afforded him one of the most vital impulses of his art, the others being a sense of abiding loss, a search for redemptive love, and a feeling of being permanently in exile, no matter where he went. By a strange paradox, Mr. Moraes travelled far more widely in the jungles, deserts and backwoods of India, in the course of his varied career as a journalist, writer of travel prose and director of documentary films, than many of the critics who attacked him for what they saw as his Westernised contempt for Indian customs and his colonial attitude of aloofness from local realities.
Mr. Moraes was born in Mumbai, then Bombay, in 1938. His father was the journalist and writer Frank Moraes, who became the first Indian editor of The Times of India after independence. Mr Moraes' childhood was exceptionally rich in experience, since he followed his father on his journeys through South-east Asia, Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand. That childhood was also shadowed by the dissensions between his parents, and the gradual descent of his mother into a mental illness that would culminate with her confinement to a care institution. Poetry announced its claim on Mr. Moraes very early: his first poems were written at the age of 12, and came in a stream when he went up to Oxford. At home, Nissim Ezekiel gave him bracing advice on tone and direction; in Britain, which would soon become more of a home than India, W.H. Auden offered him praise and Stephen Spender published his poems in Encounter. The Parton Press in London brought out Mr. Moraes' first book of poems: he was 19, and the book bore the appropriately workmanlike title, A Beginning. It won him the Hawthornden Prize for the "best work of the imagination" in 1958, and Mr. Moraes remains the first non-British winner of this prestigious award, as well as its youngest recipient.
Mr. Moraes became established as a serious poet with his third volume, John Nobody (1960) and followed this with a chapbook, Beldam & Others (1967). He then passed into a phase of poetic silence, during which he felt the energies of mystery and lyric had deserted him; he could not shape thought and image into verse, although he remained haunted by the memorable characters he had created, the sinister gardener, the innocent prince, the wizard trapped in glass, the innocent sinner, the self-mortifying saint. In these years of exile from poetry, Mr. Moraes edited magazines in London, Hong Kong and New York, covered the first mass-media trial (that of the Nazi death-camp commandant Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem) and several wars, spending time in Israel and Vietnam and working for the United Nations. During the 1980s, Mr. Moraes returned to the city of his birth, and gradually, the poetic impulse returned. Even while he kept up an astonishingly prolific output as a columnist for the daily newspapers, he wrote accomplished poems that were all the sharper for his prolonged dormancy. These have since been brought together in his Collected Poems (1987), while his more recent poems have appeared as Typed with One Finger.
Mr. Moraes never quite overcame his repugnance at the regressive features of Indic culture, the bigotry and violence of the sub-continent's social formation. Towards the end, even as he regarded the rise of majoritarian intolerance with horror and thought the country's future bleak, he achieved a certain compassionate equanimity towards its people, a positive sense of identification with their struggles and aspirations. In a reciprocal gesture, the literary culture that had long rejected him, to the extent of excluding him from anthologies of Indian literature, recognised him with awards, and more importantly, with a revival of serious attention in his writing.
The Long Strider is the title that Mr. Moraes and Ms. Srivatsa gave to their book on the 17th-Century English traveller and mystic, Thomas Coryate, who visited the court of the Emperor Jehangir and died in Surat. Considering the distance that Mr. Moraes covered, from his early position of self-declared alienation from India, and his intricate negotiations with the conditions of home and elsewhere, self and the other, this would serve as a fitting description of his own life. Mr. Moraes was a poet who nurtured his gift despite the workaday demands of prose, who fought his inner demons and gave a candid account of these encounters, and who distilled these struggles into haunting phrases and compelling images. His candour, just as much as his brilliance, will ensure that he is remembered by generations of readers of poetry.
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V M
With your lifetime of experience pondering this matter, I think you've come to something very important with your idea of "positively present."
To cultually and intellectually fluid, globalized Goans like your family members in Malaysia and Kenya, the nature of their colonial experience was to be "forever on the road" (to use a felicitous phrase by Celine). There was no benefit to being a local in the colonial set-up, far better to be sub-colonizer.
That in-between existence is still a characteristic of part of our diaspora, especially the Africanders. Thus, you meet young Torontonians who will describe themselves proudly as Ugandan Goans, despite never having been to Uganda or Goa, and knowing next to nothing about either place's 21st century reality. Quite recently, I met a nice octogenarian lady in Saligao who told me proudly, 'we're from Rangoon, Burma.' Her key identification marker was taken away from her 64 years ago, but its still how she defines herself, a villager with a tiny advantage over he other villagers (in her own mind).
This leads to the very, very common diasporic Goan impulse to say, "I'm not Goan, really," I've come to judge it as the truest Goan marker of all!
"I'm from Bombay, not like those village buggers" and its variants goes all the way to the top, especially the many Goans who have managed to make the transition to get some affiliation with the West. "I'm Portuguese, men," "I'm an American citizen (said as though that means something important).
Goans are much given to heated definitions of themselves that manage to delicatedly skirt the fact that they are just samkem Goemkars after all.
I prefer to remember that we've also produced an impressively long line of people who were/are so very "present" that they fought hard for the freedom of their adopted lands. Here's a brief essay I wrote on the topic: http://www.timeoutmumbai.net/books/book_preview_details.asp?code=148
Best,
VM
Nazareth, Peter
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 9:15 PM
alexyz fernandes
| Hi VM... Must tell you of two 'close' encounters i had with Dom Moraes. I think it was in 2006. It was the first 'Celebrate Bandra Festival ' I was working on my exhibition of 'Caricatures of Eminent Bandra personalities. I met Dom at his Bandra flat. I told him about my visit to include him in my list of caricatures.He was very obliging and gave me a photograph i could use for reference. He also autographed and gifted me his book of poems "Typed with one finger ".He was so soft spoken i had strain my ears to hear him speak. After the exhibition was over I went to his place to gift him his caricature which he graciously accepted with a smile. I had caricatured him as " The Long Strider ". The title of one of his recent books. After some months..I'm not sure whether it was after some months to a year I had returned to my place in Bandra. I heard he had just died. I went to his place to pay my respects. I was somewhat stunned. At the head of his coffin was placed my 'The Long Strider' caricature of Dom. In the evening i went for his funeral at Sewri Cemetry. The other tragedy is Dom Moraes' ancestral and quaintly designed bungalow in Santa Cruz which is in a state of collapse. Without doubt it is of great historical and heritage value. It has to be restored immediately. Or it will go the way of Abbe Faria's ancestral home in Colvale. When Joel D'Souza of Goa Today and I (maybe ten years ago ) had gone to do an article on the village of Colvale...Abbe Faria"s house was already in ruins. But when we passed by after six months or so. The house/ruins was razed to the ground. We later learnt the then parish priest used the stones for some purpose in the Colvale church vicinity. What a shame .And what a tragedy it would be if Frank/Dom Moraes house went the way Abbe Faria's did. Or should i say died. Alexyz --- On Fri, 8/12/11, V M <vmi...@gmail.com> wrote: |
Nazareth, Peter
Dear Savia,
Did you get the Indian (Writers Workshop) edition? If so, below is the cover of the TSAR (Canadian) edition, 1991. There is a story behind the cover. Moyez Vassanji (the novelist) and his wife (Nurjehan Aziz) were the owners of TSAR Books. Moyez asked me to suggest someone who could design the cover. I suggested Alex Tavares. He was born in Zanzibar, grew up in Goa, studied in Spain, worked in Kenya, and lived in Canada. I had not met him but my brother John said (seeing a piece on him in Goa Today) that he (Alex) reminded him (John) of me. My friend Horace Vaz and his wife Margaret in Toronto knew how to get in touch with Alex, so I did. He invited my wife, Moyez and me to his place to have lunch where he could talk about the cover and show us his paintings. And this was the cover Alex drew as a draft, which he handed over to Vassanji, and he vanished. Moyez asked me to find another person to design the cover but I insisted it had to be Alex so Vassanji shaped the draft into a cover. I heard from my brother that Alex turned up at a Goan conference in Toronto and bought a copy of the novel. The curious thing is that I don't think he read the novel but his wife, a teacher, whom I met at a Harborfront event years before that, bought the Indian edition and read it. I think Alex caught the spirit of the novel from what she read or thought, or maybe by omosis. It does not take much imagination to see that the head looks like that of Idi Amin in a TV set. As a PS: not long after the lunch at his place, he and his wife separated.
The disappearance of Alex fits the spirit of the novel. As one of my students wrote in an essay, everyone in the novel disappears.
I hope the picture does not vanish. If it does, please check Google.
Peter
| The General Is Up |
 |
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2011 8:53 PM
mas...@udsm.ac.tz
Folks:
Being one of the Goans during such a crucial time in the history of East
Africa, I find the phrase used by VM most insulting
"There was no benefit to being a local in the colonial set-up, far better
to be sub-colonizer." A "sub-colonizer" ..... I simply do not recognize
that group at all. Neither, do I remember East Africans looking down on
those those educated or who came from India!
Quite a few of us were like Peter, we had the skills, talents call it what
you want, and African leaders who trusted us, and so we played our part.
So Peter goes to Lira and I go to Sumbawanga to advise on how best to use
the latest satellite technology. There was no question about being
superior to anybody.
So an eighty year old identifies herself as having lived in Burma ... she
may be right, she was the only Goan in that village who had exposure to
Burmaa ... are you not assuming that she felt a notch above the others.
Remarkably, in 1996 up in the Usambara Mountains, I met two Africans who
were Ex KAR, sent there by the British. They were proud that they returned
from Burma ... I could empathize with them ..... but they were part and
parcel of that community in Lushoto ..... like the Goan elder citizen.
Are there Goans of the "in-between person" type. I suppose the one who
feels he is not "An Asian" "An Indian" "A superior catholic" etc. Yes
there are perhaps many. But there are an impressive number of Goans, some
who even contribute to this discussion group, who regard themselves as
normal human being with many strengths and a dose of weaknesses.
First, we are human, then Goans and then we many choices ....... VM I
think you interpretation was a bit flawed.
Peter, I was wondering what you were doing in Lira .... then I remembered
you were Prof Walkers student .... economists are responsible for all the
"mess" and being a Goan makes no difference.
Adolfo
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V M
It is great that you went to Dom Moraes's funeral. Well done.
I must say that Dom seemed happy, or relatively happy anyway, in those final years of his life with Sarayu Srivatsa. For decades before that, he seemed to me one of the unhappiest men in existence, forced to a lot of hackwork for pubs like The Afternoon (run by his old friend Behram Contractor) in order to survive.
It's a source of some considerable embarrasment that he was once assigned to profile me! (I was working for the environmentalist Jacques Cousteau, in my early 20's). When he figured out who I was, instead of doing the story, we walked over to the good old Wayside Inn and drank away the afternoon in its wonderfully dingy atmosphere. He was one of the great drinking buddies, as generations of dissolute Bombay poets can attest.
But Dom also loved Goa, quietly. There are some great photos of him in Panjim taken by his friend Chico Fernandes (of Hotel Mayfair) which surfaced recently in the NT.
It is yet another towering disgrace that this inarguably great Indian poet of the 20th century is not acknowledged with a plaque, a road sign, a school or college named after him in his own homeland. It makes me very angry.
VM
V M
Please so not take offense to the phrase "sub-colonizer", it could easily be replaced by any other words which denote the colonial administrative and commercial cadre that the Goan migrants to East Africa (or British India) occupied in the 19th and early 20th century. This is a historical analysis, without judgement or bias.
Also, as my previous short essay on Aquino Braganza should have indicated to you, I am actually deeply appreciative of the Goans in Africa who felt and feel they belonged enough to fight injustice (see: http://www.timeoutmumbai.net/books/book_preview_details.asp?code=148).
The constant slur against the Goans, particularly Catholics - here in India, in Kampala and Beira alike, and right back to the Indian migrant communities in London and Lisboa - is that we have always been toadies to the colonialists, arselickers extraordinaire.
But I must tell you, Adolfo, the more I look at the history, the less evidence there is to support this nasty, pernicious slur that still pollutes our state's politics. In fact, one could say the shoe is on the other foot, the brown on the other's nose!
We Goans have always derived our strength and astonishing capacity to get ahead from being comfirtably "in-between."
Viva the In Betweens!
VM
V M
My point is that the Goan personality is confluential, and can be remarkably fluid. This characteristic is bred of the colonial experience, formed by long generations of diaspora and the necessity to seek opportunity and advantage far away from home.
In previous eras, this capacity of the Goan has been treated as suspect - we have spent a long time being insufficiently Indian for some Indians, and we still contend with rueful Portuguese who regret that we have been insufficiently Europeanized. Just as the colonizers found us ultimately suspect, the colonized also found us ultimately suspect. Our reality is an inconvenient truth that pleases no one.
My point is that it shall remain so, and we should celebrate from the roofops, just as you describe, "the in-betweenness" that "has another potential". That in-betweennesss makes us pre-eminent global culture brokers, see my essay: http://www.supergoa.com/pt/read/news_cronica.asp?c_news=1060
Best regards,
VM
V M
Can you tell us more about your father, who was presumably Frank Moraes's classmate at Oxford? Do you have photographs to share? I have an abiding interest in the Goan colonial elites of the late 1900's and early 20th century, many of who managed to ingeniously recreate themselves on the others side of the "colour bar". Like this 'Karachi Girl': http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/01/karachi-girl.html
Most grateful in advance.
VM
Luis Vas
ABSENCES
Smear out the last star.
No lights from the islands
Or hills. In the great square
The prolonged vowel of silence
Makes itself plainly heard
Round the ghost of a headland
Clouds, leaves, shreds of bird
Eddy, hindering the wind.
No vigils left to keep.
No enemies left to slaughter.
The rough roofs of the slopes,
Loosely thatched with splayed water,
Only shelter microliths and fossils.
Unwatched, the rainbows build
On the architraves of hills.
No wounds left to be healed.
Nobody left to be beautiful.
No polyp admiral to sip
Blood and whiskey from a skull
While fingering his warships.
Terrible relics, by tiderace
Untouched, the stromalites breathe.
Bubbles plop on the surface,
Disturbing the balance of death.
No sound would be heard if
So much silence was not heard.
Clouds scuff like sheep on the cliff.
The echoes of stones are restored.
No longer any foreshore
Or any abyss, this
World only held together
By its variety of absences.
By Dom Moraes
Dom Moraes on 'Absences':
I came back to Bombay from Madhya Pradesh in early 1982, not knowing exactly what I would do next. Leela (the late actress Leela Naidu, who passed away in 2009) had been appointed Editor of a magazine, and was away most of the day. During this time I wandered around the city. I visited scantily stocked bookshops; I walked by the polluted sea. I did this one afternoon, when the tide was low; there were beached boats on the wet sand, and, across the shimmery, gauze-like water beyond, a single island lay, with a look of solitude. There was nobody about. A peculiar shiver ran down my spine, and at first I thought I must be ill. Then I recognized my own symptoms. I had not felt like this for seventeen years.
Certain words and phrases came to my mind. I went home, sat down and began to write a poem; it was about what it would be like if everyone in the world was dead. As I worked, I felt pure power coming out of me. I was concentrated to such an extent that the world around me did, in fact, seem dead: there was only me left, and my writing hand. It was a sensation that I had forgotten, slightly unpleasant, but simultaneously exceptionally exciting. After about four hours, I could not continue any more. I followed an old habit, and put what I had written aside for some days.
During these days I worried; what if, when I went back to the poem, it was no longer there, was no longer as good as I had thought while at work on it? When I returned to my notebook, the two days being up, I found it was still there, and I could see some of what needed to be done. I continued to work on it. It was protean, taking on different shapes as I worked, until at last one strong shape remained.
I typed this out, and called it 'Absences'. It was the first poetry I had written in seventeen years which I felt was poetry. It was like nothing I had previously written, but, partly because of that, I felt once more what Cecil Day Lewis called 'The Poet's inward pride. The certainty of power'... Perhaps I should quote it here. I feel a tremendous pride in it still, not because of its quality, but because it was the precursor of a great deal of new poetry in the years to come, a John the Baptist.
(Dom Moraes, one of India’s best-known poets in English, died in Bandra in June
2004)
Goan exile: in search of an identity
Somebody recently sent me a slim paperback called "A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History". The author has a very melodious name. João da Veiga Coutinho, and the blurb tells me that he was born in Margão, but now lives in Philadelphia. He would seem to be a fairly elderly person, and to have traveled widely in the course of his career. The book is very difficult to describe. On the surface it is a collection of essays and fragmentary prose pieces, but they do not seem to be particularly connected in terms of chronology. What connects them is that they are all to do with the theme of exile. The theme interests me. Wherever I have lived I have felt an exile, and this would worry me less if I knew from where.
The book is about a specific kind of exile: the exile of Goans from their homeland. The author seems obsessive about the great numbers of Goans who have traveled, and in many cases settled, in other countries, and he seems to find this a unique phenomenon. I don’t think it is at all. I have spent the last few months traveling through India in search of a book, and in every state I have visited there is a long history of people who have gone abroad to better their fortunes in one way or another.
Two Asian countries, the two largest, China and India, are like this. They have continually been overpopulated, in the sense that they have always had populations too large to be sustained by the resources and available technologies of the time. So people left their birthplaces, at first to look for a life somewhere else in the country, then, as travel became possible, to look for it overseas.
Wherever one goes in the world today one sees Chinese faces, or some indications of Chinese blood; in many places one sees Indians. Where in India they come from is irrelevant. The numbers that have left Punjab probably equal the numbers that have left Kerala. That Goa has a monopoly on exiles is simply not true. The Indian subcontinent has been left by millions of people over the last two centuries.
But Mr. Coutinho also inquires into the components of an exile, particularly a Goan exile, and he seems to take himself as an example. He says that his childhood memories of Goa are sharp. He recollects the kinds of plants he saw, or smelt, or touched. But he tells us that he now cannot describe them, since throughout his schooldays, presumably under the Portuguese, he was forbidden to use the Konkani words which to him were the natural names for various kinds of flora and fauna. Some part of this book is well conceived, but it is also confused, and it uses too many words to describe what, when it comes down to it, are relatively simple ideas. However, it is a book deeply committed to itself, and some part of it is very well written.
There are several ways to look at Goan history, most of which Mr. Coutinho refutes. What he cannot refute comes down to the simple fact that Goa is a small place, and that for much of its history it was situated on islands, like Bombay before the British. It was therefore more or less cut off from the more important events on the mainland, or they affected it at a second hand. Any event that affected Goa directly, like the Portuguese invasion and occupation, naturally had a more powerful effect on the people that it might have done on the mainland. This produced some curious results. Goan Hindus submitted to conversion but retained their original casts, almost like Talismans.
Goan Christianity had other unique features, amongst them the fact that it was practised with slight local differences from village to village, as Hinduism had been. The territory drifted rudderless for four centuries under Portuguese rule, and during this time many people left it for unmysterious reasons, like the need for employment. In 1961 the mainland once more directly affected Goa, this time by the Indian occupation or liberation or whatever one wants to call it. This has had some fortunate effects and some which are far from fortunate. A great influx of people from the mainland has caused the state to lose the identity it acquired through four centuries of colonisation, the only real identity it had ever had. It has not yet acquired a wholly Indian identity. If and when it does, it will be like any other small Indian state, allowing for local idiosyncrasies. The whole reason for Mr. Coutinho’s quixotic quest will disappear.
Many people have commented on the fact that Goans have a strong sense of their homeland, which is why so many of them return to it.
These remarks have been prompted by the decisions of the two famous and sophisticated Goans to live in the state they were born. Mario Miranda went back to his ancestral house at Loutolim, Frank Simões built a beautiful villa at Candolim. Many other Goans have returned home with less publicity, and of course many other people non-Goans have chosen to live there of late, because it is a pleasant place to live.
All over India and the world there are Punjabis who want to retire to Punjab, Keralites who want to go home. It is a very Indian trait to want to end your life where you started it. In fact, the modern Indian urban population is still close to its rural roots.
People still want to identify with the village of their ancestors. It is worth note the memories of village life that called Miranda and Simões back to Goa, and which seem to inspire Mr. Coutinho in his search for the identity of the Goan exile. But judging from what I saw when I was in Goa last November, soon even the villages may have vanished.
Panjim, Goa
February 14, 1999
The above review appeared in the February 14, 1999 edition of The Herald, Goa
Remembering a Brother -- by Dom Moraes
Brother Pardo became a friend of mine. I sympathised with him because his activities, which were perfectly honourable, evoked mirth from the other boys, and sometimes disgust. For he was also in charge of keeping the school lavatories clean, and here once more he showed the sweepers how he wanted it done by doing it himself. Brother Pardo was bewildered when some boys, as he passed by, ostentatiously turned way, holding their noses. "But why they do these?" he would ask me. "Mahatma Gandhi, he also would keep clean the toilets, no? Why these boys they behave so?" It was difficult to explain to him that the boys were not interested in the examples set by Mahatma Gandhi, or indeed by Brother Pardo. He was still, then, very much of a boy himself, and very easily hurt. He was also very conscious, at the time, that he was not a full-fledged Jesuit father and could never be one.
