These are the first six lines of a poem “Figures in the Landscape” from Dom Moraes’ debut book of poems A Beginning:
‘Dying is just the same as going to sleep,’ The piper whispered, ‘Close your eyes,’
And blew some hints and whispers on his pipe: The children closed their eyes.
And gravely wandered in a private darkness,
Imagining death to be a way of looking.
I had nearly forgotten these lines from his first book when I met Dom in Kolkata in the last year of his life and asked why his travels in a fractured land, meaning India, put into a book Out of God’s Oven had to begin with a chapter called “Leaving London.” Dom, as usual sucking at a long cigarette precipitously dangling from his lips, smiled and said as he shakily autographed my copy of the book, “Since it’s all about displacement. Imagining departure as a way of looking.”
I still cannot figure out why that afternoon every now and then we came around to talking about death and departures. One reason, of course, was the beautiful paragraph he had written of his father’s departure and death in the aforesaid essay on London. But the other, and more important, reason could have been an information that he hid from me, that his days were numbered.
He, it seemed, didn’t mind that we talked so little about the book Out of God’s Oven and so much of its opening essay, which brought out with such poignancy his estrangement from the one city he could have called his own. When I asked why his father decided to live his last years in London, he uttered the very same sentence he had written in the essay, “I haven’t the faintest idea.” And then he put a very pointed question: “Why do you ask me to repeat something I have already said in my writing?” To which I replied: “Because I like to listen to you endlessly quoting from yourself. You never fail to do it.”
Dom, I’m sure, did not fail to notice in this repartee, the great admiration I bore for the style and content of his oeuvre, which was seeing himself, through himself, in and out of himself, and always himself. The entire corpus of his writing, combining both verse and prose, adds up to a loosely structured autobiography, which also, significantly, offers a rollicking script of his time and place. Everything Dom wrote ended up as autobiography and all talk of death and departures eventually veered to his own death and displacement.
We may first consider the lines he writes about his father. His father Frank, who was very Indian and very successful in his career as a journalist, on retirement chose to spend the rest of his days by himself in London surrounded by memories, memorabilia and his son’s books. He lived there just two years. Dom writes: “Whenever I have visited London after my father died, I have gone to look at the house where he last lived. This is a rather grand house in Bayswater Square. I look at the house for a while through the taxi window, before I ask the puzzled driver to go on. It is the only monument left to my father’s loneliness”.
I asked Dom if he had plans to retire to somewhere before dying. Strange, even after this he did not disclose that he was fast dying and that it was far too late in the day to plan a final transit camp.
Instead, he said two very charming things– one, he wouldn’t mind dying among the aborigines of New Guinea and two, though not in any athletic fitness, he was still doing a lot of running around. This running around turned out to be his hectic travels in northern and western India to dig up material for his book with Sarayu Srivatsa on Thomas Coryate’s historic walk from England to India in the year 1613.
So, Dom, who a few years ago on a certain Sunday had watched London, once his city, pass by with detached sadness, was back again in Odcombe in Somerset to launch his book The Long Strider shortly before his death. On hindsight I get a feeling that he hid his fatal ailment not to stop me from bringing up themes like death, dirge and derangement.
Addicts of Dom’s prose, pieces journalistic or artistic, laced as they are with superb humour and pinch, would hardly suspect the depth and horror of the pain from which it all emerged. Born into a family with a much preoccupied and largely absentee father and an insane and violent mother, Dom had all the classic ingredients of an autobiographical novel at hand when he started out into poetry.
In all his life he wrote just one novel, which he regretted having written at all. But he spread his life’s experiences generously across all his poetry and much of his personal prose, which share a subtle archaeological activity- the digging of the mind. Like poetry in his tender boyhood, (he reminisces in “Leaving London”: “I was by now going to school, which helped keep me out of her way. But I had now also started to feel an obscure but powerful need to write poetry. This required that I sit still with a pen and paper in one place, which had of necessity to be my room”) wit and humour was an escape from circumstances.
Ten years after that brilliant debut, (A Beginning earned him the Hawthornden Prize) when he stopped writing poetry for seventeen years his prose grew in journalistic cynicism, yet it retained its levity and impish verve. In his last book, The Long Strider, I feel he found that serenity of expression that comes with a reasonable escape from self. Dom had harboured the will to write a book on Coryate for fifty years and only launched into it when writing was no more a passion or escape but a job that helped pay the grocer’s bills.
Even then, Thomas Coryate reflected a part of himself, the Dom without permanent liaisons or address and trammelled with a constant need to keep tramping. Like a lonely traveller as Coryate, Dom too wore a sad face in his last years, which like quite a bit of his poetry and prose, I now find unforgettable.
