Keki Daruwalla’s ‘Landfall’: An exploration of memories

GJV Prasad

KN DARUWALLA is one of the most prominent voices in Indian poetry now, perhaps the most significant one in Indian English poetry. He has a large body of work and is well-known for his striking imagery, his pithy and often ironic observations (and his humour), and his wide range of subject matter. His first poetry collection was published in 1970, and he has continued to write long after the publication of his ‘Collected Poems’ in 2006. A noted fiction writer as well, Daruwalla reminds us how good a poet he is with this new collection.

The cover of ‘Landfall’ features a detail from a painting by Eugene Delacroix, Dante and Virgil in Hell. It should alert you to the world of references of this book and that the motif of journey — through time and space — would be significant in the poetry. Opening with an unnamed section of a dozen poems, the book takes us through the following sections — ‘Cyprus and Salamis’, ‘Alaska Poems’, ‘Landfall at Canto X’, ‘Black Death Sonnets’, an unnamed selection of poems, and ‘The Night Attendant’. He takes us on this journey, the person and the personality of the poet always before our eyes as his body and mind make various sorties, physical and intellectual.

Daruwalla’s eye for detail, his visual imagination is on display from the first poem in this volume, ‘Matheran’: “that forested hilltop dripping/with shadows and leeches.” This is a book filled with memories, a book exploring how memory is made (“How does a fitful glimmer/move into memory through words?”).

Daruwalla observes both the human psyche and the natural world with precision and he does celebrate the few occasions when humans seem to live with nature, and not in hostility to it — many poems in this book are filled with his wonder for nature, of how we live such small lives in such an infinitude.

The epigraph of the book is from Canto X of Dante’s ‘Inferno’: “Now by a secret pathway we proceed…” We have seen the path that Daruwalla takes in the structuring of the book. Canto X is about the sixth circle which contains Heretics. They didn’t believe in the soul and were Epicureans, looking to attain happiness. Daruwalla does seem to believe that we carry our Hell with us and perhaps all of us are living in it. Whether we believe in souls or not, most of us seem to be heartless! Daruwalla is a poet of the world, his interest in history and geography ensures that he speaks of more than India. Take the poem ‘Chalk’, for instance, which is about a child from war-torn Poland of the 1940s. The girl draws on the board and turns “to stare at the counsellor who had asked/her to draw/‘home’,/her eyes marked with new-found horror/for her chalk had drawn/a stack of barbed wire.”

Daruwalla is nothing if not political, more so in recent years, never hesitating to call a spade a spade even if others don’t consider it to be even a spoon. As he says, “goddesses of peace/are hard to find; gods/of war are a-plenty.” (‘If There Were a Goddess of Peace’). And if you think you are getting a state of humankind poem, you soon reach the lines, “The goddess of peace,/had there been one,/would have been disturbed/at the sight of a temple coming up/on the carcass of a mosque.” His eyes are focussed on what is happening in our country — “UP is not the right home for daughter./Whether India is a better place,/we can discuss later.” (‘Hathras’)

We are living in inverted times, Daruwalla avers — when neo-Godses “beat/you right up to the mortuary/… the police would serve them tea/and biscuits…” (‘Of Neo-Godses’). But he is not done yet, When asked what happened to men who were beaten, the answer would be, “One’s in the autopsy room,/other’s in the lock-up.”

How does one cope with all this? One does, for there is always the other side: “Have lived with love and friends,/Lived with death and grieving./What else is there to life?” (‘There are Wars’). As he says in an earlier poem in the book, “it’s not such a bad planet after all.” (‘The Bakula’).

These are poems written over five years, which include the Covid times. If the sonnets on Black Death didn’t tell you that, the brilliant and chilling ‘Night Attendant’ series of five poems towards the end of the book will remind you of the pandemic years — the lessons in anatomy many got, the lessons in wet and dry. While you plan how to die, nature carries on, “too busy with the leaf edge/looking for gold”. (‘Goddess on the Grindstone’). These brilliant lines conclude the book and I must leave you with that.