The reason I, and a few other boys were close to him was because, as well as being responsible for keeping the school clean, he was in charge of the equipment within it, including the cyclostyle machine. When Micky Chagla, now a well known barrister, and I started a magazine called 'The Monthly Review', we had to deal constantly with Brother Pardo, since it was not printed but cyclostyled. A large number of copies had to be done, since it was supposed to be distributed through the entire school, but Brother Pardo would never let us help him or lay a finger on the machine. He guarded it with jealous pride. Though a priest, one felt in him a great need for private possessions. He was provided by the school with a camera, with which he took photographs when there were distinguished visitors or when parents came or prizes were handed out. "I weesh I had my own," he sighed.
He was a small, agile man, in those days, with an unlined and boyish face and a constant air of being harassed in everything he did. He had reason to look like this, for he was always in demand, by the senior priests, by his staff, by the boys; they all wanted different things. If a window was broken or a drainpipe was blocked, he was the person called on to fix it.
He invariably managed. He was good with his hands. They understood tools and implements of labour. As a boy he had worked in the fields, and if I understood what he said correctly, he fought for the Republicans, that is to say a communist alliance, during the Spanish Civil War in the late '30s.
He remained, however, a Catholic; and after the war he decided to become a priest and applied to the Jesuits. It takes 14 years to become a Jesuit priest: Damaso was not very educated; and so they only accepted him as a Brother.
A Brother does not have the duties of a priest. He has rather more; he is there to serve, and Brother Pardo did. I left school in 1954 and went to England. Fifteen years later I revisited St. Mary's with a BBC television crew, and was amazed to meet him once more. He was by now senior in the school hierarchy, simply by virtue of the years he had been there; while other brothers and priests had been posted to other schools and cities, he had remained. He now, in some way I did not understand or question, had a camera of his own; he had a small office of his own. He was still in charge of maintenance and cleanliness and so forth, but he now had assistants. He had also started something which was a combination of an art and an industry. He had started to travel -- and once more I did not understand how all this had suddenly been sanctioned by the school, and paid for by the church.
In Turkey, Greece, and the Middle East, he had seen icons. Icons are the religious pictures which have been painted and in a sense constructed (for some of them need inlay work and the use of gemstones and precious metals), in the near east and in Russia. These belong to the Coptic and Syrian churches rather than the Catholic church proper, but they had fascinated and enthralled Damaso. He had travelled in India and had seen churches so poor that they had no ornaments or decoration whatever. He decided to furnish them with religious art at no cost. He had collected a team of carpenters, painters, and other artisans, and they produced squares and rectangles of painted wood on which reproductions of famous icons were carefully pasted. I cannot say that they looked beautiful, but they were serviceable symbols of religious faith. Damaso supplied poor churches with them.
Brother Damaso Pardo used to practice what he preached IN the middle of July, Damaso Pardo died of a heart attack in his native Spain. I say "native", but it was not really a country in which he had spent much time. He must have been in his 70s when his life of service ended and I would think more than half this time was spent in India. When I first met him I must have been 12 or 13; I was in my first year at St. Mary's High School in Bombay. He was in the main courtyard between the administrative buildings and the senior school, his white cassock hitched up around his waist, with a broom in his hand. He was supervising a group of servants who were sweeping up dead leaves and rubbish, and was showing them by example how to do it. Large numbers of boys watched him, giggling loudly; the idea that a white priest should do menial work was completely beyond them. They could not understand it; they themselves had never done menial work.
I pointed out to him that one of the tenets of the early Christian church had been simplicity an absentation from decorative art. "No, no" he said, "but there must be something to look at in a church, no?" I said "I thought in church you were supposed to commune with God or yourself or whatever without any distraction from the decorations. " He shook his head violently. "No, no!" he agonised. "Look at our churches in Spain! They are full of decorations." Argument was pointless. Damaso had turned this art of his into an industry by selling the icons to people he knew and holding exhibitions of them not only covering his costs thereby but ensuring a profit for St. Mary's. He led a busy social life. If his friends bought the ingredients, he would turn up at their houses carrying a wok-like utensil in which he cooked the Valencian version of paella. He always lamented the unavailability of octopus. As time passed the icons became more sophisticated they looked much better than they had. Damaso had a whole staff making them. In this later years he visited Spain more frequently and came back with gifts and anecdotes. He was as impressed by the modern facilities he found in Spain as an Indian travelling abroad for the first time would have been. He had become Indian over the years, though I don't think he accepted the fact. "I like to hear Spanish spoken to me and to speak it to others," he told me. " It is so marvelously sweet a language. But now I find people in Spain do not understand me when I speak. " He seemed a little puzzled by this and saddened. But nothing could sadden him for long. I did not meet him in the two years before his death, but I shall miss him and it strikes me that if the Catholic Church makes posthumous awards to those who have served it well, it should make some kind of award to Brother Pardo.
( By Dom Moraes )
The writer as a young man
DOM MORAES
WHEN I attained my 40th birthday, an event that in my opinion was more to be mourned than celebrated, a kind person in Bombay told me that I could not now expect to make any new friends. ``Up to the age of 40,''said this philosopher, who was a decade older than I was, ``you easily strike up friendships with other people. But after 40 you find that your friends are all dying off. Then you become wary of friendships, because they only bring you closer to death.'' His remarks made me feel even worse than I already did, and also unimaginably ancient.
But at about that time I became the consultant to a literary magazine in Bombay. I appointed two young men as associate editors. They turned out to be quite other than constant reminders of my mortality. In fact, since they both treated me as though I were their own age, in the early twenties, they acted as my defences against death. They were brilliant, cheerful boys. One of them, Dhiren Bhagat, was killed in a traffic accident in Delhi, with most of his great promise unfulfilled. He was driving his own car, since his driver hadn't turned up on time.
This was a great waste of a valuable person. But David Davidar remained alive. He was a tall, coltish, bespectacled young man, curiously lovable. While Dhiren had abstained from most of the pleasures of the world, David was — at least then — very susceptible to them. He drank a lot and liked to fall in love. He was paradoxically a devout Christian. At that time he lived in the YMCA in Colaba, not far from me. He would often drop in for Sunday lunch. I discovered that he usually stopped at church before this, to attend the morning service.
Our magazine turned out disastrously. The proprietor was a small, tubby Marwari, and a determined alcoholic. He soon found out that he could not afford the simultaneous upkeep of the magazine and his favourite occupation. The printer's bills and the contributors' payments fell into arrears. Finally he ceased to pay our salaries. I made a very strong protest on behalf of the staff.
After this he appointed a former army officer to keep his editors in order. This man, whom we irreverently called Alfie, attempted to enforce military discipline on all of us. The month after his appointment, I once more protested to the proprietor about unpaid bills and salaries.
The next day David phoned me at home to say that Alfie had locked the staff out and ordered everyone to leave the premises. Some people had left property inside the office and David refused to leave till it was returned. ``Alfie says he'll call the police,'' he chuckled happily. ``Shall I break the door down?'' Seriously alarmed, I told him under no circumstances to move a muscle until I came. After a quick phone call I hastened to the office.
Here Alfie and several policemen were arguing with David and the rest of our people. Pieces of the office door were strewn all over the floor. ``I couldn't resist it,'' David explained to me with the smile I always found irresistible. Alfie seemed to resist it without too much difficulty and told me we were all under arrest. The call I had made to my friend the Police Commissioner now bore fruit. A senior inspector arrived, and ordered the assembled constables to leave. Soon after this minor triumph, we also left the premises, never to return.
After this David became an associate editor of Gentleman, together with Harish Mehta. The two young men invented a monthly feature. They took turns every month to interview a beautiful film starlet or model over an expensive, often candlelit dinner, paid for by the office. David's first such dinner, with a then famous model, caused him to tell me enthusiastically that he loved her. I was not unused to these confessions. I suggested that he should declare his emotions to her, not me, and should start by asking her to a meal that he paid for himself.
Later David came to tell me the lady had accepted his invitation to dinner. He was to pick her up the following evening. I advised him to be particularly careful about the impression he made on her father, and to take her flowers. He said my ideas in these matters were unoriginal. It was Easter. In the patisserie of a hotel, he had seen a life-size Easter bunny made of chocolate. It cost a lot and with a lavish dinner would exhaust his month's salary, but it was worth it. As to her father, he expected to have a man-to-man talk with him over a drink.
This rendezvous was not a success. Through nerves, he arrived far too early, carrying his gigantic gift with difficulty. The reaction of the family had been one of amusement rather than awe. While the girl got ready, the father rather grumpily offered David a drink from his last bottle of Scotch. In those days a bottle of Scotch was much prized by its owner. But the girl took time to dress, David's nervousness increased and by the time she appeared the bottle was empty. The father was by then no longer grumpy, but positively hostile.
Later requests for a date were firmly turned down. Soon after this David left Bombay. I missed our long talks about literature, and his youthful presence. He wanted to be a writer and showed me his poetry. When he returned from America he told me he wanted to write a long novel about his clan in Kerala. This has now been published, a decade after he first mentioned it to me, and has been praised. He is already the CEO of Penguin India, but I think he will be more pleased with his book than with his position, and I am pleased for him.
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Dom Moraes
A Reassuring Presence
Vernon's Krishnamurti somehow does not sound like the person I met in Pupul Jayakar's house in Delhi.
DOM MORAES
Star In The East—Krishnamurti: The Invention Of A Messiah
By Roland Vernon
Penguin India
Pages: 336; Rs 295
When I first interviewed Krishnamurti in New York, I was a boy. Every time I asked him a question he asked me the same question back. I was utterly nonplussed by such an evolved technique of evading the point, and the interview got nowhere very slowly. He had been destroying interviewers since before I was born. But I genuinely liked him, for he was as aware of his charisma as I was.
Also present at this interview was Mary Zimbalist, one of the monstrous regiment of protective and possessive women who always surrounded Krishnamurti. Before the interview started, I asked him if I could smoke. (In those days nearly everybody smoked). Mrs Zimbalist said, "He’s allergic to cigarettes." He said, "I will speak for myself, Mary. Most certainly you may smoke."
I lit my cigarette. He started to cough and splutter, almost in a convulsion. I hastily put it out. Mrs Zimbalist glared at me. Krishnamurti had been described as a great teacher. Perhaps this was his way of teaching me.
Later, in India, I got to know him slightly. I was grateful to be able to talk to him privately. He was a beautiful old man, and he carried reassurance in his voice. Whenever we met, I felt soothed: nothing to do with his philosophy. He wrote many books; it was an industry of sorts and has continued after his death. There are now books about him rather than by him. Vernon’s is the latest. Unfortunately it’s little more than a rehash of previous material on him, though better written than most.
Krishnamurti had several affairs with women. A book has been written on his private life. Vernon records this, but also quotes a statement that Krishnamurti made about himself in his last days, which is new to me. It reads, in part, "You won’t find another body like this, or that supreme intelligence operating in a body, for many hundred years."
It somehow does not sound like the person I met in Pupul Jayakar’s house in Delhi. "I only like to read thrillers," he once said to me there. "Pupul does not have any. Can you lend me some? Good! The bloodier the better."
REVIEW
Writing Aloud, But Gently
For the average Mumbaikar, Busybee's columns was their voice speaking
DOM MORAES
Busybee: Jamva Chalo Ji Best Of 1994-95
By Busybee
Oriana Books, Bombay
Rs 150; Pages: 324
Behram Contractor was my friend for over 40 years. He was a friend to many people from many different walks of life. This was curious in a way, since he never appeared to make any effort to acquire these friends. He was physically small, and though he had a wise and witty face, he very seldom spoke at all, as a matter of principle. I myself adhere strongly to this principle. Unless one has something useful to say, one should not say it. So conversations between Behram and myself often consisted of total silence, but it was a comfortable, comradely sort of silence.
Behram had an elegant style all his own. The English of his columns was an artistic creation, communicating perfectly with his readership.
One of the few people to whom he did talk freely was his wife Farzana. She was much younger than he but they were devoted to each other. She nursed him through several illnesses. He was lonely and rather sad before he married her, in spite of all his friends; and she made him happy, though it cannot be said that he consequently became more loquacious than he chose to be.
After his death, Farzana has continued to look after his interests. Behram Contractor was a journalist, who wrote sardonic, often very funny newspaper columns under the pseudonym Busybee. These columns contained a large number of perceptive and brilliantly witty observations on the society he lived in, and his milieu was the city of Mumbai. Moreover, he wrote his columns in an English that the citizens of Mumbai understood.
He wrote in the English dialect that they spoke. He presented himself as a normal citizen of Mumbai. His attitudes were the attitudes of the normal citizen. The faces of ordinary people lit up when they heard the name Busybee, the sobriquet of an extraordinary man who said with irony and wit what they felt; who truly represented them. His following in the city was colossal, and some of the newspapers he wrote for were read only because they carried his column. He loved his city as it loved him. That, paradoxically, was a slight disadvantage, for he was not as well known or as widely read in the other major cities. One might say it was their loss.
For I think my friend Behram was one of the few great journalists of India. He was, in his later years, an editor, but not a very good one. His greatness is mostly shown in his columns. He knew exactly how most of his readers lived, what they were interested in. He knew the hardships that most people in the city suffered, for he had been through them all. He was poor for much of his life. So he was able to address his audience on equal terms. It was more involved with him than with any other writer, living or dead.
I have mentioned that Behram wrote in a version of the English dialect spoken by most people in Mumbai. It is far more difficult to write and sustain dialect prose than it is to write in English as it is taught in schools and colleges. Behram had a perfectly acceptable, often elegant, English prose style of his own. The English of his columns was in a sense an artistic creation, which communicated perfectly with its intended readership.
He often reminded me of Damon Runyon, whose columns in New York papers in the 1920s and ’30s had a demotic appeal not dissimilar to the Busybee columns, ‘Round and About’. Runyon became famous not so much for his columns as for the fiction he later wrote. I do not know if Behram could have written fiction on Mumbai, though he must have had an incredible amount of material for a novel. But the 500-word column was a perfect vehicle for him to write what he wanted in the style he chose.
I do not think that he expected posthumous fame. He once described his columns to me as "ephemeral scribbles". They weren’t. The last and greatest gift his wife Farzana has given him and us is to ensure that Busybee’s diaries have reappeared in book form, each volume limited to a fixed period. The columns represented in this book cover the 1994-95 period, a fascinating and eventful time in Mumbai history.
All historians, when they write, long to have some record of the views of an intelligent bystander who lived through the events of centuries ago: someone who was not an expert, but had good eyes and ears and the ability to document what they heard and saw. Any future historians of Mumbai, if they want a true sketch of the city in the second half of the 20th century, will, if they possess any wits, turn to Busybee as a primary source. They will be not only more enlightened but also more entertained by the account he has left than by any other source material they have ever come across.
Byzantium Beckons
An honest travelogue: across a past enveloped by the present
DOM MORAES
From The Holy Mountain
By William Dalrymple
Harper Collins
Pages: 483; Rs:732
The British are (or were) instinctive adventurers and travellers. Witness the number of outstanding travel writers who have come out of Britain. To their names, that of William Dalrymple has been added in recent years. Dalrymple has a purpose in mind when he sets out on a book, a purpose which is both intelligent and an arrival. His books sometimes turn out to be slightly different from what they started out to be. This is his third book and it is somewhat like his first one In Xanadu, which is in fact subtitled "A Quest". Travel writing has now become a quest, because all the world is known.
There are no undiscovered places left; the mysteries that remain are connected with phenomena largely extant in the imaginations of people. To write a travel book, it is necessary to invent a quest which will take you on it. Alexander Frater, for example, was Chasing the Monsoon when he decided to write about India. Dalrymple has subtitled his new book "A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium".
The area over which the Byzantine emperors held sway has frequently and rather inappropriately been called "the cradle of civilisation". Cradles are supposed to soothe whoever occupies them into an induced sleep; the area once occupied by the Byzantine empire has been notable for its unending unrest. As for civilisation, all it seems to have taught the human race is new ways of genocide. Dalrymple is a very good writer in the sense that his prose style is strong, and can stand up without too much ornamentation; also that it conveys his character, which is highly intelligent, sensitive and observant. When you accompany Dalrymple through a book, you know that in a literary sense you are safe.
He is also something of a scholar, and deeply committed, or at least it appears so here, to his native country, Scotland. He declares his Scotland. He declares his Scots nationality to everyone he meets. He is also, in strange but apparently rooted ways, a Roman Catholic, which was often to his disadvantage in the Christian monasteries he visited. These are part of the Eastern Church and regard the Pope and his followers as heretics. Dalrymple visited various monasteries, including the one at Mount Athos about which Patrick Leight Fermor has written a book. However, Dalrymple's account of this monastery and of others includes a new element. The area covered by the book, having cradled civilisation for centuries, have through the same centuries been making incessant and determined efforts to destroy it.
Dalrymple's hardly an innocent and in his apparently random wanderings in the shadow of Byzantium, he has done two things at once. He has given us an account of what the monasteries, settlements and habits of the followers of the Eastern Church are like. He displays enthusiasm about his discoveries, especially when they have some tenuous relationship with the Catholic Church in Scotland (where it is not, these days, immensely popular). He finds that the singing in one monastery is perhaps a precursor of the Gregorian chant; in some other mountain eyrie of monks he finds the paintings similar to those in early Celtic church art.
Then he makes a discovery which surprises him, though he must know that many before him have made this discovery: monks in ancient, secluded Middle Eastern churches prostrate themselves in prayer, rear ends raised, in exactly the same posture Muslims do nowadays when praying. From this he logically concludes: the way in which Muslims pray is similar to the way in which early Christians prayed. Since the founder of the church or the inspiration, whatever you call it, was a Palestinian Jew, this does not really seem surprising. But his enthusiasm carries the reader with him on his quest for the places across which the long shadows of Christ and Byzantium fell.
The strength of Dalrymple's book is that it is neither exactly a historical work nor a research volume nor a collection of poems. In its own way, it combines all three. As I said earlier, Dalrymple's books often tend to bring him to where he wants to be by ways he does not want to go. The areas he went to are now the killing fields of a quiet war which has gone on, sometimes well--reported, sometimes not, for many years. There have been massacres and genocidal warfare there on a scale that is sometimes not worth a news editor's column inches, but which it is inhuman not to report and record somewhere. Dalrymple found that not only the monks he met but all the villages and townspeople around were seared and scarred by a war not properly reported. He has provided the report of this quiet, deadly, long death; he has recorded it.
To be a good writer takes courage. To be a good travel writer may take more. Dalrymple is a good writer in an absolutely unpretentious way. He does not twist or bounce the language around. He lets it say itself. As a consequence his books are always readable and valuable because what he writes about ultimately turns out to be valuable, whether by chance or choice. The trouble with many good modern minds is they ignore the past. Dalrymple does not and by telling us of the past as it is enveloped by the present he is also telling us of the future. He is not a prophet, simply one of the very few good, and honest writers left.
REVIEWS
A Weak Dose Of LSD
No thrills here, just meaningless tragic frills to a fantasy no one can really fancy
DOM MORAES
The Last Song Of Dusk
By Siddharth Dhanvant Shangvi
Penguin
Rs 395, Pages: 304
Some reviewers, presumably to save themselves the trouble of writing down the full title, have nicknamed this book LSD. It is curiously apposite, for parts of it read as though they were written under the influence of that interesting substance. LSD is ingested by letting it melt on the tongue or sucking it. Many have praised the book and the author too copiously. One might say that it and he have made suckers of them all.
The trouble with his characters is that they are dislikeable and eminently forgettable, one doesn’t wish to partake of their joys and sorrows.
In literature today, mass delusion is a common means to an end. Agents and publishers have colluded to make it a fact of literary life.
When a reviewer declares that a novel contains "magic realism", it generally means that he likes it, and may indeed feel it is a masterpiece. But it is usually difficult to pinpoint what this means. Magic realism is a genre some writers have cultivated in recent years, most successfully in South America, but it is not new. It implies a delicate use of irony and fantasy in its distortion of what exists. It looks through, not into, a mirror to discover its true self.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are classic examples of magic realism. Alice is an ordinary little Victorian girl living in the countryside. Almost by accident, she enters other worlds and meets fantastic creatures. They are mostly grotesque, but have human foibles, somewhat exaggerated. It is possible for her and the reader to relate to them, however eccentric they are. Characters like the White Knight, comic and tragic at once, are drawn from the world she lives in, yet are not of it.
