MATCHBOX

Click here to watch the video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKFkww1fjuE

I have so many memories of Keki. Too many. It all began in 2006, when he was reading my manuscript for potential publication by the Sahitya Akademi. I was stricken with nervousness, and flooded with elation when I learnt it had been accepted. Keki was my first, strictest, fairest poetry editor. It was he who wrote the Foreword to my very first poetry book, Sight May Strike You Blind (2007). I was overwhelmed then that such a senior poet could take the time to do this, make the effort so willingly and warmly. I’m still overwhelmed.

When my first novel Rupture came out in 2009, I had no doubt who would launch it in Delhi. Keki, of course. He was blunt and forthright, as always. “Why the bric-a-brac?” I remember him asking me about a particular section, as the audience guffawed. That discussion – with Urvashi Butalia as our wonderful moderator – still glows like it happened yesterday.

Thereafter, Keki’s Collected Poems was launched at PEN@Theosophy Hall. I remember that evening. He was very unwell and had to go home. In lieu of the prepped plan, we took turns, audience members and organisers alike, to read from his book. So many memorable evenings and events followed, in Bombay. And always, Keki had a joke, a wry comment; ever the self-deprecatory, witty, old-school gentleman.

I will never forget his humility in welcoming and accepting editorial direction, when I found myself publishing his poetry in the Indian Quarterly (what an honour). That was a different kind of grace altogether.

2017 shines as a high point for a very special reason. It was that year, at the Poetrywala Festival, that Keki and my father, Chandak Chattarji, met for the first time. Both poets, both gentlemen. They drank tankards of beer after the day’s session. Keki joked about Baba having beaten him in terms of two hospitalisations and being two years older than him. Three days after the numbness of Keki’s passing, five months after my dad’s death, I thought: There, he’ll be joking again – saying, “You beat me to it!”

In April 2023, I visited Keki at his Dilli home in East of Kailash. His daughter Rookzain had said I could come for a short while. He was immaculate as ever, the smile on his face as he greeted me wordlessly a whole summer’s worth of sunshine. His speech centre had been affected by the stroke and Rookzain told me he was doing speech therapy. This poet, who wrote complex, intricate, referenced poetry, with the world’s mythologies and poetries at the tip of his tongue, was re-learning how to pronounce simple words: ball, tree, cloud.

His latest book, Landfall, had arrived from the publisher. I opened it and read a couple of poems to Keki. Rookzain recorded them. I share them here today, with love and gratitude for the life of this person, this father-figure in poetry, this friend.

Sampurna Chattarji

30 Sept, 2024

A tribute to Keki Daruwalla

Mustansir Dalvi

Keki spoke to me in Urdu. I would respond in my gutter Bambaiya, which was the closest I could get to Urdu. But we both shared a love for the words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which Keki could recall seamlessly, and recite in his soft, mellifluous voice. He was intensely happy that I was translating Faiz regularly. Whenever we met, not very regularly, whether at the Press Club or the Kala Ghoda Festival In Bombay or at the Goa Art and Literary Festival, I would always prefer to read my poems first. You see, Keki was a hard act to follow.

Belying his avuncular demeanour was the rasp in his words, an impatience and suppressed rage in his verse. I could never read his poems without wondering what those eyes had seen for those hands to write the way they did. His early work, especially ‘Keeper of the Dead’ uses imagery from his youth in undivided Punjab, and his life in the police, as it unsparingly talk of a country coming to terms with its independence, nominally under governance, but largely in a struggle just to survive. Anger is conveyed through irony, which continues even in his later historical work while talking about the Persians of Greeks, of Babylon or Nishapur. An irony that he would happily unleash on an audience whenever he stood up to read.

I came into the poetry scene later than some of my contemporaries. Late enough to know that the last great outpouring of Anglophone Indian poetry had been in the 1970s, when I was a schoolchild. Many of the great names had already passed on, Kolatkar, Chitre, Moraes, Ezekiel. But I was privileged to read with some of their contemporaries, Adil Jussawalla,  Gieve Patel, Jayanti Mohapatra, and of course, Keki Daruwalla Now only Jussawalla remains, and long may he be with us.

Each one of them was gracious to me, willing to share and talk about their work, gracious enough to write a blurb for a book of poems by a greenhorn, gracious enough to agree to release a book I had written, as did Eunice Desouza and Gieve Patel for me. Keki, stalwart poet, was the kind and friendly elder in my poetic life whose quiet encouragement and appreciation like Faiz’ sweet morning breeze could make an ailing soul like mine, feel fine for no reason at all.

 Raat yunh dil mein teri khoee hui yaad aayee

Jaise veeraane mein chupke se bahaar aa jaaye

 Jaise sehraa mein haule se chale baad-e-naseem

Jaise beemaar ko be-vajah qaraar aa jaaye

For Keki Daruwala

Mrinalini Harchandrai