Besides death and departures, Dom spoke a good deal on madness. It began with his caustic remarks about poetry as a form of madness for some and a supple system for others. When I wanted to know what it was in his case, he kept silent for a while and then made the vague comment that poets would not be half as interesting without some corny features.
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I mentioned the genteel and proper Eliot to whom Dom had been to with his earliest poems. “He liked my pieces but said that just twenty poems wouldn’t make a book,” said Dom, and then added as if to add an oddity to Eliot’s image, “Then just when I was fearing that my time was out, he enquired if I drank. ‘It’s five o’clock and I must have my gin.’ I said that I’d be only too glad to share his gin. And out came a bottle of Beefeater’s from his handbag and we settled down to drink in his chamber.
“But that was only the beginning of our drinking, for as soon as we had downed the bottle, Eliot asked if I’d join him for further booze in the pub. The pub that he took me to turned out to be a very sleazy one with a very strange mix of clients. The way the crowd kept yelling ‘Hi Tom!’ rather confirmed that the joint was one of Thomas Stearns’ regular haunts.
Eliot took me to a far corner and ordered more gin. And then after a couple of glasses suddenly remembered something and said, ‘Do walk out to the phone booth and make a call to my wife, tell her we are busy with your poems and that I’d be back soon.’
“When I had said just about this, I heard Mrs. Eliot from the other end, ‘If you are in Tom’s office then why do I hear you dropping coins into a box? I know where you are precisely, and I want you to tell Tom that if he did not turn up at our doorstep within half an hour then the door will not open for him tonight.’
No sooner had I reported this to the great man than he fast settled the bill and dashed out of the pub. In his haste, I noticed he had left behind his valise, which I duly picked and ran after him. By the time I caught up, he had hailed a taxi and was describing his route. And then he turned round to say ‘goodbye’ and saw me holding his bag. ‘How come my valise is in your clutch?’ he asked, still wondering how it had all happened. ‘You had left it behind in the pub’, I clarified. He said, ‘You ought to have told me that, I would have gone back to collect it.’
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“I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. Eliot then drew his drunken body to its full height and said in his authoritative style, ‘Remember, you are a poet, and a poet does not carry anybody’s bag save his own.’ He then went inside the cab and vanished in the dark. So much for your genteel and proper Eliot,” said Dom with a crooked smile.
I remembered having seen this smile of his on an earlier meeting only a few shades wickeder – when I had brought up the topic of Khushwant Singh. We were discussing the flamboyance of the memoirs of poets, and I told Dom how Khushwant had reacted to an anecdote given by him in one of his books. It stated that Leela Naidu, then wife of Dom, was helping Khushwant to do some shopping in Hong Kong. Among the items Khushwant had to buy were bras for his wife and daughter.
As per Dom’s version, Khushwant did not have the exact sizes of the bras required and cupped his hands over the breasts of the Chinese salesgirls and asked for something ‘a little larger than yours’. Apparently, the salesgirl did not take offence and produced exactly what he wanted. It was a good story, Khushwant thought, at his expense.
Dom was still wearing his smile as I recounted Khushwant’s grouse and then warmly said, “Of course, it’s true Khushwant had taken his palms precariously close to the girl’s breasts; I had only set them on the skin. Which is very much within the rights of literary recounting. And it’s not that Khushwant doesn’t know this.”
I was still savouring the exquisite Eliot anecdote when Dom spoke again, “You might still want to know if I revisited Eliot. And just in case you do, the answer is ‘yes’. But this time with my first book of poems in hand.”
I couldn’t help asking, “Is it still among your favourite?”
Dom took a sip of coffee and a drag of his long cigarette and looked quizzically at me, “Favourite what?”
“Book of poems,” I said.
“No way. They are all rubbish.”
“You mean you don’t care for any of your many books?”, I had to ask.
Then Dom said with classical aloofness, “Whatever be its merit, I still am fond of just one of my works: My Son’s Father.”
“But that is prose.”
“What’s wrong? Maybe I still like the way it has turned out.”
“But it’s for your poetry people will best remember you; isn’t it so?”, I reminded him.
Dom sat silent for a while and then disarmingly conceded, “That’s the price you pay for having written poetry that people liked. Nothing else you ever wrote after that can change your image and address.”
Dom has described poetry in his short preface to his Collected Poems 1954-2004 as the hardest and most demanding discipline and a ferocious master. His seventeen years of poetry block, he says, arrived and went away for no apparent reason. He resents this long block as seventeen years of deprivation, and he did not want it ever to recur while he was alive. I now find that even as he was trashing his lovely poetry, he was still working at it with the last dregs of passion and energy to produce those exquisite “New Poems” of 2003-2004.