One trouble with Shanghvi’s version of magic realism is that his characters, even those he intends his readers to suffer for and with, are all slightly dislikeable and eminently forgettable. This dilutes any effect their joys and sorrows might have. He showers them with profuse, indiscriminate adjectives. He dowers them with descriptions that (sometimes) seem not only sympathetic but empathetic. But they emerge as puppets, jerkily manipulated against elaborately stylised backdrops.
The heroine, if there is one, is Anuradha Patwardhan, physically every man’s wet dream. She has also, which is unfair, been given by God and Shanghvi an impossibly beautiful singing voice. Her aunt has taught her several CDs worth of literally spellbinding Rajasthani songs. She travels from Udaipur, her home, to Bombay to marry a doctor called Vardhmaan Gandharva, a fantastic storyteller. The gifted couple produces a son, Mohan, fit fruit of their conjoined loins. At the age of three he is an awesome singer and—shades of Yehudi Menuhin—wants to play the violin.
At this point one knows what will happen. This idyll has been presented simply so that it can be broken into, outraged, and finally destroyed. If any other character emerges from the plot, like a snail from its shell, he will not survive unshattered. For starters the child Mohan falls from a tree and dies. After this Anuradha and Vardhamaan move to Juhu. This house was once occupied by a gay Englishman who died there after his Indian lover abandoned him. The house seems to take a dislike to the couple.
They have another son, Shloka. His parents become estranged. The father falls unnaturally silent. So does the child. Considering the general quality of the dialogue, this is perhaps just as well for the reader. I had forgotten to say that this is all set in the 1920s, for no perceptible reason except that it has enabled Shanghvi to invent a dialect for his characters. This is a mixture of English, American, and Indian slang of every decade since the 1920s, and is repulsive beyond belief, as are most of the people who employ it.
The book has a secondary locale, Matheran. Having brought his creations to the resort, Shangvi fills the place with ferocious panthers and rabid hounds. Some of the crucial action of the book occurs in Matheran: poor place, it never deserved to suffer so. Among the countless characters is the painter Nandini. She walks on water, and her family tree includes a black panther. She marries the son of the Governor of Bombay, but her wedding party breaks up when she has an epileptic fit. Such events are fairly frequent. Several characters die along the way. It’s just as well; they are addicted to making statements that aspire to profundity, and it gets tiring. Even Virginia Woolf, who makes a guest appearance, does not say anything interesting. She dislikes Nandini, but that is understandable.
This book is like an echo chamber, full of fragmented voices. One thinks one recognises some of them, but cannot be sure about the rest. Here and there one comes across a passage that is definitely unrecognisable, and by a process of elimination, I deduce that this may be the voice of the person who actually wrote this book. If it is, he has a clear, melancholy talent which may eventually produce good work. All this depends on whether he can get rid of his pretentiousness and shed the habit of believing what most reviewers have said about this novel.
A Dry Course
Most of the people in this book speak as though at an English public school, and the author is as facetious.
DOM MORAES
River Dog; A Journey Down The Brahmaputra
By Mark Shand
Little Brown
Pages: 352; Special Indian Price: £5.50
The 19th century was the golden age for travel books, many of them written in English. Back then large parts of the world map were coloured red, to mark them as British colonies. Substantial portions of these colonies had never been seen by anyone except the original inhabitants. English explorers went into them. They unearthed new species of orchids and spiders; found animals, and even people, whose existence had not previously been dreamt of. They wrote the first accurate accounts of gorillas, pygmies and cannibals.
By the middle of the 20th century few places remained that had not been visited by a foreigner with a typewriter. But travel books were still written about difficult destinations. Very soon hardly any such destination remained; so publishers nowadays demand a gimmick to make a travel book sell. Mark Shand has apparently made some successful expeditions into this territory in the past. Though I haven’t read any of his previous books, I gather his gimmick has been to travel on, or with, a female elephant called Tara.
Shand originally conceived this book as an account of a boat trip down the Brahmaputra, from its source to the sea. An elephant, whatever its gender, would be rather an encumbrance in a boat; so his chosen companion is a dog, the second of two. He loses the first in Delhi, while staying with the Rajmata of Baroda; he borrows the second from a friend in Assam. It is fairly clear he doesn’t need canine companionship so much as a literary prop; but he heavily emphasises the friendly relations between him and his pet.
Indeed, the book contains a very embarrassing dream sequence in which the dog Bhaiti and the writer have a long conversation and declare their undying love for each other. (This, admittedly, takes place after Shand’s smoked a pipeful of opium.) At journey’s end the author returns Bhaiti to his rightful owner without too many tears. He doesn’t really need to have dialogues with a dog, for he is clearly a gregarious and popular man.
His influential friends arrange all the details of his trip. Charles Allen takes him, mostly on foot, to the Brahmaputra’s Himalayan source. Another friend finds dogs for him; yet another searches for a suitable boat. All this while Shand meets and talks to people interesting in varying degrees.
If you subtitle a book "A Journey Down the Brahmaputra," you’re expected to be out on the water, not sauntering down the shore. When Shand boards his first boat, and it floats out on the river, we’re already on page 230. Tribesmen often threatened 19th century travel writers, animals attacked them. By comparison Shand’s trip is a piece of cake.
Not only do his friends arrange his travels from the shore, but when afloat he has a crew to sail his boat and feed him. He suffers a few minor contretemps. He hurts his foot quite badly, but it heals. He has a few harmless tiffs with officials. He unknowingly eats a stew that contains rats. He also eats a poisonous beetle, after his guide has first squeezed its venom out. Hardly the stuff of high adventure.
This kind of travel book needs to amuse and entertain. But most of the people in it speak as though at an English public school, and the author is as facetious. Years ago Eric Newby wrote a very good book on sailing down the Ganges. Circumstances prevented Shand from sailing down the Brahmaputra, but even if he had, I doubt it would have helped "River Dog".
House Of Tradition
English sensibility, Indian ethos
DOM MORAES
The Virgin Syndrome
By Rani Dharker
Penguin
Rs 200, Pages: 196
IN the first chapter of this book, the narrator offers us proof that she is not an inhibited woman. She stumbles in a crowd and falls to the pavement. Unembarrassed, she sits back on her haunches and examines her toenails to check on the polish. While thus occupied, she finds time for a few reflections. "Being an Indian is not easy, you have so many forces coming at you so swiftly you whirl this way and that....
If the beautiful but decrepit house symbolises the burden of tradition, its destruction may be part of a new freedom. Yet, the narrator cannot help but sorrow.
Being a woman is even more special and if you happen to be born into a liberated family you're really in for something."
This is the first page, and she has already told us what the novel is to be about. On the same page she introduces her parents: "Beautiful, intelligent, moving ahead faster than the country." She also describes her seduction, or attempted seduction, by a fellow college student. She chooses him to be her first lover as he is more mature than the other male students: he has a moustache and smokes cigarettes. Once in bed, he invites her to admire his penis, but does not know what to do with it.
That concludes the first brief chapter and, as can perhaps be deduced by now, the novel, into which it leads us moves at speed. An incident takes place, is deflected into a sequence of eccentric musings: then almost without realising it, we are in the midst of another incident. These incidents are mostly to do with the narrator's enormous family, with her career as a resentful schoolteacher, and with her life in a provincial Indian town. Occasionally, the narrative slides out of control. The reader, as though forced on to a rollercoaster, ceases to know where he is, or even to care very much. He is brought back to the book by a sudden sharpness of observation, a happening which surprises him by its delicacy of perception.
What interested me about this very readable novel was that the sensibility of the writer, her processes of thought, the way she perceives herself, are so very Western—more particularly, so very English. This has gradually become observable in good literature written by Indians in English. The first well-known novelists, like Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, had an identifiably Indian sensibility. So in poetry did Nissim Ezekiel. A.K. Ramanujan did not have this, neither, of today's youngish poets, does Jeet Thayil. Most of the current crop of novelists possess a kind of international sensibility. Arundhati Roy is a perfect example of this. But Dharker, like Anita Desai, seems English. This English sensibility is that of an otherwise very Indian woman.
For, a great deal of this book is concerned with matters that would be wholly alien to most Englishwomen. The joint family, or the spectre of it, form an important part of this novel. However liberated Dharker is in the persona of a narrator, the woman who is the I of this book is terribly trapped within the monstrous fetters of Hindu tradition, unimaginably heavy because the elder members of her family have fastened them in her mind.
The book ends in the burning of the ancestral home, cluttered with superstitions, family legends and the bric-a-brac of generations of minds who were all mentally bound to the same wheel of life. If the beautiful but decrepit house symbolises the burden of tradition, its destruction by fire may be an intrinsic part of a new freedom for the narrator. Yet, she cannot help but sorrow for the house. Male writers in English do not seem to have this deep emotional involvement with tradition. For women it will take another generation to disentangle themselves.
The possession of a Western sensibility together with a Hindu psyche must be almost impossible to unravel within oneself. In a sense, that is what Ms Dharker's book is about, and apart from this it is permeated with style, dash and humour. I hope it will have its successors.
Pilgrim's Progress
An intense examination of painter Sabavala's 'otherness'
Dom Moraes
JEHANGIR Sabavala is one of those people who seem elegant in casual
clothes, which for him include a carefully knotted cravat. He is by nature
courteous and can, on occasion, be dryly witty. The more civilised aspects of western culture are embedded not only in his manners but in his mind; he abhors carelessness and unpunctuality, and believes that one should be concerned for other people. He is now 75, and has been painting for most of that time.
Sabavala has always been a painter who looks inside himself
for his sources.In this he resembles European rather than
other Indian painters.
The statements and observations made by his paintings are achieved by
echoes of experience, by hints and whispers from his palette, by
understatement. He is completely unlike any other Indian painter.
Sabavala is also, to my mind, the most distinguished of all living Indian
painters. Many poets have been fascinated by his work. At his best, he
creates a world and a mythology of his own, as some good poets do. He
presents us with nearly barren landscapes, cloud formations above them
that admit a white sear of light; in this light, dunes, serrated by wind,
spread out towards unclear horizons or mountains that look as though they have never been visited. Somewhere in these landscapes are human figures, hooded and in shroud-like cloaks, who embody the beautiful biblical phrase, "men like trees walking." One cannot really judge whether they are moving at all, and if they are, whether they have a destination, or a reason for their movement. Towards what? And away from whom? None of the canvases will tell you.
Many of his landscapes—even they are devoid of human figures and, with austere emptiness, deny any human existence—are mysterious in that they become alive under his brush: rock becomes flesh, veined with water, eyes open in petrified wood. Sabavala's imagination in recent years has also been inhabited by robed, alopecic figures, squat or elongated, which are recognisably human. Gentleness and bereavement appear in their movements, in their expressions. They seem, in some way, to be on a mission, to be healers or carriers of important information.
Sabavala's studies of trees, living or petrified, contain an identical
quality of stillness and sadness. All these figures and landscapes belong
to the same world. Sabavala has always been an artist who looks inside
himself for his sources. In this he resembles European rather than other
Indian painters. And for this reason, he has stood slightly apart from the
others in this country. I wouldn't say that this was a matter of choice.
His work deserves to be evaluated according to high standards; no high
critical standards exist here, and some Indian critics and fellow painters
have denigrated him for no reason except that he seems to come from
another world. The trouble is, of course, that he does.
He was born into a wealthy Parsi family, spent his childhood in travel
through several countries and, for some time, at school in Switzerland. In
early manhood he studied in Paris at the feet of Andre Lhote. After his
return to India, he lived quietly and painted. Unlike many other Indian
painters, he has never known severe financial hardship.
But when his critics assert that Sabavala comes from a world different
from theirs, these aspects of his life are mainly what they mean. I agree
with them that he does, but not for those reasons. His growth has been,
like that of any good artist, secreted within himself, silent, and
unaffected by external circumstances. Out of this a fully conceptualised
vision has emerged, of a world that is not our world but which reflects it
intensely and closely, a world in which grief, suffering, loss, and
endurance are constant factors. No other Indian painter, to my mind, has
been able to concretise his personal vision of what it is like to be alive
as Sabavala, over many years, has done.
So far as I know this book, subtitled The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir
Sabavala, is the first biography of any Indian painter. Ranjit Hoskote, a
young poet and art critic, has written it. To produce the biography,
subtitles of a living person is, as I know from experience, a very
difficult and usually thankless task. Hoskote has carried it off
brilliantly. He has found the correct balance of style in relating the
subject and his work, which is particularly hard in a biography, and he
writes with an authoritative and crisp elegance. He is also exceptionally
well-read, with strongly developed views of his own. Since Hoskote himself has an interesting mind, the text is full of ideas, and maintains its
movement and flow to the end. The well-known English writer and
photographer Richard Lannoy, an old friend of Sabavala's, has contributed an informative and affectionate preface.
A Word For The Wind
That was Nissim Ezekiel, poet, professor and person par excellence
DOM MORAES ON NISSIM EZEKIEL
On January 10, one of the first mornings of a new year, The Times of India told me that Nissim Ezekiel was dead. He had survived nearly 80 mostly tranquil years. But in the last few of them he suffered from Alzheimer's disease. It was a savage way for him to die, for he had always treasured the real world, and for the last few years his illness took it away from him. I did not see him often in these years. The last few times we met, he knew my face but could not place me. I had known Nissim, when he died, for more than half a century.
At our first encounter, in 1952 or 1953 I think, I was 14 or 15, and he had recently come back from England. The Fortune Press had produced his first book of verse, A Time to Change. I read it. By then I had started to read and write poetry, and with less fervour, short stories. Nissim had become the assistant editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India. The editor was Shaun Mandy, who was irascible and Irish, possessed of a good heart but no critical sense. Nissim told me once that Mandy was "a barbaric man". But he was then also about the only editor in India who published poetry and fiction in a serious way.
I sent my short stories to Mandy. He passed them on to Nissim, who seemed to like them. Anyway, he published the two or three I had produced. I wasn't really much interested in writing fiction, and soon stopped. But I then sent Nissim some poems. He suggested that we should meet. When we did, I think he was astonished to encounter a schoolboy in shorts, but very diffidently offered me a cigarette. I felt grateful. He was the first adult to do this, though I smoked at school.
He was then, perhaps, not quite 30, very thin and pale, with spectacles, and long, delicate hands. He had a warm nature that he tried hard to suppress. The result was that he seemed rather prim and clerk-like in his ways. He spoke in the meditative tones of a much older man. He always clutched a bundle of English magazines, or of books, under his arm. My personal acquaintance of other writers was scanty then. I had met the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, a friend of my father's, and also, briefly, G.V. Desani, but Nissim was the first poet I had ever encountered, and he did not fit my mental picture of a poet.
But the poetry he wrote at that time was perhaps the best he ever wrote. It was mostly unambitious in its scope and technique, but his tight rhymed quatrains often worked very well and displayed a wry, dryly mischievous sense of humour and an eye that was observant and sympathetic at once. Some of his poems expressed a strong sexuality that I couldn't really connect with the person I knew. Occasionally he would show me his new poems. I read them with uncritical awe.
Awe was not particularly evident in his reaction to my work. He told me more than once that I should stop writing poetry and continue to try short stories instead. In later years Nissim denied that he had ever said this. But I was an adolescent then, and I clearly remember how suicidal his remark made me feel. But he also suggested I should read criticism, and particularly that of Pound and Walter Bagehot. More dissimilar critics can hardly be imagined, but his suggestion was very useful. Nissim guided my reading habits at that time, except that he disapproved with acerbic contempt my fondness for crime fiction.
I knew that several other young poets showed him their work. He mentioned Kersey Katrak and Adil Jussawalla, neither of whom I met until some years later. I often think now that he should have introduced us to one another. There were very few people in Bombay with whom one could talk about poetry. Indeed, Nissim was the only person I knew with whom this was possible. I don't think the situation has changed very radically since then. Nissim was very important in this way: he gave young poets the feeling that they were not alone.
I left Bombay for England in 1954, when I was 16. Ten years later Nissim came to Leeds University for some months on some kind of fellowship. I used to meet him when he came to London. I tried to introduce him to other poets and to publishers. This wasn't a success. None of the publishers we approached liked his poems. Some poets felt rebuffed by him, because he disapproved of their habits, such as drinking in pubs. "Why can't they drink coffee?" he would ask me. The primness I noticed in him earlier intensified in a strange milieu.
But he was a very good man. Though he could be acerbic in his wit, he possessed a true and pure quality of innocence. I think this is what I most admired in him, and why he leaves so many friends to mourn him. He belonged to Bombay, the Bombay that existed before it was renamed. When I was a boy we used to meet at the Naaz cafe on a rooftop in Cumballa Hill. He would look beyond the chairs and tables to the open sea, a cigarette in his long fingers, and smile his kindly smile, contented with this time and this place. He had the gift, given only to a few people, of being happy with small and humble things.
Architecture Of Hope
"Advani thought this was a costly Japanese project. When he realised it was Indian and cheap, he said he would not have believed it had he not seen it."
DOM MORAES
Around the town of Morvi in Gujarat, the fields are drab and mostly, nowadays, show no traces of the plough. Sometimes they are strewn with rubble where, until the earthquake that celebrated last Republic Day, villages stood. Very few livestock can be seen. Grey with dust, hunched as though exhausted, the occasional trees, under hot breaths of wind, mutter like resentful refugees. The shrivelled rivers do not seem to move. At noon the crimson eye of the sun squints down at a landscape in stasis. The rains will soon come, but the villagers dread them; they may spread further chaos when they do.
We've come from villages reduced to rubble. In their narrow lanes, the debris of human habitations has piled up higher than a man's head. Former inhabitants live among the ruins, or in tents supplied as relief. They seem to await a miracle. So far, people have come with promises, none of which have been kept. The state government, resolved on inanition in the days immediately after the earthquake, firmly pursues this policy. The ngos and private firms who adopted villages have not yet had time to rebuild them.
Near Morvi, a swami has erected a small settlement of prefabricated houses that won't stand much stress. Some rich patels are trying to patch up their wrecked houses, or to rebuild them on the same collapsible lines as before. The houses are some distance from each other, "for caste reasons", Vishal Jadeja tells me. "Caste is very important here," he says. "Very few people want their villages relocated, because they love the land. But they may want people of lower caste, or Muslims, excluded from villages that are rebuilt. We can only try and sort it out."
Down another dirt road, we arrive at Ravapar Nadhi village. It once had 573 inhabitants, including a Muslim family, and 14 Hindu temples dedicated to various deities. Unlike the wrecked hamlets nearby, the place has returned to life. People are putting final touches to a collection of 108 small, unattractive houses built to survive cyclones and earthquakes. They were put up in 30 days and on April 19 the people moved into their new homes. Children wave as we enter the village; adults smile at us under the sullen sun.
Vishal, at least in his Mumbai incarnation, is a gregarious young man with a lively social calendar. Ever since the temblor, he's been at Morvi, working for the Mayur Foundation to rehabilitate villagers. Ravapar Nadhi, he tells me, was named after an ancestor of his, who ruled Morvi state. "That wasn't why we chose it to be our example of how a village could be built quickly, cheaply. It was simply a badly-damaged community that needed help." The village is on the banks of the Macchu river, which in 1979 flooded and devastated the area. "I was only a kid then."
His aunt Purna, clad in a yellow sari, remarks: "That was when the foundation was started, to help the local people. We felt it was our duty." Its trustees are members of the former royal family: former Maharani Vijaya Kunverba; her daughters Meera, Maya, Uma and Purna; and her grandchildren Lia, Dubash and Vishal. They've been greatly helped by Vasant Pandit, a young man whose mobile phone seems as much part of him as his pigtail. Pandit is the secretary of the Deendayal Research Institute, and an old friend of the Morvis.
Purna is married to the Honourable Garech Browne, and lives in Ireland. "I was able to collect £70,000 there. We're spending part of it on the project village.We're also building a hospital at Morvi, and starting a fully-equipped mobile clinic." She wanders away with a local photographer, towards where the light, hollow blocks of which the houses are made are being manually manufactured. "I need to send pictures back to Ireland," she says. "There's been a lot of sympathy there."
In a building intended to be a marriage hall, we shelter from the sun. Pandit is with us, as is village sarpanch Shaktisinh. He sports an aggressive moustache and a red shirt. Also present is an old man from a tribe of cattleherders, Kodagova, and several other people who watch and listen, but do not speak. "The district commissioner formed a committee of villagers," Pandit says. "These people are on it. There's one from every caste in the village, and also one woman, the schoolteacher. We've worked closely with them, consulted them in everything we've done."
