A Tryst With Keki N.Daruwalla Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

To take the name of Keki N.Daruwalla is to be conjured of Ted Hughes
And his cruel love for Sylvia plath,
His animal imagery
And love of violence
Which is but in our human nature,
Savage and wild, bloody, beastly and brutal,
To see it in the Tennysonian terms, Nature red in tooth and claw

And to be remembered of Robert Browning and his dramatic monologues
Full of lyrical intensity and internal inner action,
The personae conversing with,
The protagonists in talks and sharing,
The personality split into two,
The speaker and the listener,
One half saying while the other half hearing,
Listening to.

But in case of Daruwalla, there is nothing like that of Plath’s case
And he not like Hughes meting out cruelty
To a nervous
But loving girl
Of her daddy,
So sick and ailing,
So shattered and desperate in her self,
I mean the soul,
A sickling, a weakling she,
Confessional and accepting
But Hughes a hawk man,
With the heart of a falconer,
A rugged fellow,
Unmindful of a tender but pulsating heart.

But as far as Keki N. Daruwalla is concerned,
He is a Parsi man of a Parsi heart and soul,
Searching his lost tongue,
Lost home and locations,
Dealing with the Tower of Silence, Fire Hyms
And the birds of prey circling over
And ths is his own ethos,
The psyche and heritage of his
But apart from it, he is something more
As for his poetic stance
And penetration,
Psychological and sociological,
Sarcastic and sardonic glib.

First of all, he is verbose, bombastic and curtailed abruptly,
The exterior nut-kernelled
But the interior full of decoration,
Lyrical and so much so full of internal action,
The personae in dialogues,
Giving a tough time to comprehend him
And his poetic statements,
The situations, circumstances and times
Picked up from other climes and environs,
Mapping the cartography and topography of that,
Into the forests hearing the call of the wild
In the call of the hyenas.

Poetry gushing forth as one lead from the barrel of the gun
And one of the mating bird pair shot at
And it fallen with a shriek
And the bird in blood,
Poetry gushing forth
While viewing the curfew-clamped towns with
Movement come to a standstill,
Poetry landscaping the rivers in flood
Swirling around
And the villages and men in water,
Poetry in the sighting of the palanquin-carriers
Taking the cholera patients away to heath centres
From distant hamlets and thorps on foot
The same carriers taking the brides away.