MATCHBOX

Keki N. Daruwalla wrote with the sharp clarity of someone who had seen the world’s fractures up close. He knew that to make sense of chaos, you had to first call it by its name.

Born in Lahore in 1937, Keki’s life straddled a subcontinent that was split apart before he could even understand it. This early experience of rupture marked his work with an acute sense of how history seeps into the everyday, how it quietly alters lives.

Keki spent much of his life in the civil services, working as a police officer and later with the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW). He then served as the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and, post-retirement, was with the National Commission for Minorities until 2014. It was during these very decades that he produced a majority of his literary work. But to call this a dual life would be to miss the point. Keki’s was truly the life of a writer in its fullest sense. He stood at the center of whirlpools, noting the bend of the water, the force of the wind, the devastation within its folds, so those of us who watched from the shore could understand turbulence.

His first poetry collection, Under Orion, was published in 1970. He was part of the monumental shift in Indian English poetry that rejected the pretty and the polite. But even among this wave, Keki’s verse felt like a blade cutting through fabric—rooted in the political and social realities he witnessed up close. Nissim Ezekiel said of him, “Such a bitter, scornful satiric tone has never been heard before.”

Keki won the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Keeper of the Dead in 1984, which he returned in 2015 in protest against Sahitya Akademi’s failure “to speak out against ideological collectives that have used physical violence against authors”. For Keki, the political was also personal. 

In “Curfew in a riot-torn city,” he writes from his experience as a police officer:

“A gunshot scatters
the silence and the birds.
You rush there, pistol cocked,
search the lanes and scan the walls for blood.
Weak with relief, you praise the Lord,
the bullet hasn’t claimed a corpse.”

His fiction carried that same weight. Across his novels and stories, Keki blended the monumental with the minute. He wrote about history, politics, and identity, but it wasn’t about retelling events; it was about how they shaped the lives of ordinary people. This ability to turn grand, sweeping narratives into something intimate, something personal, is perhaps his most lasting gift to Indian English fiction.

Keki was never content with being a solitary voice. He extended his hand to young writers, generously offering his time and insights—reading their poems, their manuscripts, and engaging in conversations that stretched far beyond the page. There hasn’t been a poetry gathering where I haven’t heard his name invoked by writers from different generations, calling him a mentor, a guide, a lighthouse. Perhaps Keki was quietly building a cadre of poets, armouring them with the same integrity he carried in his voice.

In a world more fractured than ever, it is this integrity—equal parts legacy and lifeline—that Keki will be remembered with.