He has written a booklet in English about the model village. This describes in detail the cheapness of the scheme and the speed it was executed at. "All the labour came from the village," he says, "except for the masons. We formed a team of local planners and architects before we started work. We didn't know much about building, neither did the villagers. But we respected the villagers' suggestions and were able to help them." Kodagova, who has white whiskers and kind eyes, says: "Only these people helped us." The foundation invited L.K. Advani to come and see what it had done. Pandit's booklet had attacked the government and the ngos of inefficiency and of having no guidelines. "In his speech, Mr Advani held up a copy of my booklet and said the government would tell ngos to use what it said as their guidelines. He said he had thought the project had originated in Japan and was expensive. He found it was Indian and cheap. He said he wouldn't have believed it had he not seen it with his own eyes."
Then Shaktisinh made a short speech. He said the villagers had had differences before. But they'd all suffered equally when the village was destroyed and worked together to rebuild it. Now, he said, all differences would be forgotten and the village would be happy for the next century. I doubted this. But when I looked at the weathered faces of the villagers, who hadn't been paid to smile but were, I felt elated myself. In this small, dusty, unappealing village, something remarkable had been achieved. Only a few people knew about it, but I was glad to be one of them.
THIS ABOVE ALL
Requiem to Dom Moraes
Khushwant Singh
DOM MORAES died of cancer over three years ago on June 2, 2004. He was buried in the Sewri Christian cemetery in Mumbai. He had never been a practising Christian. Though he was born in Mumbai and was as dark as a Goan Indian, he regarded himself an Englishman, spoke no Indian language and wished to be buried in the churchyard of Odocombe, a tiny village in Somerset—for the simple reason that one Thomas Coryate, who belonged to the village, had in the 17th century walked all the way from England to India and died in Surat, where he was buried.
Dom and his lady companion during the last 13 years of his life, Sarayu Srivatsa, went to Odocombe to collect material on Coryate’s background to write his biography.
Dom published 10 collections of his poems and 23 books in prose on his travels to different parts of India and the world. He was rated the first among Indian poets writing in English. I found his poetry beyond my comprehension but read all his other books as I regarded his prose as good, if not better, than any written by his contemporaries. Somehow, I had missed out his last book written jointly with Sarayu Srivatsa, Out of God’s Oven: Travels in a fractured land (Penguin-Viking).
It was published in hardback five years ago. I read its paperback edition published recently. That is my excuse for writing a second requiem to Dom (or Domsky, as he was known to his friends). I also knew his father, Frank Moraes. The father and son were close to each other as Dom’s mother became violently insane and died in a lunatic asylum.
I befriended Dom from his years in Jesus College, Oxford. He often visited me in London. I stayed with him and his then wife, the beautiful actress Leela Naidu, in Hong Kong. Both visited me frequently in Delhi.
Dom was a complex character. He disliked everything about India, particularly Indians. The only exceptions he made were good-looking women he took to bed. Yet his description of the Indian countryside, the heat and dust-storms of the summers and the monsoons are lyrically beautiful. His characters come alive. Despite his ignorance of Indian languages, he was able to comprehend what they were saying in their dialects and in Indian English. He was not choosy about his women: if any was willing, he was ready to oblige.
He is said to have married three times. His second wife Judy bore him a son. I don’t think Dom paid for his education. I am not sure if he had civil or church weddings and court divorces. In any event, he did not pay alimony to any of his women. He never earned enough to do so. It appeared that the only real love in his life was Sarayu Srivatsa. She was visibly shaken by his death.
Sarayu is a Tamil Brahmin married to a Punjabi and mother of two children. When David Davidar of Penguin-Viking asked him what he found in his new lady friend, Dom replied in his usual style: "She has such big boobs." There is more to Sarayu than her shapely bosom. She thinks like him, writes in the same style and adored him. She was his soul mate.
Like his father, Dom was a heavy drinker. At the best of times he spoke in a low mumble, hard to understand. I asked Mrs Gandhi, whom he interviewed many times to write her biography, if she understood what Dom was saying. She beamed a smile and replied: "No, Leela Naidu translated it for me". After she read Mrs G, she snubbed Dom for a few words of criticism he had written.
Because of his love for the bottle, Dom could not be depended on for meeting his deadlines or sticking to the subject on which he was commissioned to write. Ram Nath Goenka of The Indian Express sacked him because instead of going on his assignment in the North-East, he spent his time in a Calcutta hotel drinking and in the company of a lady. His friend R.V. Pandit fired him for drinking in his office in Hong Kong. The Times of India appointed him Editor of a magazine they intended to bring out. They fired him before the first issue came out. He vent his spleen on poor Prem Shankar Jha, who was appointed in his place as Editor, by grabbing him by his tie and asking him: "Fatty boy. What do you know about journalism?"
I got him an assignment from Dempos, shipping magnates and mine-owners of Goa. Dom produced a highly readable book on Goa without mentioning the Dempos. I had to add four pages on the family. He was commissioned by the Madhya Pradesh Tourism Department to do a book on the state’s historical sites. He did a memorable job on the beauty of the landscape and its tribal women without bothering about historical sites. Dom never allowed facts or the truth to stand in the way of the flow of lyrical prose. He did not write reference books; instead, he painted pictures in vivid colours to the songs of flutes.
Out of God’s Oven is an excellent sample of Dom’s writing in partnership with Sarayu. His contempt for everything Indian finds easy targets for what he hated most—the resurgence of militant Hindu fundamentalism in the Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the BJP and the RSS. Sarayu is gentler with her characters and tends to caricature rather than castigate them. Between them, they traverse the length and breadth of India, interviewing poets, writers, editors, film-producers, Naxalites, Ranbir Sena leaders, dacoits and politicians. Once you begin reading the book, you cannot put it down.
REVIEW
A Requiem To Domsky
Dom Moraes (Domsky to his friends) is not easy to read. While his prose was limpid and lyrical, his poetry tended to be somewhat obscure as the works of many modern poets.
KHUSHWANT SINGH
Dom Moraes' interest in poetry started very early in his life. In his preface to this collection, he writes, "I was about ten years old when I started to read poetry.... I had an instinctive feel, even at that age, for the shape and texture of words." By the time he was 14, he began to write it himself. He learnt French in order to be able to read Villon in the original. Poetry became a lifelong passion. But for a longish break (1965-1982), he continued to write till the end of his life over a month ago. It would appear that the writer's block which had lasted 17 years was finally overcome when he met Sarayu Srivatsa to whom he dedicated this collection.
Dom Moraes (Domsky to his friends) is not easy to read. While his prose was limpid and lyrical, his poetry tended to be somewhat obscure as the works of many modern poets. His words have resonance but you have to read every line two or three times before you can comprehend their meaning. People brought up on simple rhyming verse like Twinkle, twinkle, little star will find Domsky's poems obscure. However, one can detect a few themes which recur consistently. He was obsessed with death. The hawk was his symbol of doom. His mother's insanity haunted him all his life. He sought escape from it in hard liquor and making love. He sums it up in A Letter:
"My father hugging me so hard it hurt,
My mother mad, and time we went away.
We travelled, and I looked for love too young.
More travel, and I looked for lust instead.
I was not ruled by wanting: I was young,
And poems grew like maggots in my head."
With the arrival of Sarayu, he turned to writing on love but death remained a permanent fixture. We are not told how and when he fell in love with her. The confession is made in Fourteen Years.
"Fourteen years, the same mixture
As when first I met her:
...Her breasts always ready:
Mindmarks and handmarks on each other:
I study the landscape of her body
As architect, husband, and brother."
He confirms their love remained unabated.
"Under our feet the harsh subcontinent
where you and I were born,
...Eight years I have inhabited your weather,
the clear and darker seasons of your mind.
We have been more than married. It was meant.
We've lived in each other. It was meant to be."
Domsky was stricken with cancer but refused to undergo chemotherapy. He almost wallowed in the prospect of an early end with the ghost of his insane mother hovering over him.
"From a heavenly asylum, shrivelled Mummy,
glare down like a gargoyle at your only son.
...That I'm terminally ill hasn't been much help.
There is no reason left for anything to exist.
Goodbye now. Don't try to meddle with this."
Dom Moraes died in his sleep in Mumbai on the evening of Wednesday, June 2, 2004. He was only 68. With him died the best of Indian poets of the English language and the greatest writer of felicitous prose.
Gone Away, Dom Moraes
Rahul Singh
DOM MORAES died in his sleep in Mumbai just the other day. He was only 65 years old. Though he produced a substantial body of work in both poetry and prose, not to mention journalism, one felt that his best years were still ahead of him. He had not fulfilled his immense potential.
He was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago. The doctors advised immediate treatment. But he knew the debilitating effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. He did not want to be deprived of his full faculties and so refused treatment.
"Look what happened to Frank," he told me soon after the cancer diagnosis. "I don’t want to go like him."
Frank Simoes was, like Dom, a Goan. He was also a writer but had spent too much time in advertising and only began to do some good creative writing in his later years. He spent the last months of his life sick and in bed. The cancer defied the chemotherapy treatment. He, too, was in his early 60s.
Dom had the potential of being a great writer, among the best of his generation. Yet, he did not reach the heights of a V.S. Naipaul or a Salman Rushdie, which he had the potential to do. Once, about 20 years ago, Naipaul was passing through Bombay. He was at a loose end and rang me up.
"Come along for dinner with me. A friend, Hiro Shroff, has invited me and I’m sure he won’t mind me bringing you along," I suggested. He tagged along and we entered the party rather unobtrusively, nobody recognising Naipaul. Both of us happened to sit next to Behram Contractor, a master of gentle satire (he also died some time back) in the Bombay papers, who wrote under the pen-name of Busybee. Behram, who had already had a few drinks, introduced himself and asked Naipaul who he was and what he did.
"My name is Vidia Naipaul," came the reply. Behram pondered over this, with a look of wonderment. "You’re not the V.S. Naipaul, the famous writer?" Naipaul admitted he was. "You’re a very good writer," responded Behram after a pause, "but Dom Moraes is a better writer than you are." Without a word, Naipaul turned his back on Behram and started talking to me. Later, Behram complained to me: "Your friend, Naipaul was so rude to me." "What did you expect," I laughed. "You can’t compare Dom with Naipaul."
Behram was, of course, wrong. Naipaul, who went on to win the Nobel Prize, was in a different class altogether. But had Dom led a less wayward and more disciplined life, I am convinced he could have been close to that level. He handled the English language as few others could.
But sadly Dom’s enormous early potential was frittered away. At the age of 19, when he was still a student at Oxford University, he won one of the most prestigious prizes in poetry, the Hawthornden Prize. He was the first non-Britisher and the youngest to win it. He was lauded by the likes of Auden and Spender. Even earlier, he had written an acclaimed book on cricket, one of his enduring passions.
Soon after Oxford, he travelled to India with a university friend of his, the blind writer, Ved Mehta. Ved wrote Walking the Indian Streets and Dom Gone Away. If I recall right, E.M. Forster, the renowned author of A Passage to India who was then an honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, wrote a glowing account of Gone Away in a leading English paper.
A brilliant literary career awaited Dom. Somehow, it never materialised, despite a series of books, on Indira Gandhi, on the population issue, on his upbringing (My Son’s Father, perhaps his most lyrical and touching work), on India after half a century of independence (In God’s Oven) and on an unusual character who, in the 17th century achieved the incredible task of walking all the way from England to India (The Long Strider).
Too much alcohol and too many women in his life were his undoing, as have been the undoing of so many good writers who could have been great writers.
Return To Reticence
Silence was like a cancer—he fought it in erratic flashes of brilliance
ANIL DHARKER ON DOM MORAES
A couple of years ago, Sarayu Srivatsava, Dom Moraes' companion for the last 13 years, rang to ask if I would help to launch their book. "Dom is keen that the three of us have a 'conversation' about Out of God's Oven." It was a strange conversation. I asked a few questions about the writing of their book on 'India's fault lines'. Dom's answers were an interviewer's nightmare: monosyllabic or Morarji Desaiish (a question to answer a question). Faced with a packed British Council auditorium, it was soon desperation time. "Hey," I wanted to say, "This was your idea, wasn't it?" So I turned to Sarayu, ignored Dom as much as possible and the evening was salvaged. Barely.
Was Dom being rude? He wasn't: he was just being himself, a prolific writer who never gave in to the writer's favourite indulgence—talking about himself and his craft. Over the years, caught in some boring National Day reception, or a literary party packed with too many hungry writers, he would tell me (eyes darting with mischief, a smile playing around his mouth) an amusing story about some writer or the other. In the hundreds I heard, he was never the centrepiece. The "I" was always only an observer. But the observer had a sharp eye for detail, especially the detail which revealed the fragile egos of literary men and women.
If he wasn't so reluctant to talk about himself, I would have asked him why for such a prolific writer, he wrote so little. Let me explain that. Dom Moraes wrote 30 books—which is a lot. But of these, only five were volumes of poetry, which is very little. His first book of poetry, A Beginning, came out in 1958 when he was 19 and promptly won the Hawthornden Prize for the best work of the imagination. His second, Poems, came out in 1960 and was the Autumn choice of the Poetry Book Society. In 1965, his third book of verse, John Nobody, appeared in England to much critical acclaim. Then there was silence, which lasted until 1983.
The silence wasn't really a silence because in the interim period, there was a huge flurry of activity: extensive travel, editorship of publications, a UN assignment, prose books and even war reporting. That last bit on his CV was astonishing to anyone who knew him. After all, you expect a war correspondent to go where no man has dared go before, you expect aggression and, perhaps, bluster. Dom, on the other hand, was quiet, reserved almost to the point of being shy. Yet his reports for the London Times on the Communist massacres in Indonesia were highly perceptive, brilliantly written with an underlying compassion. Even on this subject, he never told a boastful story, wanting to remain as self-effacing as possible.
His one dramatic moment was a young man's gesture. When India liberated Goa, he made a public renunciation of his citizenship and turned in his passport. It was something he was to regret soon. "But in the Square today," he wrote in John Nobody, referring to Trafalgar Square,
I dream of hawks
Of doe like girls, the sun endless delays,
Bullocks and Buicks, statesmen like great aucks,
And I grow homesick for an Indian day.
But there, last year, a moral issue arose.
I grabbed my pen and galloped to attack.
My Rosinante trod on someone's toes.
A Government frowned, and now I can't go back.
But he did come back in 1979, became a part of Mumbai and through his columns, a part of India which despaired at the direction the country was moving. This concern brought about Out of God's Oven (co-authored with Sarayu), which recounted first-hand accounts of some of the terrible landmarks in our recent history, like the killings in Gujarat, the demolition of Babri Masjid, terrorism in Punjab and caste wars in Bihar. His association with Sarayu transformed him. He gave up whisky, a romantic fixture from his early days in England:
My income and my debts remain the same.
Still, I can feed my typewriter each day.
My agent tells me that I have a name.
An audience waits, he says, for what I say.
My audience!—kempt, virtuous, and strange:
those delicate flushed girls with eyes like stars,
so lately come from college,
long to change the creature they observe in dingy bars.
The creature they observe sways where it stands,
Lifting uncertain arms as if to bless.
Even so great a gesture of the hands
Can hardly hold so vast an emptiness.
In his last years that emptiness suddenly seemed to have disappeared. Book upon book followed, prose and poetry. Had Dom suddenly become aware of his mortality and become conscious of so much unfinished business? Or had he, mysteriously, been revitalised and had, creatively, become young again?
When it was discovered he had cancer, he decided that he wasn't going to let it dominate him. He refused the conventional and extreme forms of treatment, led as normal a life as possible and embarked on one new venture after another. At the end, he was working on at least two books, possibly more. He fought the disease with the weapon he knew best, which was to write and write and then write some more. The victory was almost his in the end.
Anil Dharker is a journalist, writer and friend of Dom Moraes
BOOK REVIEW
A cynical, idealistic melange
Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land, by Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa
Reviewed by Jason Overdorf
Honesty, they say, is its own reward. And it's a good thing, too, because it rarely wins many friends. In his latest book on India, Out of God's Oven, poet and journalist Dom Moraes wields candor like a bludgeon, confessing at the outset: "In 1980, [my return to India] had sounded like a prison sentence ... I sympathized with the poor, but too many of them existed. India had the most brutally stupid middle class in the world."
Critics from that disparaged group have responded in kind, taking Moraes to task for his pessimism, his anglophilia and, generally, for writing like a foreigner. The small praise given Out of God's Oven has been parceled out to his co-writer Sarayu Srivatsa, a woman whose relationship with "home" is less ambivalent. But it is a mistake to accept either writer's pose - charitable ingenue or cantankerous snob - too readily. These are devices, and terrific ones, for examining what the writers refer to as "terrible landmarks in Indian history". The pairing of the cynic and the optimist gives these "travels in a fractured land" a dramatic urgency, as grim event after grim event threatens, by education, to make the lark more and more like the owl.
The book's title, which derives from a story Srivatsa's grandmother told her to explain India's oppressive caste system, captures the essence of that struggle between innocence and experience. The first men the gods made were burned dark brown in the gods' hot clay oven, grandmother says. They became the Shudra, the pariah. Once the gods perfected the recipe, they made the beautiful, fair Brahmin. If I am a Brahmin, the young Srivatsa asks her grandmother, then why am I so dark? Just as Moraes' brutal sincerity is a mask for a great love, as emerges in his portraits of his many friends, Srivatsa's sunny optimism is a terrific foil, also, for cutting sarcasm.
Based on six years of nearly constant travel, Out of God's Oven captures the issues gripping contemporary India more completely than recent books with comparable agendas (Mark Tully's India in Slow Motion and William Dalrymple's Age of Kali come to mind). The book neither panders to the foreigner's obsessions nor caters to his ignorance. At the same time, Moraes and Srivatsa both "write like foreigners" to the extent that - unlike too many Indian journalists - they never neglect to provide the background necessary to understand the events they describe. But where a foreign correspondent like myself might be content muckraking (India is corrupt! Hindus kill Muslims!), they have the luxury of being able to go beyond sanctimonious outrage to more complex analysis.
In a book of remarkable scope, the two writers address many of the seminal events of Indian history of the past three decades, ranging from riots by Dalits (formerly untouchables) in Bombay, to the cooperative movement that empowered village women by granting them control over the marketing of the fruit of their labors, to the battle of communist Naxalites with Bihar's upper-caste landlords, to the various tragedies caused by an enduring religious mania. Though the timing of its release prompted publishers to market Out of God's Oven as a prelude to the deadly Gujarat riots, it is far more than an investigation of the persecution of Indian Muslims or Hindu fundamentalism.
Despite those numerous strengths, however, the book suffers from an over-reliance on informants who share the sensibilities and background of the authors. These interviews - spirited exchanges between the like-minded, to be sure - generate some terrific lines: "An Indian was not part of a team; he was part of a mob"; "The greatest freedom we have received from Independence [was the] freedom to talk"; "Corruption is an offshoot of hypocrisy, the habit of lying to oneself"; "Politics is the only profession where you do not need any qualifications." But the eloquent expression of consensus does not result in many new insights about the others: the fundamentalist thugs, the devoutly religious, the desperately poor.
Nevertheless, though it's peopled with too many talkers and not enough actors, Out of God's Oven is not completely without heroes: a teacher at a convent school combating the messages of religious hatred her students absorb from their parents; a 72-year-old writer who has lived among the poorest villagers of North Bengal, fighting their causes for 25 years; a man who takes in illegitimate children, mad and destitute women. But the overall feeling is that India has just too many tragedies. "I am tired, so tired," says one of these good souls. "If I had an alternative, do you think I would be doing this? Can I just leave everything and run away? They have no one else. So I continue. I have no choice. And I am so tired."
This is not the familiar quirky, mystical India that churns along, in chaos, yes, but never in collapse. It's a vision of a lighted bomb, the fuse sputtering fast. And the writers offer no solution, which means that in its darkest moments, the book seems to echo the novelist who tells Moraes: "I couldn't help you much. I think as you ask questions about India, you will find many people like me, who will point out what is wrong. That is, of course, glaringly clear. But I don't think anybody will be able to point out a way to make it right. If he could, he would be a leader, and India's tragedy is that it has none."
Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land, by Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa, Penguin Books, December 2002. ISBN: 0-670-04943-3. Price: US$9.43. 400 pages.
BOOK REVIEW
Faltering footstep
The Long Strider: How Thomas Coryate Walked from England to India in the Year 1613 by Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa
Reviewed by Jason Overdorf
NEW DELHI - In the early stages of researching The Long Strider with co-author Sarayu Srivatsa, Dom Moraes discovered from doctors that he suffered from cancer. The prognosis was not good. The old poet was dying. Perhaps inspired by the eccentric subject of the book, Thomas Coryate, a dwarf and writer and sometime buffoon who walked from England to India in the year 1613, Moraes decided not to undergo radiation treatment to prolong his life, but to spend his final days completing a last project.
As he told Srivatsa: "I don't have a lot to do. I want to go to London for one last time. I want to be able to finish writing the Coryate book. And if there is some time left after that, I want to work on my collected poems." When the two collaborators were left alone by his doctor, the grand old man added, "What I need immediately is to get as pissed as is humanly possible." Moraes brings that irrepressible pluck and humor to this, likely his last book, and his wry, sometimes baudy wit finds the perfect foil in the earnest, sometimes priggish Srivatsa.
The Long Strider tells the story of the remarkable, foolhardy walk of Thomas Coryate, a would-be Marco Polo whose writings were mostly lost in transit from East to West. Coryate, whose thirst for fame bordered on madness, enjoys a no-more curious reputation today than in his own time (though his 15 minutes were up centuries ago). Though he is credited with popularizing the use of the fork in England and inventing the word "umbrella", Coryate is best known as the first Englishman to make the "Grand Tour of Europe", which eventually became an essential part of the gentleman's education.
But he made that journey less as a gentleman than as the butt of a gentleman's jokes, say scholars. After the death of his father, a country parson, Coryate managed to secure a place in the retinue of the young Prince of Wales, where he was both wit and buffoon, a wise fool not unlike the jesters of Shakespeare. He made a name for himself with comical orations, full of pseudo-scholarly words and ludicrous circumlocution, that parodied the posturing, courtly repartee popular at the time.
No doubt unsatisfied with making and rebutting insults, however, Coryate set out to make a name for himself by walking across Europe in 1608 and writing a first-person account of his adventures, called The Crudities. In what Charles Nicholl calls a triumph of self-promotion in a compelling piece in the London Review of Books, Coryate's book became something of a sensation in 1611, a year in which Ben Johnson's Alchemist and William Shakespeare's Tempest were on the stage and John Donne was writing the Holy Sonnets.
But the book's success was due not only to its merits. Having received a copy of the travelogue to review (and edit), the Prince of Wales called for the addition of a compendium of fulsome, mock praise from Coryate's ostensible friends - Johnson and Donne among them. While other writers, such as Tim Moore, the author of The Grand Tour: The European Adventure of a Continental Drifter, view this facetious preface as detracting from - and even obscuring - the literary and anthropological merits of the Crudities, in The Long Strider, Moraes credits Coryate himself for this development, suggesting that the tenacious self-promoter used the scorn of his literary betters to create buzz for his offbeat tract.
But whether or not Coryate was satisfied with the reception that his Crudities received, one thing is certain: He was not content to let his notoriety end there. In what Moore interprets as a desperate reaction to the reception of Coryate's first book and what Moraes and Srivatsa spin as a bold quest for ever greater fame, Coryate set off on his long, eventually fatal, walk to India. That he made it to the Moghul court alive is remarkable enough. Without maps or the writings of other travelers to work with, he set out with little money and nothing more than a copy of the Christian Bible as his guide.
Coryate left England in 1612, first sailing to the Holy Land and then leaving from Jerusalem for India in 1614 on foot. He made the first part of his walk with a caravan, crossing the Euphrates and Tigris and finally the Indus rivers with a motley horde of traders and their numberless, groaning camels. He made Agra, then the capital of the Mughal Empire under Emperor Jahangir, and then Ajmer, now a pilgrimage site for Indian Muslims, in 1615.
In India, usually clad in filthy rags and without a penny in his purse, Coryate met Britain's earliest trade representatives, including the East India Company's agent at the Mughal court, William Edwards, and the ambassador of England's first official embassy to India, Thomas Roe. With characteristic audacity, he also insisted on delivering one of his pompous orations to the Emperor Jahangir, whom he fantasized would finance a further tromp to China and beyond.
How his faulty Persian was received is a mystery, but like his mad street tirades against Islam, it was amusing enough or insane enough or incomprehensible enough that it did not get him killed. On the other hand, it lost Coryate the sympathy of ambassador Roe, who found the man's appearance disgraceful. Unlike his European tour, Coryate's walk to India did not become a publishing success. A handful of letters he sent home via other travelers eventually went to press as Thomas Coriate, Traveller for the English Witts: Greeting in 1616, and some were reprinted in Sir William Foster's Early Travels in India in 1921. But he failed to deliver the enduring masterpiece he had set out to write.
Moraes and Srivatsa tell Coryate's story in alternating chapters. Moraes writes the more imaginative, novelized sections that recreate Coryate's thoughts and adventures on his journey, while Srivatsa supplies diary entries cataloguing the pair's efforts to retrace the dwarf's steps (by jet plane, mostly).
The idea of the dual narrative is to show the contrast - interesting in its continuities - between ancient and modern India. The authors rely on their readers to see the parallels, however, and the juxtaposition of chapters is not often illuminating enough. Part of the problem is that while Moraes' novelization of Coryate's journey is entertaining, particularly for the humorous appearances made by Ben Johnson and other literary and historical figures, Srivatsa's diary entries are too concrete, too pedestrian, to measure up.
As in their previous collaboration, Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land, (See Asia Times review of March 22, A cynical, idealistic melange) the urbane and poetic writing of Moraes, a veteran poet and journalist, makes the workmanlike contributions of Srivatsa seem all the more clunky.
"People here, Hindu or Muslim, are still religious and they believe what their ancestors did. People here were terrifyingly poor then and they still are. What's interesting is that their attitudes toward religion and poverty are slightly different now," Moraes tells Srivatsa as they follow Coryate through India. He must be right, but simply telling readers to be on the lookout for these similarities is no substitute for a thoughtful reflection on them, and that neither author provides.
There is another parallel here, however: that of two men coming to the end of a journey. Perhaps because of his own outsider's status in both India and England, perhaps because of his own failing health, Moraes displays a remarkable sympathy for his fascinating subject that carries the book, flaws and all. Maybe there's another reason. Though in life he was mostly a teetotaler, in his dying moments, the author of the Crudities made a final request for his liquor of choice, white wine, with last words that Moraes must envy: "Sack! Sack! I have not tasted sack these many months. Give me some sack."
The Long Strider by Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa. Penguin-Viking, 2003. ISBN: 0670049751. Price: US$9, 359 pages.
Of a nation in a sling
Dom Moraes' recent book, Out of God's Oven, is an effort to look contemporary India in the eye, without shoving any dirt under the carpet. He shares his views with BAGESHREE S.
Dom Mores and Sarayu
"I have preferred to take risks in my life, and let them lead me... As a result of this, my life, whatever else it has done to me, has very seldom bored me. And I think it is essential to avoid boredom between birth and death. The boredom can come from circumstances or from other people. It is worst when it comes from oneself..."
IT IS, perhaps, this dread of boredom that makes Dom Moraes an avid traveller — literally and metaphorically. He has visited every country in the world except Antarctica, which, he has said elsewhere, "is not a country, anyway". He has written poetry, prose, newspaper articles, biographies, and scripts for television productions. He has edited magazines from London, Hong Kong, and New York. He wrote his autobiography, My Son's Father, when he was 30. Incidentally, he wrote his first book, on cricket, when he was 13!
How does one manage to traverse such vast spaces in one lifetime? "One doesn't manage it, it sort of happens," says the 65-year-old writer in his very soft, very English style. He adds, as an afterthought: "If you are in a position to slightly manipulate events, you should do so." He was once in Jakarta to interview Suharto, the then President. It was Ramzan and the whole town was shut. Suharto refused to give an interview until after Ramzan. Dom heard, from another journalist, about a prison island called Buru, which had 10,000 political prisoners. Reaching there was not easy. But Dom and his photographer did, and as a result of what he wrote, 7,000 of the prisoners were eventually released. Papua New Guinea was not too far from Buru, and so, they went there too and spent two weeks with a cannibal tribe! "I, fortunately, had a publisher who paid for all this," says Dom, with a hint of smile.
His recent book, Out of God's Oven (co-authored by Sarayu Srivatsa) also documents a journey — a journey through India, "a fractured land". It is not a "feel good" book, but more an attempt to look the nation in the eye, warns Sarayu. As a reviewer puts it, it is "an uncompromising look at the drama of contemporary India based on the author's personal memories and first-hand accounts of terrible landmarks in Indian history... Recording the voices of several Indians, including the anonymous and the famous, the dispossessed and the privileged, the sane and the fanatical... " And Dom is not very positive about what lies ahead of us either. He calls it "only the first act" and that many "treacherous things" are in store.
Doesn't he sound like the prophet of doom? Did he always feel that way? "I have grown very sceptical now," he admits, and goes on to trace what he sees as the "mistakes" in Indian history. "Early leaders made a big mistake in assuming that India was a secular country Gandhi and Nehru presupposed that Hindus and Muslims liked each other. The idea that they lived as friends is a total myth."
But isn't that a rather perfunctory dismissal of a great ideal? Aren't we, by saying this, playing into the hands of the communal forces? "I am not saying that India cannot be a secular country. I am just saying that it is, by definition, not a secular country... In any Indian town or village, you can see that that the communities live separately. There has always been a ghettoisation of the minorities..."
But many would dismiss Dom's views as those typical of a carping "outsider". Hasn't he himself, said that there are three categories of Indians and he belongs to none of them? Doesn't he write at length about his resistance to learning ? Doesn't one see traces of a certain bemusement for the "alien" as one reads his interview with Laloo Prasad Yadav? The half-smile returns: "Anyone who goes to Bihar, wherever he comes from, would feel a bit astounded. I got along pretty well with many people in Bihar, but Laloo seemed like someone from another planet!" He goes on, on a more sober note: "People have accused me of being Western. But I don't think I belong anywhere. I feel no loyalties to either England or India. But I don't feel disloyalties either."
"Much of the publicity in India has been of Indian writers in English getting large sums of money from publishers. If you work like a normal writer, you don't make a great deal of money, but you produce what you want to produce. Those who get tied down by two or three book contracts have to keep producing stuff to satisfy their publishers..." What really pains him is that no one has ever made the effort to translate and distribute Indian writings in regional languages. What does he have to say about Salman Rushdie's damning remarks on regional writers? He retorts: "He should either read them or meet them." It's tragic that someone as enormously talented as Asokamitran "appear and feel out of place" in literary conferences where English writers are hogging the limelight. Though Dom never, eventually, learnt Hindi or any Indian language, he has travelled to every corner of India (with interpreters, of course) to meet and write about a number of Indian writers.
Dom's next book too, predictably, is about a journey - of a very different kind, though. He and Sarayu are together working on the story of Thomas Coryate, a poor Englishman with a passion for walking. He walked all the way to India in the early 17th Century and travelled all over the country on foot. He fell sick in some remote village and walked 300 kilometres to Surat to catch an East India Company ship back home. The captain of the ship offered him some fine Spanish sherry, which he hadn't even smelled for five years. An excited Coryate drank so much of it that he died before he boarded the ship!
Catching up on Dom
Jaithirth Rao
To get to the village of Hay-on-Wye you have to drive due west from London past the lovely town of Hereford on the Welsh Marches. Why does anyone go to Hay-on-Wye?
Well...it has the unique distinction of ‘‘specializing’’ in second hand bookshops. The world’s largest second hand bookshop is there...as well as several specialist shops...one is dedicated to crime and detective fiction, one to children’s books and one to poetry. The poetry bookshop is located on a quiet road and is languidly spread over two floors. The owner is a critic and avid reader. He talks to you gently. No attempts at hard-sell, no computerized catalogues, no high pressure...plenty of time to walk around, to browse and to literally soak in poetry.
And in the poetry bookshop in Hay-on-Wye guess what I find? Two first editions of Dom Moraes: Poems (published in 1960 by Eyre and Spottiswoode and priced at 10s 6d) and John Nobody (published in 1965 by the same publisher and priced at 12s 6d). I noted with some feeling that Britain was more interesting before it decimalized its currency. A shilling sounds good, spells good, feels good! And of course, between 1960 and 1965, Dom’s poetry seems to have gone up in financial value. The 1965 book cost two shillings more. I wondered what inflation was in the sixties. Did Dom get a proper inflation-adjusted increase? It is the kind of question that Dom would have smiled at.
The owner of the bookshop had some acquaintance with the books and seemed to know of Dom. He asked me if Dom was alive. I told him that he had died not that long ago. He asked me if Dom had been happy. I paused. I looked at him for a few seconds. I asked him in turn: ‘‘Are poets ever happy?’’ He nodded with a measure of understanding. I had to tell him that Dom was not happy. He drank too much. His muse deserted him for long periods. He had a love-hate relationship with India where he chose to live. He was high-strung. And then I added, ‘‘But he did find love in his life’’. My bookseller friend responded, ‘‘Ah good, at least he found happiness in that regard.’’
I recommended Dom’s ‘Serendip’ anthology as it had some very finely crafted love poems. He made a note of it.
I remembered my last meeting with Dom. He had been diagnosed with cancer. Sarayu was a luminous presence. By tacit agreement, all three of us stayed away from any talk of his impending death. We talked of the book he was planning. It was based on the life of a crazy Englishman who walked all the way from England to India in the sixteen hundreds. Apparently the traveler (who was also quite a scholar) met the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. He seems to have died in India after a drinking bout. Dom was searching for his lost grave with an earnest sense of irony.
But of course the big C hovered in the background and insisted on intruding into the conversation. In inimitable Dom style he said ‘‘Now that they know I’m dying, old boy, some people are beginning to take me seriously.’’ By implication, of course, he hated pompous people who took themselves seriously. We switched topics to India...she who tantalizes, excites and also wrecks all our lives. Dom had a deep feeling for India, which at its root was not cerebral but sentimental and emotional, although he would never have admitted to it. We meandered back and forth. We talked of his father....always a sensitive subject. To be the son of a brilliant and well-known public figure is difficult. Success came easily to Frank Moraes and came to him steadily throughout his life. Dom had tasted success very early in life...he had been a bit of a prodigy and had received heady praise and great reviews for his early poetry. And then things went wrong or at least did not go right. It is almost as if his stars turned phlegmatic. It isn’t as if he did not do interesting things...he traveled a lot, he wrote interesting prose, dabbled in journalism and biography...he dazzled beautiful women, he drank himself into interesting states where his quiet sense of humour never left him and late in life the departed muse returned and he wrote some bewitching delicate verse...and yet he knew, we all knew, that Dom simply did not live up to his promise. He could have been a Larkin or a Housman. The gods somehow withheld from him their final touch of grace. And no one was more aware of it than Dom himself. It was at the root of his mordant observations, his struggle with his own demons.
As the evening wore on, we talked of Dom’s early romp through India along with fellow-writer Ved Mehta (who called him Domikins). Dom was happy to relive the energy and the sarcasm of his early prose. Dom was very enthusiastic about a new publisher in Kerala who was into poetry...obviously a lovable if financially unsophisticated publisher. We knew that there were just a few months left. We did not mention it. We simply parted. I remember watching him and Sarayu get into the car. Who would have guessed that it would be weeks not months and that I would never see him again.
Standing in the bookshop I read Dom’s prophetic lines written fifty years ago ‘‘I think of the tears I have wept and shall weep, There’s a child in my body: it longs to confess.’’ There was within Dom a half-serious half-impish child and overlaid on that was a patina of rootless cosmopolitanism, miasmal wanderings, unnamed sorrows, unfulfilled wishes. In reconnecting with Dom in a quiet English village I felt a sense of cathartic relief. Wherever you are old boy, your friends will join you soon and over a drink and a cigarette we shall dissect and patch back the fate of Indians and lovers of words.
Dom Moraes
Brilliant young writer, whose star, lauded by bohemian London, dimmed in later life
"For Alan - best wishes for a voice he won't lose, Dom," were the words that Dom Moraes inscribed in a copy of his Collected Poems: 1957-1987, which he presented to me over brunch in his Bombay home one morning in November 1988.
That was the last time I met Dom, who has died, aged 66, of cancer. After three weeks of British Council lecturing in India, with one lecture and several meetings still to go, my larynx had given up completely under the Bombay (now Mumbai) pall of pollution. But while I was on my way to Dom's stately, rundown Edwardian suburb, travelling in a taxi with his friend, the writer and editor Adil Jussawala, Dom had actually phoned a doctor and sent his servant out for a strong recommended syrup.
He welcomed me warmly at his door, but with a kind of abstracted courtesy; pleased to be visited, but also shy, with an air of entrenched sadness. My diary records an impression that Dom, then around 50, was not happy with what life had delivered him.
Dom had been born in Bombay; the background was Goan, he was the son of the author Frank Moraes - sometime editor of the Times of India - and his mother was a disturbed Catholic. He received a Jesuit education, but as a child, Frank had taken him to Australasia and south-east Asia. By the age of 12, he was writing poetry, and a book on cricket. Three years later, WH Auden read and liked his work, and, indeed, Stephen Spender - who first met him in Bombay - was publishing him in Encounter magazine.
After two years in Sri Lanka, at the age of 16 Dom arrived in England. In 1956, he began reading English at Jesus College, Oxford. The following year, his first book of poems, A Beginning, was published by David Archer's Parton Press (which had published Dylan Thomas's first) and, in 1958, it won the Hawthornden Prize for "the best work of imagination". Dom, the first non-English person to win the prize, was also the youngest.
In 1960, he published Poems, and the autobiographical Gone Away, about his travels in India. The Brass Serpent - translations from Hebrew poetry - followed in 1964, and John Nobody the year after that. All were received well, Dom becoming a familiar and well-liked figure at poetry readings and in poets' pubs. By 1966, he had published Poems 1955-65. Two years later, settled in Islington, he published more autobiography, My Son's Father.
But then the muse left him. He travelled - he was to say he had visited every country in the world - and wrote journalism, travel books and a biography of Mrs Gandhi (1980). A compelling study of Himachal Pradesh, a region of his own country he had never visited before writing about it, had kept me reading into the small hours a week before I visited him.
In 1968, Dom settled back in India for good, only resuming the writing of verse in the late 1970s. In 1988, he published his Collected Poems, and two years after we met came more poems in Serendip.
A third volume of autobiography, Never At Home (1994), was followed in 2001 by another poetry collection, In Cinnamon Shade. He also contributed to Voices Of The Crossing (2000), edited by Naseem Khan and Ferdinand Dennis, on the impact of England on writers from the subcontinent and the Caribbean. He co-edited The Penguin Book Of Indian Journeys (2001), and last year published The Long Strider. For television, he scripted - and sometimes directed - more than 20 documentaries.
Dom's conversation that November day in 1988 suggested a feeling that his literary career had not worked out well, that it was somehow not suited to the times. English was his only language, so he had no connections with other linguistic communities, not even that of his servant, the gentle old man who now suddenly entered, not with the prescribed throat syrup but with a bottle of orange pills, presenting one to me on a plate. He was sent out again, Adil translating Dom's instructions for him.
Dom's contacts with English friends were, it seemed, few. He kept up with the loyal Peter Levi, but I had to answer questions about others: John Heath-Stubbs, David Gascoyne, Thomas Blackburn - and Eric White, amazing bohemian bureaucrat of the Arts Council.
Dom responded only briefly to my information; there was no flow of reminiscence. Conversation slowed as I whispered hoarse responses about the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, whom Dom had known through David Archer, and Geoffrey Hill, who had succumbed to peritonitis in Bombay after a tour like mine.
He turned monosyllabic; the dog barked, crows squawked on the balcony. Only when I spoke of the poet George Barker did he show more interest, declaring that they had quarrelled and he never wanted to see him again.
Perhaps I seemed like a visitor embarrassingly zealous about reconnecting Dom with a world he had left behind. That impromptu inscription in the book began to seem very clever, combining sympathy with a sore throat with a gracious regard for another writer's productivity, and - I thought - a melancholy hint that the writer himself had all but lost his own voice as a poet.
When the soothing mixture prescribed for me arrived, I swallowed some, while Dom and Adil drank Bloody Marys. It made no difference. Then our muttered, three-cornered conversation was interrrupted by a high-pitched voice in the street outside. The Muslim owner of a house opposite had set up a mosque in his garage, and scores of worshippers assembled at prayer times, blocking the carriageway. Dom suddenly animated again, describing how he had been, one day, shepherding his elderly father-in-law, expressed impatience at the obstruction, and received menacing messages.
The police had supplied three bodyguards, attending in the eight-hour shifts. One had been virtually invisible, covering the night hours. But the second had proved impossibly fastidious about diet, and the third had taken an intrusive interest in Dom's work, looking over his shoulder and making comments as he typed. I had, now, no voice at all with which to respond to these stories. I thought it best to take my leave, and rest it.
I forget what I wrote to thank him for brunch, but I hope it covered my pleasure in meeting him properly at last - at his Indian home indeed, though in strange and unfavourable circumstances -and my gratitude for his work, for Dom had great talent, charm, grace and decency.
His first marriage, to Henrietta Moraes (obituary, January 8 1999), and his third marriage were dissolved. His second wife, Judy, predeceased him. He is survived by his partner Sarayu Srivatsa and Francis, the son of his second marriage.
Bernard Kops writes: I first met Dom Moraes in the mid-1950s. He walked into the French caff in Soho's Old Compton Street, our main artery, lighting up the den and the denizens with his light brown beauty. He had an aura of obvious innocence. Soho was sanctuary for all those who could not fit into the dark cold war world outside. The end of the world was nigh, and everyone was broke, but then, in the 1950s, everyone was broke, and those days were poverty-stricken bliss.
But Dom, gentle and quiet, and not yet out of boyhood, had a different aura, with his white suit and touch of eastern promise. He had a little money and was extremely generous, which immediately endeared him to all the citizens of Soho. He joined the tribe, and the word soon got around that his father was the famous Frank Moraes. He boasted about this, but we indulged in his largesse and forgave him.
He looked you straight in the face, and spoke with a soft, slight sing-song. He had dreamy doe eyes and long lashes. Before gay, I first thought he was queer; it was generally believed he would not last long. He was too ardent, too honest. He also bought me and Erica, my new-found love, coffee and croissants. That could not be bad. We all fell in love with Dom immediately.
"You've written a play, I hear. But is it a masterpiece?" were his first words to me. "I do hope it's a masterpiece." Me, in my green arrogant years replied, "Yes. It probably is a masterpiece." "Actually, I am a poet," he said, earnestly.
Surely, he could not be as awful as that. All poets were shits; the higher the art the greater the shit. But in a world where everyone was self-absorbed, Dom actually listened.
That morning, he took me around the corner to Greek Street, where David Archer had opened a brilliant and pristine bookshop; needless to say, it did not last long. David owned a third of Wiltshire, and could not wait to give it away. Dom introduced me to David and sang my genius, although he had not read a word of mine. I was not embarrassed, and did not contradict him. I asked David about his ability to recognise talent. "Dear boy, I know absolutely nothing about poetry. I just have a certain instinct for certain people."
So Dom took me to David, and David pointed me in the right direction. There and then, he commanded me to ring an American producer, and my writing life and career was born. I owe both of them a song.
Later, Dom drifted away to study at Oxford. Then he got involved with the upper demi-monde, the hard drinkers of the French Pub, the environs of Hades - the vicious, lost, successful souls like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and the Henrietta, a beautiful, sexy, booming Junoesque empress, whom he married.
Empress Henrietta departed for a sad and quite early death, and now Dom has gone, perhaps to battle on with her in God knows where. And so he disappeared forever from our lives.
Dom was an apparition from another age, another time, another class. Whenever he entered the caff, the whole place burst into light. You could not take your eyes off him. But soon Soho died. Everyone scattered, became respectable, and were swallowed up by this age of hype.
Someone later uttered, "But he was a fantasist, not to be believed or trusted." If this is the real world, long live fantasy. Forty years on, his face still floats back to me, young, innocent, beautiful, alight; seeking some sort of Parnassus.
Naseem Khan writes: Dom Moraes's return to India in 1968 - leaving behind fame in England, as well as a wife and son - marked the beginning of a long, slow and painful rapprochement with both his country of origin and himself. The last 13 years, in which he collaborated with his new partner, Sarayu Srivatsa, brought that process to fruition.
The partnership allowed a defended, intensely shy man to loosen up. His natural sociability was released and his meticulous wit flowered. The speed of his writing - always fluid - escalated, and, of course, he had started writing poetry again. His collected poems are published this month by Penguin India, and will be launched on his birthday in July. But the speed was also caused by the diagnosis of cancer. Moraes turned down radiation therapy, and was determined that he should let his body follow its natural course. Time was running out, he knew, and he was brimful of things he still wanted to write about.
His insistence on doing it his way was part of a nature with an implacable streak. It had him holding to his own views even when - as often happened - they led him into controversy, when his critical irony was taken by chauvinists as "anti-Indian". It also drew him into dangerous areas.
When the Gujarat riots erupted in 2002, with their heavy toll of Muslim dead, Moraes left for Ahmedabad the minute the news came through, claiming that since he was a Catholic, Muslims would not see him as an enemy. Even though he was physically in considerable pain by then, he was one of the first on the scene - a move that his upright father, would have applauded.
But he paid a price. The stories he encountered - particularly of the eight-year-old girl who had been buggered by policemen - horrified him. "He was shattered when he came back," recalled Sarayu. "He was drinking a lot and crying in his sleep. He couldn't handle it."
Dom's reaction was to turn the experience into a poem. He was writing poetry till the day of his death, calling Saryu to tell her he was at work on something that would be ready for her to see in a couple of days' time. But that time never came. His last lines are buried, somewhere in his computer.
· Dominic 'Dom' Frank Moraes, poet, author and columnist, born July 19 1938; died June 2 2004
Jerry Pinto... on Dom Moraes (Man's World)
Even so great a gesture of the hands
Can hardly hold so vast an emptiness.
E M Forster described him as 'an excellent mixer, if farouche'. Stephen
Spender confirmed him as a poet. William Dalrymple describes him as 'the
finest prose stylist? in the subcontinent'. He covered wars, won prizes,
loved a series of women and wrote some bloody good poems.
Jerry Pinto on Dom Moraes
I
My income and my debts remain
Still I can feed my typewriter each day
My agent tells me that I have a name
An audience waits, he says, for what I say
From 'John Nobody'
I cannot remember the first time I met Dom Moraes. I know that he was a part
of my growing up. My father recommended his prose "to clean your palate".
And so in some distant way, I knew a lot about him before I ever heard him
call me fucker in rich soft plum cake tones. I knew, for instance, that he
read a book a day and that on the day a certain column appeared, it had been
the Wisden Almanac. I knew that he had met Stephen Spender when he was
young, very young and that Spender had told him that he was a poet, an
affirmation that most poets seek. I knew that his father was Frank Moraes,
who had written a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru and that Dom had written a
biography of Indira Gandhi, in a dynastic parallelism. I knew that he was
married to Leela Naidu, the woman who was once chosen by Vogue as one of the
ten most beautiful women in the world, of whom a photographer had said, "She
has no bad angles". I knew also that he drank, seemed to drink copiously. (I
did not know that E M Forster also thought this a little tedious in the
first volume of his autobiographical writings, Going Away and said: "On the
opening page of the book brandy is mentioned twice, whiskey three times, and
this continues until the reader longs for a non-alcoholic edition. Or so Ved
Mehta tells us in his introduction to Walking the Indian Streets which was
about the trip he took to India at the same time as Dom.)
As I wandered through the south of Bombay, various books by him turned up on
the streets, remaindered through the hawkers that have taken over the
pavements around Flora Fountain. I saw Answered by Flutes, a commissioned
work on Madhya Pradesh there and thought it sounded like a lovely name.
And then, sitting by the sea at Marine Drive, I read my first Dom poem,
'Vivisection'. It was an easy introduction, a poem of deep horror and
mistrust, of love betrayed and honour besmirched. It was the kind of poem
that could be digested easily, nothing that would stick in your craw, no
words that demanded dictionaries like eidolon (an insubstantial image) and
alate (winglike). This was a poem Browning might have written had he walked
through a modern laboratory with its 'caged rats that squealed like
children, grey/ Monkeys that masturbated and ate flies'.
Nothing like the second poem that I read, with its devious echoes in my
head. Nothing like the nausea that rises when you fear someone may have
stolen the words, the experience. Nothing like that first moment of true
contact with a poet.
If you should find me crying,
As often when I was a child.
You will know I have reason to.
I am ashamed of myself
Since I was ashamed of you.
II
First the facts:
Dom Moraes was born in Bombay in 1938. His father was the editor and author
Frank Moraes. With him, the young Dom Moraes travelled through Sri Lanka,
Australia, New Zealand and the whole of South-East Asia, territories he was
often to revisit in the course of his career. He began to write poetry at
the age of 12. By 15, W H Auden had read and liked his poems. Stephen
Spender and Karl Shapiro published them in Encounter and in Poetry Chicago,
respectively. At 19, he published his first book of poems, A Beginning, with
the Parton Press in London which won the Hawthornden Prize for the Best Work
of the Imagination in 1958. Moraes remains the first non-English person to
win this prize, also the youngest.
In 1960 his second book of verse, Poems, became the Autumn Choice of the
Poetry Book Society. In 1965 his third book of verse, John Nobody, appeared
to much critical acclaim. Apart from these three volumes, he published a
pamphlet of verse, Beldam & Others, in 1967. In 1983 he published a
privately printed book of poems, Absences, and in 1987 his Collected Poems
appeared.
Dom Moraes has edited magazines in London, Hong Kong and New York, been a
correspondent in various wars and an official of a UN agency. He says he has
visited every country in the world except Antarctica, which, he adds, is not
a country. While on various assignments he has written 23 prose books. He
has also scripted and partially directed over 20 television documentaries
from England, India, Cuba, and Israel for the BBC and ITV.
That is the story of a very successful, very public life.
It sits oddly with the man I am meeting in a small flat in Bandra, a quiet
man whose voice always makes mine seem loud and brash, an unquiet man with
no time for fools and who can pulp you for a thoughtless question without
flinching as your blood splashes over him. It sits oddly even with the
poetry, which, at its best, has Dom showing you the scabs on the self,
presenting them without sentiment and without demanding a response of
horror. It sits oddly with the prose, the distanced no-risk crisp prose, so
spare, so lean, so easy that the immense effort it must take does not show
at all. The man is turbid, shadowy, with an elliptical friendliness. The
poetry is rich, sulphurous, violent, vulnerable. The prose is pellucid, as
if Moraes had decided at some early moment that he would allow experience to
pass through him as if he were glass.
III
My writings will tell you where I am
From 'Babur'
In a way there isn't much point writing this profile. Almost all that you
need to know about Dom, you can get from his prose and his poetry in
combination. In the beginning was Going Away, which chronicled his return to
the city, after the hectic years at Oxford. While his pedigree ensured that
he met anyone who mattered-he had already offered an apple given to him by
Sarojini Naidu to Gandhiji when he was still a child-the young poet hated
the country. He hated the parties, he hated the Prohibition, he hated the
dirt under his feet, the heat, humidity and foetor, the almost-meaningless
questions and the even more depressingly meaningful ones. The writers seemed
equally fatuous: Mulk Raj Anand advising him to meet filmstars; Niradh
Chaudhuri sleeping naked in his own balcony and asking anxiously about
England. (Only Nissim Ezekiel comes off well, as a poet who should be better
known in England.)
At the end of all this, after meeting Nehru and after visiting Sikkim and
Nepal, he goes back to London. Was that home?
"Home is an abstraction and a concrete place. I have lived in so many places
I don't think the two have ever coalesced around a single geographical
location," he says.
At the end of all this, he also writes:
It is raining in London. November: cold: I remember that I have not got my
overcoat. But I put the thought of you on to warm me, and diligently I
advance towards the Customs.
I have always wondered about that 'you'. (Henrietta? Leela?)
He tells me who it is: his mother.
This is where My Son's Father begins, a remarkable autobiography, the best
of the trilogy. Under the precise clarity of the prose, there is a little
boy who can't seem to connect, whose world is always in frightening flux, a
prodigiously talented boy with a star father (Frank Moraes, one of the few
editors of the Times of India who dared to be Nationalist) and a beautiful,
talented mother who was slowly going mad. (Now that there is a word for
almost every psychological condition, this seems a little absurd, 'slowly
going mad'. It seems old-fashioned, like something out of Jane Eyre, but
then there's something about this writing that is old-fashioned and
timeless, simultaneously.
My Son's Father taken with the poetry is enough. Going Away is an amusement,
Never At Home, an itinerary with figures.
"Never At Home," he agrees, "covered too much and also it was a kind of list
of people I had met and about whom I didn't particularly feel very much."
Like snapshots from a life, perhaps.
"In a way it was intended to be. It was also intended to show how different
my life had become. Stephen Spender reviewed the book and he said that every
few pages he seems to be lamenting that he's not writing poetry. Anybody
else would think he should be glad of it."
Seventeen years of not doing what you have always known you are meant to do
can be a long time. Dom has talked about this often but he once summed it up
in an interview:
"I prefer to think of it as a germination period for words, while experience
and travel took over my life. In 1982, I began once more to write well
enough to satisfy myself. One theme I followed derived from the early books,
where I had an image of a lost but compulsive dancer, who is followed by a
young man who hopes to return from following him with wisdom. When the young
man returns, nobody with listen to him, 'Because you are ugly and no longer
young'.
Today, he merely says:
"Poetry sort of comes and goes and it went."
One more clue from Never At Home:
"Leela complained that I didn't share my worries with her. It was obvious,
she said, that I had some, but since I wouldn't tell her what they were, she
felt helpless. But it has been endemic in me, since childhood, to keep
whatever I felt inside me, not to allow it to seep in to other people's
lives. This, I thought, had been one of the reasons, why poetry emerged from
me instead."
IV
One fine morning Dom said, 'Look darling, I'm off to the pub, just going to
get some cigarettes. See you in about ten minutes.' He didn't come back?
From Henrietta by Henrietta Moraes
He had looked at cabaret dancers with sad lust and ogled the breasts of his
aunt while she was packing. He went to England, full-lipped, lustrous-eyed,
Indian and beautiful. Henrietta, who was born Audrey Wendy Abbott, was
already married to a gay body builder. In her obituary, Tim Hilton says she
seduced Dom and that they flew to the Eichmann trial for their honeymoon.
That might not be quite the case but there is no denying that this was a
woman who might well have been too much for most young men. Not that Dom was
an ordinary young man, fresh off the boat when he got to London. In Bombay
(for Time-Life Books, a commission that went first to that other great prose
stylist of the 20th Century, the Indo-Irishman, Aubrey Menen) he tells of
how his father sent him at the age of 15 to get a permit for alcohol so that
the young man who was on his way to Oxford, would learn how to hold his
alcohol. Since the family doctor would not give him the necessary
certificate that established his medical need for it, he had to go to a
government hospital to be declared an incurable alcoholic. The only catch
was that you had to be an alcoholic for ten years in order to be so
declared. The doctor was dismissive, but Frank Moraes, wise in the ways of
the world, sent his son with a sealed envelope.
A rustle of paper later, the doctor said that it was obvious that the boy
had been an alcoholic since the age of five and gave him the maximum number
of units.
But Henrietta was the "only female queen of Soho". She frightened Ved Mehta
when she came to Oxford. Today, she would have been known as a wild child,
and even after Dom abandoned her, (he'd already given some warning, running
out for a while earlier and then turning up, according to her, shivering and
louse-ridden), she went on to pose for Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud,
turned cat burglar, developed a drug habit and an alcohol problem before
turning gypsy and wandering about the continent in a caravan.
Although she kept his name, and seems to try and understand, in her last
meeting with him, she waved a loaded antique pistol under his nose before
rushing off with a new Lebanese boyfriend and later referred to him
ambiguously as "that 24-hour poet".
Pretty stupid. Whatever else Dom may be, and many people have some choice
names for him, he is a poet.
His next wife, Leela Naidu, was supposed to be the dream marriage, the kind
that was always being written about in the papers. I grew up on that myth,
the happy couple, beauty and brains; the stunningly beautiful actress of The
Householder and Anuradha and the poet; his gentleness the chief attraction
after an abusive alcoholic man; the only difference that he was tone deaf
and she loved music. She aged beautifully through my growing years, that
woman in the ad for saris whose face had turned from the soft sensuality of
a meteque to the adamantine surface of a bronze.
Dom doesn't talk about these things.
"An important part of love is liking," he says elliptically. "And I always
liked them when I began."
Now, for Sarayu Srivatsa, these lines:
And so there were always reasons
How our lives became complete
For me the main one was I loved you
From 'Typed With One Finger'
Is that true? I ask.
"Yes," he replies.
V
We start out as white slime and end up ashes
From 'Derelictions'
As a young journalist, I asked him, "You write about death and sex, almost
obsessively."
He replied: "What else is there to write about?"
True.
Also true: he has cancer.
He does not want chemotherapy interfering with his life or breaking into his
work.
And he has lots to do, a biography of Coryate, the British sojourner who
walked from Britain to India in the 17th Century and met the Emperor
Jehangir before he died in Surat; a collection of his travel writing; and
there's more where that came from.
He's a man in a hurry.
And while it is good to have all the poems in one book, since Penguin India
or Carcanet or HarperCollins or whoever has not released In Cinnamon Shade
in India, one might wish that Yeti or Dom had done a more careful job on the
proof reading. Once you notice in 'War Correspondent' that cigarettes have
become cigarattes, From has become Prom, perimeters has become perimeteres,
the mistakes begin to leap out at you. Inarticualte (pg 30); nasturiums (pg
79); smelll (pg 94), too many to be listed here.
In 'Wrong Address', he writes:
'It's the wrong end of my life.'
It always is.
Nazareth, Peter
Just to take up one element in what Dom Moraes is saying. Just because other people from other regions or cultures have undergone exiles does not erase our exile. It has its specific form, it impacts Goans in specific ways, and it is MINE, that is to say, I experience it and I must deal with it and find out what to do about it. With our multiple displacements, we have become a multicultural people, whether we do something about it or not.
But we cannot overlook our own experience.
Elvis Presley was a multicultural artist, about which I teach and have written about. But he did not overlook his specific background, that of a white working class southerner. His first movie, "Love Me Tender", was about (the end of) the Civil War. The song "Love Me Tender" was based on "Aura Lee", a song sung by Union soldiers when they moved south to fight the Confederates. "Love Me Tender" can then be heard as a transformation of a war song into a love song (which may be more than individual love, more so because there is an extra song the "ghost" Clint (Elvis) sings at the end of the movie above his grave. In the seventies, one of the high points of Elvis's live performances (as in his 1973 "Aloha From Hawaii") was his version of "An American Trilogy", which he got from Mickey Newbury's arrangement and performance of three songs to do with the south and the war: "Dixie", "Battle Hymn of the Republic" (later known as "John Brown's Body"), and "All My Trials". These three songs put together required reconciliation, over a hundred years later. Mickey Newbury's version ended with an instrumental fade-out while Elvis sang the same lines with passion, about John Brown's Body: "His soul is marching on." In other words, it is a challenge to us to keep up the fight against slavery that John Brown fought and was executed for. "Love Me Tender" and "An American Trilogy" are specific to the south, southern culture, the (unfinished) Civil War.
I experienced the Asian Expulsion from Uganda in a way specific to me and yet general. I knew the coup that put Amin into power (a coup supported and even planned by the British and the Israelis) was a disaster for Goans, Asians, and Ugandans (though many did not realize it right away)--and I felt it since I was all three. I was not specifically expelled, although my Uganda citizenship was coincidentally taken away on a technicality--but I had to leave shortly after the deadline because I received the Seymour Lustman Fellowship to Yale University for my novel. I did not want to leave, but my friend Joje Waddimba (whom Adolfo will remember), the Chief Economist of Uganda, spent an hour with me in his car persuading me to accept the Fellowship and leave. I wrote about the Amin regime in many forms, and my work is available to Ugandans (and counters the superficial and disinterested and distorted and lying things written by most English writers and American ones too). I thought at one point that I was done with it all--but I met Wilson Harris (the great and prolific Guyanese novelist, twenthy-one years after I had first met him) at a conference in northern Iowa in 1994. We had breakfast together and he said to me, "There is an earthquake in you. The Expulsion from Uganda hit you much harder than you realize." He continued that he could tell me more, but I would read it in his next novel, "Jonestown." Which was true, in Harris's deep way.
My novel "The General is Up" from one angle is about Goans in East Africa and Goan history (as is "In a Brown Mantle"): from another angle, it is a political novel about Africa (as is "In a Brown Mantle"), including the machinations of imperialists behnd the scenes to continue imperialism in a disguised form. This is the advantage of the "in-between" person: one can see the machinations. Acting and dying without knowing how things are done is a waste of life.
Susan Kiguli, a Ugandan poet I have not met, wrote a poem called "The Place of My Birth." She dedicated the poem, which she read in Europe, to me because, as she told Jameela Siddiqi (expelled Ugandan novelist--"The Feast of the Nine Virgins", "Bombay Gardens") I never gave up on Uganda.
So clearly I was not reacting to the Goan situation in Goa. Or was I? Did the new displacement come as yet another layer on the earlier one that occurred hundreds of years ago and was still in the subconscious?
Peter
Sent: Saturday, August 13, 2011 3:20 AM
Ben Antao
But we cannot overlook our own experience.
I agree with the above. However, not every displaced person experiences exile. Many people get over it and begin a new life in the new land of their settlement.
Most of the Goans from East Africa who have setled in Canada since the 70s are not experiencing a sense of exile as far as I can tell. A Goan friend recently went back to Arusha, Tanzania, after 40 years to meet with the family of the African colleague who worked with him in the bank. I wrote his story of his 'personal guilt' over how the Africans were treated during the colonial regime and he went there to make some amends to assuage his conscience. Not every Goan would feel this way, but this friend is quite special.
Peter: So clearly I was not reacting to the Goan situation in Goa. Or was I? Did the new displacement come as yet another layer on the earlier one that occurred hundreds of years ago and was still in the subconscious?
No, Peter, you're not reacting to the situation in Goa. You grew up in Uganda and your roots are in Uganda; hence I understand your angst and sense of exile. I'm not surprised that after more than 40 years in the US, you still feel you're a Ugandan writer and you're sensitive to literature of Malaysia, where also you've roots, also understandable. Your connection to Goa by origin is also understandable. But your primary experiences during the first 20 years have formed you as a person and a writer that you are.
In my own case, I've my roots in Goa, where I grew up and lived in the first 30 years of my life, and so I have written fiction about Goa. I have also lived in Toronto, Canada for over 40 years, and have also written fiction about my experiences in Canada. Two of my five novels are set in Goa, two in Canada, and one in Goa and Canada. So also the short stories (about 10 in Canada and 10 in Goa).
And now I'm converting my English stories set in Goa into Konkani in Roman script because a Konkani writer in Goa convinced me earlier this year that my stories are Konkani and that I am a Konkani writer. That was a perceptive literary criticism, I thought.
Finally, I don't experience a sense of exile because my decision to live in Canada was my choice. And I have no regrets.
Best regards.
Ben
Nazareth, Peter
A late reply to your powerful message. We were present in East Africa. You are still there physically, as is Ophelia. I am outside, but I have discovered why so many writers go into exile. It is so they can continue writing and being involved, now with a broader perspective. I can continue writing as a Ugandan and East African because I left physically when I was thirty-two, with two books and many published articles. If you read "The General is Up", the novel I wrote in the US, you will discover from the Epilogue that Ronald was able to expand his consciousness, by discovering writers he did not know in East Africa who provided a framework for his experience under the General in his country. He lists some of the writers in the Epilogue, while other writers provide the Epigraphs. For example, Ishmael Reed. Reed writes in a very different way from the way English (that is, British) writers do. In the late nineties, Abasi Kiyimba, the then chair of the Literature Department at Makerere, wrote an article in Research in African Literatures called "The Ghost of Idi Amin in Ugandan Literature." In it, he praised my first novel, "In a Brown Mantle" (written completely in Uganda) but damned "The General is Up," saying this was not the way to do creative writing. Of course the second novel was influenced by Ishmael Reed. I am sorry Kiyimba's mind was stuck in the British way of writing and structuring fiction instead of looking at the new way of writing I was sending to Uganda. I wrote a letter to RAL, which was published, telling Kiyimba to ask fourteen questions about the novel, which I listed. [I sent a letter of this letter to Goa Today, which mysteriously published it as a letter to the editor of Goa Today.]
My favourite novel by Ishmael Reed is "Flight to Canada", which is at the heart of my chapter on Reed in my Trickster book. Anyone who reads it will see that I understood Reed's novel because of the Goan situation and I understood the Goan situation better because of Reed's novel. [I mentioned Reed's novel in my keynote speech, "Understanding the Asian Expulsion Through My Fiction" at a conference on the Asian Expulsion held at the University of Ottawa on April 30, 1994, sponsored by the Uganda Asians and the Canadian Historical Immigration Society. I understand that a videotape of the conference was used for sensitivity training of Canadian immigration officers.]
About your reference to David Walker, chair of the Economics Department at Makerere. I took Economics for the two years of Preliminary Arts at Makerere, but then did English Honours for my degree, as you know. I hated the Economics we were taught. But I knew enough economics, what with my re-educating myself at the Ministry of Finance, to be an effective Senior Finance Officer, that is, I was really a Senior Administrative Officer in the Minitry of Finance. [As an Administrative Officer, I had to take an examination in Administrative Law]. Incidentally, Walker briefly was a Financial Expert to Uganda while I was in the Ministry. He still walked like Groucho Marx, upper torso bent forward. I asked a colleague of mine, James Kahoza [mentioned in my Acknowledgements in "In a Brown Mantle"] who obtained a degree in Economics from Makerere, "Was Walker ever a young man?"
Peter
________________________________________
From: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com [goa-bo...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of mas...@udsm.ac.tz [mas...@udsm.ac.tz]
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2011 5:35 PM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Nazareth, Peter
Further to my previous message.
There was a problem at Makerere: it was colonial times and there was an underpinning of Euro-superiority not on the part of every faculty member but on the part of the system. I went to Leeds to do postgraduate work in 1963--and faced racist problems on the part of the chair of the English Department, who became famous the following year for beginning the Commonwealth Literature studies. You were doing graduate work in the US at the time and you knew I had problems at Leeds and you recommended I apply to come to the US (to UCLA) to study. I made serious inquiries. However, other things were happening, such as Mary (my wife) expecting our first child (Kathy) so it became unwise to move at that time. That was the time Shirley Cordeaux of the BBC (who interviewed me, following my radio-play "The Hospital" which she produced for the BBC). I wrote the play "X", which used the form of radio to free the mind from colonial control, chiefly my mind. Atukwei Okai said to me in 1978 (Ghanaian writer, in the International Writing Program) that what I did was isolate the X factor in myself and kill it (the narrator creates a character called Kyeyune X and then, having to get off the bus when the conductor announced "Terminus", kills off Kyeyune X, a mentally colonized character he had created in his mind).
Thereafter, I began to re-educate myself, continuing when I worked in the Ministry of Finance--and it took me three years to do a basic re-education, without which my novel "In a Brown Mantle" and my first book of literary criticism (re-published in the US by Northwestern University Press in 1974) would not exist.
I did subsequently meet--when I came to the US to accept the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University granted because of my novel--the chair of African Studies at UCLA. He was a white South African, and he was a powerful man in the academic world. I realized pretty soon he was a disinformation intelligence agent for you know what organization, based you know where. He wrote a review of the Northwestern edition of my first book of criticism and tore the book apart in a totally distorted way, calling it a Marxist work without any proper analysis. So I tore him apart in the Introduction to my second book of criticism, "The Third World Writer: His Social Responsibility." UCLA wanted to bring out an edition of this book but received a destructive review by its reader, which I believed was this man. I saw him one during the annual meeting of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies at Guelph giving a presentation (in 1983). Kofi Awoonor, the Ghanaian novelist, was sitting next to me. "He's a ---agent, isn't he?" I whispered to Awoonor. Awoonor replied that he was indeed an agent. How did Awoonor know? He said the man got drunk at a reception and tearfully confessed to Awoonor.
So I am telling you nearly 47 years later that it would have been a disaster if I had succeeded in following your advice and coming to the US at that time to do graduate work. I learned much more by working in the Ministry of Finance in Entebbe, Uganda.
Peter
________________________________________
From: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com [goa-bo...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Nazareth, Peter [peter-n...@uiowa.edu]
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 8:40 AM
mas...@udsm.ac.tz
I was once called to the Vice Chancellor's office and asked whether I had
written a paper on "Sugar.." and then came the question "Why ....." I
answered that when I really get angry .. I write and the "Service Papers"
are meant to make us think and rethink ..... the fellow in my office was
an agent selling equipment ..... and tried to tell me that the Cubans knew
very little about sugar ..... and he expected this silly fellow to accept
his smooth talk. I told the fellow that I really could not help him. To
cut a long story short .... The paper landed on Nyerere;s table and he had
read it .... Scribbled in red ink was a message to the VC "Please
encourage Professor Mascarenhas to carry on this type of work" The paper
was not in praise of the Cubans ..... it was simply giving my perspectives
of how the sugar cane industry could develop .... after all I had taken
students in the field, spent a couple of weeks in the area". Two
important tings come out and BEN puts it well .... we are really
multicultureal + OUR EXPERIENCE MATTERED. Other people cannot experience
for you .... but when you are young you can put your self to make CHOICES
... we chose to be friends with Grant and George Wadimba and Alison and
many Africans, Arabs, and Europeans ..... We were like blotting papers
absorbing experiences and making choices ..... and one of the choices I
had made was that I had to get out of the English system and taste the
American system .... A Harvard Professor in Political Geographer
impresseed me and his student Professor Thomas, the army Officer who did
field work in the "Sahara Trade Routes" sealed my decision. With you it
was Reed and all the other writers.
Ben Antao is right .... the majority of Goans who left for UK, Canada or
the USA are not exiles ... the majority of Uganda Goans belong to the same
group .... the fact of the matter was there was discrimination .... there
were few African leaders who really wanted "Citizens" ...first came the
"Tribe" and to some extent it is the case even today, even in Tanzania. I
once was taken to a police station on some trumped up charges .... The
charge sheet was brought up. He asked me what tribe I was, fully expecting
me to say "Muhindi" or "Indian" I told him coolly that I was a "Mugoa" or
he could write Pogoro !! He tried to argue but when I said I would
complain in court ... he would be in trouble .... do we have to invent an
identity for ourselves ....... Noway ... Goans are Human Beings first ..
I do not think it is a question of being in "Exile" or that yo are free in
the US ...... Think of Conrad .... As long as you can See, & Feel and Hear
..... you "capture" quite a bit .... ,
Sad part Peter is that I do not have any of your books any longer as well
as my Prize winning Research on Ankole, etc ..... all reduced to dust by
white ants.
I need to revisit all that again .... and
Adolfo
Janet Rubinoff
I like your book cover design by Alex. It is a fascinating portrait. Now I want to read your book when I am home from Goa! I don't know if you remember me (us). My husband Arthur was there as well. We all met long back at the Goa Conference in Toronto in 1988. What I remember most about that dinner was: we were all at the same table, but we ran out of wine half way through dinner. You said something like "no problem" and promptly went up to the dais to ask Father Correira (sp?) if he could please turn our water into wine. He laughed! (I hope you don't mind that I have put this up on the book-club site.)
Have enjoyed many of your interesting comments over the past few weeks.
Janet Rubinoff
Savia
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Nazareth, Peter
Dear Adolfo,
About what you say about English and American Education. I was on Uganda's Committee to Write and Implement the Treaty of East African Co-Operation. One of the things being evaluated was the East African University. There was the question of who would be appointed Chair of the committee from the short list. I recommended Clark Kerr, the American, instead of an Australian. I thought the Australian would be more British than the British. Unfortunately, the committees of all three countries were very pro-British so they appointed the Australian. I mentioned this in my book "Edwin Thumboo: Creating a Nation Through Poetry" since Singapore is under the controll or spell of the Australians (sub-imperialists?) Americans have at least two major (conflicting?) personas: imperialists (Roman style?) and democrats (multicultural, practical, questioning everything, encouraging many modes of knowledge).
Peter
Adolfo
Nazareth, Peter
Dear Janet,
A slight modification. I sent my wife Mary up to Father Alfonse-Correia to ask for the wine (and I accompanied her). He was taken aback. I pointed to my wife and said, "Father, Mary of Nazareth asks you because they have no wine." He could not say No.
Peter
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 12:14 PM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [GOABOOKCLUB] Dom Moraes -- from Janet Rubinoff
I like your book cover design by Alex. It is a fascinating portrait. Now I want to read your book when I am home from Goa! I don't know if you remember me (us). My husband Arthur was there as well. We all met long back at the Goa Conference in Toronto in 1988. What I remember most about that dinner was: we were all at the same table, but we ran out of wine half way through dinner. You said something like "no problem" and promptly went up to the dais to ask Father Correira (sp?) if he could please turn our waterto into wine. He laughed! (I hope you don't mind that I have put this up on the book-club site.)
mas...@udsm.ac.tz
COME ON PETER 47 YEARS AGO TOMORROW, 17 of August 1963 YOU MET MARY FOR
THE FIRST TIME ...... and that was a Great Event. While you were having
those problems in LEEDS, it was so different for me as a teaching
assistant at UCLA ..... combining three "worlds" being a couple, working
for a living and studying ..... and we were concerned that you were having
a problem in UK ... But yes if you had not returned to Uganda your destiny
would have been very different. Interestingly, you mention the
reeducation process ..... two years down the line, the three person
commission arrived one each from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania .... the
person that was allocated to encourage me was Professor Kajubi. My
reaction was brutally frank ... we simply did not run away .... the system
drove us away ... there was not an ounce of encouragement .. from the
Geography Department ... so the choice was laid out .. I had the pick of
Makerere, Nairobi, UDSM ... in that order and I chose the one at the
bottom of the hierarchy ... a clean slate is better than a used one.
There was one condition .... not available for another two years if I was
to work and study ... suddenly in a sense there was a type of urgency the
Zanzibar Revolution, the army mutinies etc ... I got a call from the
Rockefeller Foundation with a very generous offer. ... It was risky ...
but there were no regrets ...the grandparents had not seen their
grandchildren and if they lived under difficult conditions it seemed not
right to be in California. I actually went to Zanzibar as the guest of the
Zanzibar Government because two of us were appointed advisors for the
first National Census.
In Makerere, there was all that debate about Predestination ..... in a
sense one wondered why bother ... but in retrospect we all have a purpose
to be ....
Finally, all those murky characters ..... many years later I found they
were all over including at Carlins place, in the students newspapers etc,
and the South African white supremist continue to be used ..... Yes Nelson
Mandela is still regarded as a terrorist .... do the British regard George
Washington as a terrorist ..... the race element become a terrifying beast
when it is incorporated in corporations especially mining, seed production
etc ....
We should take a moment to thank "MARY" .... but JOSEPH was an equally
great guy in a very different way .... he was a real worker not a macho !
Adolfo
.
V M
Thank you for this valuable and most interesting conversation. Even though I know (and have studied, and have even married into) the Africanders, I barely follow 50% of what you're talking about - but am aware of its value nonetheless.
It gets me thinking that we desperately need an oral history project for the Goans, particularly the Africanders whose episode has already mostly past, and is being wilfully forgotten even before it fades away completely.
Can it be done via the net? Techies?
Can we have, say, the fascinating Adolfo sit in front of a webcam and talk about his life for an hour or so (and archive), and always-stalwart Peter do the same (and archive), and my father-in-law John Carneiro (ex-head Goan School, Kampala), and so on?
Rico, what's the current state of technology? If something like an oral archive of 20th Century History can be aimed for, I will support to the hilt. Our stories are so unbelievably interesting....as Peter and Adolfo are showing right now. What memories, what complexity, what a dance we Goans led at the eve of colonialism!
VM
Jeanne Hromnik
Dominic Fernandes
For the "oral history project" i would use youtube.
regards
Dominic
mas...@udsm.ac.tz
What most of us did not understand was that we were undergoing an
experience that would shape our value system. The canvas is huge and in it
are facts, impressions feelings ..... and Peter reminded me that when he
wrote to me about the discrimination and loaded value system, I suggested
an alternative. ..... but we both ended by returning. I did not nwant our
children to be fodder in Vietnam, drugs and guns .... East Africa was so
much "safer" and yet there was a violent revolution in Zanzibar and
Ophelia came from there ...... Don't worry if you fail to always
understand .... In some cases I am literally carrying out a conversation
where I left it years and years ago.
One choice which my father favoured was that I go to Dublin. The Irish
Prist, a close friend of Julius Nyerere suggested Makerere ... so when I
went to Kampala I found four other Goans ... three medical students and
four of us, 2 from Kampala and my room mate from Mombasa ..... so diverse
and hundreds of African students .... all with a common purpose .... and
you realized that the humanrase was not only Goans and the rest but Goans
were part of the human race .... One day while working in a lab ... the
Kenyan Muslim girl comes toe and says could she come with me when I
returned to Mitchell Hall ....she wanted to stop by the Mosques which was
next to our hall of residence .... You learnt to trust people instead of
differentiating whether one was a Catholic or a Hindu ... I realized she
did not ask her Hindu mates who were in class with me... Peter,
Reynold,myself have all experienced that realization that our African
friends realized the problem of crazy sterotyping of people by tribe,
race,gender etc.
As you come in ... I think you are beginning to realize how the Goans in
East Africa actually went through some changes ..... the majority of the
"East Africans" only knew of African as their "servants" and it stopped
there and they found it difficult to accept an African Boss etc .... one
such person was an Anglo Indian lady Catholic and all that but Africans
..... one fine day their baby had a serious problem .... we drove 15 kms
away... my friend from Makerere was on the night shift and he took over
and found the vien for the drip ... When I talked to Dr Mnletlema he said
"a baby is a baby" ....
I am also carrying out another conversation with an ex Tanzanian of
Chinese origin now established in the States ... From out of the blues
last week he wanted to know why I was in Tanzania ..... rather than in the
land of democracy, freedom, wealth ..... Instead of oppression, lack of
freedoms etc ..... So Tanzania would be OK if "Rendation" was allowed, and
Canadian firms could extract unknown amount of gold etc and unemployment
increased and people lost their land like the Red Indians did ...... Who
cares we are a superpower and etc. I had to remind him that while he was
studying, apart from teaching, I had other responsibilities and one of
them was not to pretend that peoples rights were being trampled, that
there was another way to look at problems ....... VM now you will be even
more confused. ... time for me to take a trip to Goa.
Your idea of an oral history is worth trying .... take care of yourself
... the last time I went to Kampala there were only one and half Goans
!!! It could have increased.
Adolfo
Luis Vas
Dear LuisThank you for all this material on Dom Moraes. I have been reading and re-reading it -- reviews, obituaries, poem, all. After Peter's brief remarks on Gone Away, Dom Moreas's travel jornal of 1959, I am re-reading that too.So, it is a season of Dom Moraes for me -- a wonderful and abundant season. And I thank you for helping to make it so.Jeanne
On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 10:20 AM, Luis Vas <luis...@gmail.com> wrote:
In the 1980's when Dom Moraes started editing The Sunday Standard, I wrote for his paper a few articles including a profile of Dr. Jose Pereira. Later when Joao da Veiga Coutinho came out with his A Kind of Absence, I asked Dom to review it. He did. And I reproduce it below along with some of his writngs and writings on him after his death. When Abbe Faria's 250th birth anniversary approached, I asked him if he would consider writing a book on him on the lines of The Long Strider. He said he would consider but passed away before he could decide.
Janet Rubinoff
Janet
mas...@udsm.ac.tz
Tell me a bit more ......I will have to get quite a bit of education first
...... but thanks
Adolfo
Susan Rodrigues
> Subject: Re: [GOABOOKCLUB] Dom Moraes
Luis Vas
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Dom of the bygone era | ||||||
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An unusual play written by Sue MacLaine celebrates the life of society beauty and model Henrietta Moraes, first wife of Indian poet and writer Dom Moraes. He was a poet in exile - an English poet in India and an Indian poet in England. Here's a closer look at the relationship between the much celebrated Dom and the Bohemian Henrietta If Dom Moraes had been alive, I think he would have asked me to drive him down to the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton to see an unusual play called 'Still Life: An Audience with Henrietta Moraes' in which the audience are invited to "bring a sketchbook and drawing materials of your choice (not charcoal)" and draw the main character on stage.
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Dom: A Critical Appreciation
I believe in serendipity. How else can I explain why, in spite of my best efforts to dodge this assignment, I am still saddled with what would, under normal circumstances, have been a more enjoyable, though no less challenging task—to write a “eulogy” on one of India’s greatest contemporary poets, Dom Moraes.
I must, however, clarify that what follows might perhaps be more aptly described as a “critical appreciation.” Dom does not need a eulogy, but I think he does need more appreciation. That’s because he is one of the least read, least anthologised, least studied, and least written about major Indian poets. There may be reasons for it, but such neglect is regrettable. Moreover, as a writer whose unrelenting honesty compels us to look at ourselves and our surroundings with unblinking and unblinkered eyes, I am sure he does not expect pious platitudes or predictable plaudits. So, while I’m not sorry to take a candid look at some of his work, I do regret that I cannot be present to honour him in person. I should be on my way to Tokyo when this is read—but then he may not find such mischance entirely accidental.
I say this because I think Dom believes in serendipity too. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have written a book named after the island that gave us the word. Serendip (1990) was Dom’s comeback volume, published twenty-five years after his much acclaimed third book of poems, John Nobody (1965). There were two slighter collections in between, Beldam & Others (1967), which was really a pamphlet, and another published privately in Bombay called Absences (1983). The gap between Absences and Serendip is seventeen years. That number has stuck in my memory because Dom once told me that he couldn’t write poetry for “seventeen years.” “How did it feel?” I asked. “Like living with an amputated limb,” he said in his rich, gravely, but matter of fact voice.
After Absences, David Davidar of the then newly established Penguin India coaxed Dom into publishing his Collected Poems, 1957-1987. This extraordinary volume is arguably the most impressive single volume of poems of any Indian in the English language. When Serendip was released three years later, the small number of those who followed Dom’s work—and the even smaller number who could actually understand him—was thrilled. What turn would his muse take after such a long absence, we wondered.
Serendip contains three sequences of poems, set in specific places, Sri Lanka, Greece, and Sweden, and a fourth section containing eighteen other poems. The poems in the first three sections are quite different from those Dom wrote earlier. They are quieter, limpid, essential, even terse. The traces of exuberance and sentimentalism some of his earlier poetry are totally absent. Instead, his expression, pared down to the modicum, is denser far, and certainly more evocative. Dom seems to plunge into deep recesses of tribal, even collective memory, to make gestures which might almost be called cosmic.
“Serendip,” the opening sequence, from which the volume derives its name, is of course set in Sri Lanka. When his father was the Editor of the Times of Ceylon, Dom spent two years there. A memorable tribute to his childhood experiences on the island is found in one of the best poems in his debutant, award-winning volume, A Beginning (1957). “At Seven O’Clock” shows a supine lad resurrected by a Ceylonese masseur:
Within my mind he is reborn as Christ:
For each blind dawn he kneads my prostrate things,
Thumps on my buttocks with his fist
And breathes, Arise.
In “Serendip,” Dom returned to Sri Lanka, now war-ravaged and wracked by gory civil strife. Reaching back into prehistoric times and evoking ancient myths, he wonders if the pearl of the Indian Ocean can regain its eponymous tranquillity. Only as poets are wont to do, he looks into the dim future and asks:
Perhaps an evening waits
Beyond the ruptured bridge
Of some wrecked village, where
Pilgrims with lamps resume,
From memory, the trek.
Despite the poet’s habitual reserve and unrelenting realism, the compassion still shows.
Serendip won the Sahitya Akademi Award in English, the highest Indian honour for a writer. Awards were of course nothing new to Dom. At the age of nineteen, he had been the youngest and the first non-British winner of the Hawthornden Prize for his very first book of verse. Excited, I went to listen to Dom reading from Serendip at the India International Centre. He seemed rather alone on stage, never looked up from his book at the audience, and read for his allotted twenty minutes in a dispassionate, clipped style, clearing his throat once in a while. “More like ‘Dry Salvages,’” a wag quipped, “definitely disappointing to those who expected pyrotechnics.”
Looking back, one of the defining moments in Dom’s life came in 1954, when he met Stephen Spender. Dom was fifteen and later recalled the moment vividly:
It was the first time I had ever met a real poet. Through the large opaque, sea-coloured eyes of Spender I seemed to see how it might be possible to write poetry. I showed him my poems. He liked them, and said he would publish some in Encounter, which he did. Also he asked what I wanted to do. Did I want to stay in India? (Gone Away: An Indian Journal 9)
Dom realized that he did not want to.
My family was an entirely English-speaking one. My father and grandfather had been at Oxford. The background of my life had been English. In the streets of India I felt uneasy, knowing neither the language, nor, because of not having come into contact with many Indians who were not from an English background, the people. I suppose I had always known I would leave India, but when Spender asked me if I wanted to, the answer came clear at last. (ibid)
The same book, written for Heinemann, soon after Dom had scraped through his B.A. at Oxford and now wanted to make his living as a writer, also records a fascinating visit that Dom, accompanied by Ved Mehta, paid to Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Asking their way through the by-lanes of Kashmiri gate, the duo finally stumble upon a naked Chaudhuri, stretched on a string cot, on the landing of a tiny top floor flat. Wrapping himself with a sheet with great dignity, the frail figure announces, “I am Mr. Chaudhuri.” In the course of a conversation that follows, Chaudhuri says, “I want to settle in England, you know. I was only there for five weeks, in 1955, but I felt as if my whole life had been a preparation for those five weeks, and after that I feel myself at a loss till I can return.” Before the visit end, he warns Dom, “Return at once to England. If you stay here you will perish. They will not understand you here” (ibid 68). Luckily, Chaudhuri’s prophecy proved not entirely accurate. In 1980, Dom did come back to India. Although he had felt that returning was “like a prison sentence,” he has had an active and productive twenty years and more in our midst. But in one respect Chaudhuri may have been right: I’m not sure how well Dom has been understood here.
One might even say that the overriding theme of his work is his love-hate relationship with India, the country of his birth. In “Letter to My Mother,” which I find a deeply moving poem, he says:
Your eyes are like mine
When I last looked in them
I saw my whole country,
A defeated dream
Hiding itself in prayers,
A population of corpses,
Of burnt bodies that cluttered
The slow, deep rivers, of
Bodies stowed into earth
Quickly before they sank
Or cooked by the sun for vultures
On a marble tower.
…
You know I will not return.
Forgive me my trespasses.
In another book, From East and West: A Collection of Essays, (Delhi: Vikas, 1971) he confesses:
Now, for the first time, I saw what the people of Bombay really looked like. Somehow I had never noticed them before: as a child I thought always that the shrouded, bundled objects that lay along the pavements were some curious species of plant. But they were people, an army of the defeated, without food or money or the prospect of either, which was why they lay limply on the pavements, their ribs like birdcages, their eyes sunk black and silent into their skulls. (94)
It is not that Dom is the only alienated Indian English poet. A whole generation of his peers felt similarly displaced. But, none, I would venture to say is as out of place as Dom is. While Nissim Ezekiel, his contemporary and senior, finds himself reluctantly reconciled to India, Dom stubbornly holds out. Even the titles of his books, Gone Away or Never at Home underscore this estrangement. His poetic personae—from Alexander to Babur—invariably reinforce the point of view of invaders and conquerors. “Babur,” at times, is even startlingly self-reflexive: "If you look for me, I am not here./ My writings will tell you where I am./ Tingribirdi, they point out my life like/ Lines drawn in the map of my palm."
Even Serendip confirms his grim and forbidding portrayal of India. In "1668," the poem commemorating the year the British took possession of Bombay, gifted to them as a part of Catherine de Braganza's dowry, Dom paints a graphic picture of a sickly and stinking island, unfit for human inhabitation. What would later be the commercial capital of British India and, of course, Dom's home, is depicted as "beslimed acres" of a leech-infested and malarial swamp.
In Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land, which he co-authored with Sarayu Srivatsa, Dom puts this outsider’s persona to good use, turning out an acerbically pessimistic book. While I disagree with both its conclusions and the methodology—most the “native informants” already share the authors’ views—I can still enjoy the prose and the gift of observation that it offers. I look forward to reading Dom’s latest book, The Long Strider, also written with Sarayu Srivatsa. In a way, I’m not surprised that it retraces the journey of another “outsider” to India, Thomas Coryate who walked from England to India in 1613.
Of course, this is not the first time that Dom has tried to retrace other people’s journeys. In 1963, he was commissioned to do a book modelled on the journeys of Dr. Johnson and Boswell in Scotland. Instead, off he went on a wilder trip, with the irrepressible George Barker for companion. The ensuing manuscript, “North Wind,” is a memorable account ranging between a half-drunken stupor and feral adventure. Barker, a poet almost forgotten today, was supposed to be Dr. Johnson to Dom’s Boswell. True, he does come up with some unforgettable quips. At Oxford and when in his cups, Dom was sometimes called “Dim Morose”—Barker modifies it to “Dumb Morass.”
I started this tribute by saying that I believed in serendipity. When Chandrika asked me yesterday if I could write it, I was amazed that I had spent a good deal of my summer as if in preparation for such an exercise. At the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin in July of this year, I had the occasion to read not only Dom’s notebooks, but also the manuscripts of his unpublished works. I have just mentioned “North Wind.” The other one, preserved in a folder of the literary agency Curtis Brown and Co., is actually a novel—I believe, the only one Dom’s ever written. Called “Horsemen Fell,” it’s a sort of thriller-cum-melodrama about Dr. Fell, who sells heroin, and then liquidates some of his victims. The plot is bracing and is resolved in the last pages by a blind man who recognizes the smell of the villain’s after-shave. What interested me was that this blind man, is also a poet and is called Beldam, a name that also graces the title of one of Dom’s minor collections of poems.
There are many things that this tribute has been unable to address, including Dom’s extensive journalistic and other writings, including the screenplay on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, books on Mrs. Gandhi, recent collections of verse, especially In Cinnamon Shade, and so on. There’s nothing here about the women in his life—Henrietta, Leela, and now Sarayu—nor about all the interesting people he’s met and written about—Mahatma Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, even Allen Ginsberg. All I can say is that his oeuvre is extensive, varied, and that some of it will endure. I’d like to end my tribute with the words of another younger writer-poet that Dom has inspired, words that I’m afraid are blunter and perhaps more apropos than mine: “He covered wars, won prizes, loved a series of women and wrote some bloody good poems.”
Postscript
I wrote this piece for a British Council gathering to celebrate the launch of Dom’s last book, The Long Strider (2004), which he once again co-authored with Sarayu Srivatsa. This book is a remarkable account of an even more remarkable journey by an English my, Thomas Coryate, who walked from his village in England to the court of the Grand Mogul, Jahangir, in 1613. He was an eccentric man, a writer and an adventurer, who wanted fame. Dom wrote of his 5000 mile journey across the sands of Arabia, through many kingdoms and strange lands, at last to India. However, at the end of his journeys, great disappointment awaited him. India repelled him; Jahangir didn’t do much for him. He died in Surat in obscurity. In some ways, this kind of story was typical of what would attract Dom, especially the promise of India and the great disappointment at the end of the quest.
As it happened, I couldn’t be at the function when the book was launched because I was on my way to Tokyo. My tribute was read out by someone else. Dom died a few months afterwards, so I never got to see him. I do feel a sense of personal gratitude to him, though, because in 1993, when I had appeared for an interview with the Homi Bhabha Fellowships Council, Dom, in a way, salvaged my bid for the Fellowship. My project was on Sarojini Naidu, a poet the modernists didn’t much care for. The people who reviewed my project expressed their skepticism. During the interview, I spoke out against them, saying that their narrow-mindedness had created a schism in Indian English poetry. The interview didn’t go very well.
The Council, however, asked one of the experts, Dom, to “talk” to the “angry” young man. Dom called me to his house. He lived in Colaba in a flat near Electric House with his beautiful wife, Leela Naidu. The flat had belonged to Naidu’s scientist father. They had a Goan butler. Dom spoke no language other than English. It was strange to see him talk thus even to the lift man or the cab driver. A brown sahib, he was, to the core, but everyone seemed to like him. Both Leela and Dom drank each evening. Dom smoked heavily too. The conversation was sparkling. Dom told me stories of Sarojini Naidu, of his single meeting with her when he was still a child. Apparently, she gave him an apple to eat. He remembered her as a substantial, portly woman, with deep, shining eyes, and a beautiful way of speaking. But he said, “It was always difficult to remember what she said later, if it had any substance at all.”
Ultimately, Dom conceded that she was worth working on; at least her life was interesting, even if her poetry wasn’t, he said. I got the fellowship. For the next couple of years, I visited Dom every time I was in Bombay. My last attempt to see him was when he was writing the second volume of his autobiography. I didn’t know that when I called him. His butler said, “Saab is not at home.” It was 4:00 p.m. I called at 6:00 p.m. Again, I got the same answer, “Saab is not at home.” I called again at 9:00 p.m., only to get the same answer. I asked, “Isn’t he coming home to dinner?” “Yes, but he’s not yet here.” I felt a bit spited, so called again at 11:00 p.m. Amazingly, the same answer awaited me, “Saab is not at home.” Exasperated, I gave up. Later, some friends told me that he was busy writing so wouldn’t take any calls or visitors. Next year, when the book actually came out, all the pieces in the puzzle came together: it was called, Never at Home.
-End-
Dom Moraes's experiences
'Typed With One Finger'
June 06, 2003 16:40 IST
Renowned author and journalist Dom Moraes visited the British Deputy High Commission in Mumbai on Wednesday to formally launch his new collection of poems, 'Typed With One Finger'.
Moraes, along with two hundred or so admirers, listened to his assorted works recited by actor Denzil Smith in a dramatic baritone accompanied by the haunting and Bluesy synthesiser of musician Steve Sequeira.
Dom Moraes, 65, was born in Bombay in 1938. His father was the editor and author Frank Moraes. With him, Moraes travelled through Sri Lanka [ Images ], Australia [ Images ], New Zealand [ Images ] and South-East Asia. He began his career at an early age and wrote his first book, on cricket, when he was 13.
"When I first started to type at the age of eight and nine I wasn't taught to type so I typed with one finger," said Moraes when asked about the significance of his book's title. "Until today, I type with my one finger (on my) computer."
At nineteen, Moraes published his first book of poems, 'A Beginning', which won the Hawthornden Prize for the best work of imagination in 1958. Moraes remains the first non-English person to win this prize, and also the youngest.
He wrote his autobiography, 'My Son's Father', when he was 30.
Though Moraes has never learned Hindi or any India [ Images ]n language and recently told The Hindu, "I don't think I belong anywhere," he has travelled to every corner of India and beyond for material and inspiration. "I have lived in a great number of countries," said Moraes when asked whether his work is specific to India.
Moraes, with his single-digit style, has produced a large body of work encompassing twenty-three prose books, including a biography, 'Mrs Gandhi', and over twenty television documentaries from England [ Images ], India, Cuba and Israel for the BBC and ITV.
'Typed With One Finger', is a reaction to his travels in India and beyond that Moraes himself describes as dark. "[The work] has gotten more dark," said Moraes. "I think most people's lives get darker."
The book contains a collection of old and new works that all serve "as an interpretation of how I see me," said Moraes.
What is the central message of Moraes's latest work? "I don't go around sending messages," he said.
When asked whether the day's performance was an appropriate representation of his work, Moraes paused, straightened somewhat, and said: "The reading was very well done."
Dear Jeanne,2 more items by Dom:LuisFrom The Cheap Seats
As soon as he comes out, the thunder starts
from fifty thousand throats the sun made dry.
You almost hear the fifty thousand hearts,
In ragged unison, beat for one boy.
Ten years ago they mispronounced his name
At Lord’s, where, with a catch, a myth began.
Tall, cold, and arrogant, the captains came
to break this boy, and found he was a man.
Thickset and stocky, he takes guard today.
Designer stubble coarsens his young cheeks.
What fetches thousands here to see him play?
You feel the watchers stir in the cheap seats
Suddenly as the sun, he finds his power.
So, when the ringmaster assumes his place,
flashes and whipcracks fill the acrid air,
though he shows no emotion in his face.The great show’s on the road, the circus tent
made of leached sky. The tricolour hangs slack.
Not many people know what it once meant.
The marvellous boy refuses to turn back.
The watchers in cheap seats applaud it all
with puny wooden drums, instead of words.
Fireworks explode round fences as the ball
soars up in its huge arc to threaten birds.
Now strings are pulled, the tricolour unfurled.
But he’s empowered, not reined by any rope.
Tatters of colour, shreds of sound, are whirled
around the cheap seats, in a rage of hope,while with his bat he reinvents their world.
Poetic Note
Caught In Some Morass, Dom?
Call me behind times, but technology and I never took to each other
As a boy, I brooded over books, and my only concession to the real world was an interest in cricket, though I preferred reading about it to playing it. I envied my school friends, who were splendidly illiterate. These boys owned toolkits and meccano sets, and were as adept with their hands as other rough young primates are; whereas I, if exposed to sharp tools, managed to cut myself severely, and any structures I built with my meccano set instantly collapsed.
I believe that all mechanical devices hate a certain kind of person. No matter what he does to placate them, they will never respond with sympathy. They will go out of their way to annoy and frustrate him. I was born one of these people, fated to be a victim of technology and saddened by my stars.
By the time I was 15 years old, I spent much of my time writing poetry, and the rest thinking about it; often lost in a dream, I paid no attention whatever to the world around me. It was hardly the moment for my father to decide that I should learn how to drive. The instant result of this decision was that in 1953, somewhere along Marine Drive, I drove his brand new Buick into the back of stationary bus. My instructor and I were not irreparably damaged. The bus and the Buick were, and my driving lessons came to a sudden end. By now it was generally accepted by those who knew me that I could not be taught science, mechanics, or any other matters that would be useful in the technological age whose imminent arrival was predicted even in the 1950s.
One of the major irritants for me now that I have reached 60 in a period full of technological advances is to be asked how I react to these developments. The implication in these not wholly civil inquiries is that I must be behind the times. What my questioners seem not to realise is that there has never been any period in my life when, in so far as technology is concerned, I have not been behind the times. When in 1950 my father gave me his old Hermes portable typewriter, I was delighted. But when he attempted to teach me how to use it, I refused to learn. I acquired that typewriter half-a-century ago, and since then have used many other machines. But I have only ever typed with one finger, and I never managed to learn how to change a ribbon.
In recent years I have had my typewriters serviced at a shop in Mumbai, Fort area. The proprietor, a wise and kindly South Indian, told me he would soon close down his shop because most people now used computers. Typewriter parts would soon be unavailable. Guided by a friend, I got a computer. I was able to conceal this from other friends for weeks, because I didn’t want them to know. I found a young instructor, Pratik, who agreed to teach me. I insisted that all I wanted was to be able to write on the machine, and then correct what I wrote, no more. He was surprised by this, and that I typed with one finger. "I feel ashamed," he said, "so many things can be done with a computer. I don’t teach you even five per cent. I don’t do my duty."
Pratik attended a journalism class. He had read some of my writing, and he asked me to help him with one of his assignments. He showed me what he had written about a journey on a commuter train in Mumbai. "The teacher offers us his own ideas," he said. "I have used his ideas to write this." The piece he had written was awful. Much to Pratik’s gratitude, I rewrote it. A week later he came to me, looking puzzled. He averted his eyes and showed me the rewrite I had done for him, fiercely annotated in red ink. "Sir," he said, "I received zero marks for this essay. It’s the first time I have got zero marks." I consoled him by saying that he shouldn’t feel guilty about how little he was teaching me. "As teachers," I said, "we seem about the same."
But the changes in equipment continued to irritate me. In London a writer friend remarked, "Some people who change over to computers find their styles change. Not for the better either." I replied sourly that none of these innovations was for the better. He agreed; then as we parted said, "We’ve been out of the touch all these years. Here’s my e-mail address. What’s yours?" When I returned to Mumbai, I started to make inquires about acquiring this service. Vijay Mukhi, who pioneered the Internet in India, kindly sent me an instructor. He was a very young man, and he found it difficult to set up the system. One night he came with another computer expert, also very young, and they conversed in a strange dialect made up of technological terms.
It was like some secret code only known to a few conspirators; it seemed unlikely that anything significant or beautiful could ever be said in those words. Eventually, speaking in ordinary English, the two young men told me that my telephone line was faulty and would have to be reconnected. I didn’t understand how my telephone came into it; they explained kindly, as to a child. Finally I suppose I shall have an e-mail address, like everyone else. That is what I object to in technological progress; it herds people together at the lowest common denominator; clones them, vulgarises them. Quality has been removed from human life, not added to it, by new technologies that come from Orwellian nightmares and are in some senses imposed on one.
I committed myself to a premature millennium resolution last week, and have not smoked since. This has made me simultaneously grumpy and confused, and perhaps it shows in this article. I am a child of the 20th century, the last in which some places and people, once discovered, were destroyed by the same technology which will rule the century to come. I recall a discussion I had in the ‘70s with the great anthropologist and explorer Margaret Mead. I was fairly young and she was over 80. I told her about a recent visit to a cannibal tribe in West Irian. She had been there two decades before I had. "All the men wore penis sheathes then," she said. "Now you say some wear shorts."
She used to carry a long Masai shepherd’s crook, which she banged on the floor of the restaurant we were in. "In another 20 years," she said, "they’ll be wearing suits and their ambitions will be connected with money. Progress is about that, my boy. It’s nothing to do with improving life. It always comes when businessmen and scientists smell money at the same time. And then it kills." Last year I met a rich American poetess who had recently visited the valley I discussed with Margaret in the ‘70s. She had gone as a tourist and she had stayed in a hotel. The great mountain forests had been felled, and paper mills built along the rivers. "But the local people are making money," she said. I suppose Margaret would have asked if they were wearing suits.
Luis Vas
Nazareth, Peter
Janet,
Just got back to Iowa--fifteen minutes ago--from Ashburn, Virginia.
No, you remember incorrectly. We did get the extra bottle of wine from the priest, who had the bottle of wine on the high table but was not drinking it whereas we had finished the wine on our table, which was apparently being rationed--we could not even buy a bottle when we had finished the one we had been given.
Peter
Janet Rubinoff
Janet