I cannot recall why that afternoon – in between talk of poetry and passion – I put him back to discussing his mother’s presence and absence.
He said he still had his mother hovering over his memory and invoked her in his poetry.
The long last poem, a combination of sonnet-like pieces, in Collected Poems, titled “After the Operation”, begins with such a surrender to the mother image that he had fought with all his life:
From a heavenly asylum, shrivelled Mummy, glare down like a gargoyle at your only son, who now has white hair and can hardly walk. I am he who was not I
That I’m terminally ill hasn’t been much help. There is no reason left for anything to exist. Goodbye now. Don’t try and meddle with this.
In the opening stanza of the third section of the poem, Dom rued his imminent death because that would freeze his dialogues with his dead father and his life with Sarayu, his ‘closest friend, harshest critic,’ to whom Collected Poems 1954-2004 is dedicated. His lines go:
Death will be an interruption of my days, of all matters pertinent to me, and the private intimacies I have that cannot be taken away. It will interrupt my talks with my dead father, moribund friends, and bent, witchlike trees;
Even as we talked of death in the softly lit hotel room and Dom continued to suck his cigarette smoke with trembling lips, arrangements were afoot to have him operated upon.
He was still hopeful that he would come by a collaborator to work on a translation of Jibanananda Das’ poetry. I now feel foolish why I hadn’t prodded him more on Jibanananda, another poet obsessed with death and departures.
As a result, I don’t even know what in Jibanananda appealed so much to Dom that he was prepared to give even his last days to translating him. But strangely as it all happens in poetry, Dom in the fifth section of “After the Operation” describes an O.T. experience which matches firmly Jibanananda’s imagined scene from an autopsy room: “Lash Kata Gharey” (In the Autopsy Room)
My throat was split open by a surgeon’s knife. Though he was a pleasant man, whom I liked when he took the tumour out, he invaded all the private places in my head, and, you, God, giggling, watched. I shall choke on my blood but not to toast you, monster made by man.
The first time I met Dom I had told him how in late school and early years of college we almost idolized him. To which he replied, “I hope you’ve gotten over that.”
“The phase, yes, but the feeling stays.”
“You probably know why I am here in Calcutta with Sarayu?”
I said, “Yes. To shoot a documentary on the city.”
To make it more specific Dom added, “But this won’t be Dom Moraes’ Calcutta 96. It’s actually a look at the remains of the Raj- fact-bound and data-displayed as documentaries go.”
“So, a trip to the Bowbazar Baijis is off the script?” I asked.
Dom replied, “What to do? That’s another story, about another city.”
“You mean the ‘spider city’ Calcutta, as you called it in “Gone Away”, and this city we are sitting in are two different places?”
“I’ll put it this way: the similarities of the past and present cities are vague, and their realities are vague too. They must be held together by memory.”
I asked, “Aren’t the memories of two people of the same thing various too? Like Ved Mehta couldn’t remember that knife incident at the Baiji den you described in your book.”
Dom had plucked out his cigarette to enjoy a little laugh and then spoke with naïve candour, “But I did meet up with Ved and settled the issue. What I wrote was no story-making and I still stand by it.” I said, “Among the remains of the Raj were the excellent floor shows of Calcutta hotels. Those cabarets too are no more.” “Of course, of course,” Dom nodded, “And among the best cabaret dancers ever seen anywhere in India was a girl from here. Luscious Lola.”
I cannot describe what joy Dom’s complimenting Lola brought me. Lola, whom I knew in boyhood as Lauren Swinton, and grew up watching practicing her steps from my attic window in central Calcutta! I told him this and asked, “Will there be any reference to those long-lost cabarets?” And he said, “I am afraid, no.” Then casually he put across a query, almost as an afterthought: “And where in the world do you think Lola is?”
I said, “Not the faintest idea.”
And Dom sadly closed the issue: “Gone away!”
For the final time, I will return to our last meeting at Taj Bengal hotel when Dom had just been through a session of promotion of Out of God’s Oven. Like I have been saying all along this piece, our conversation simply wouldn’t shake out of death or displacement. But Dom did not speak anything of belief, religion or God. His death he was hiding like a private part. Now when I think back on it, I seem to know why, since there is textual evidence in the sixth section of “After the Operation”:
Let me situate this poem in time and space. It is 15 April 2003: Baghdad has surrendered. The dictator may be dead; Bush doesn’t know.
At the end of his days, Dom Moraes must have been a very resigned person. He seemed happy with himself, his lover Sarayu, even with the hordes of hostile memories of his mother and father. I do not know when he gave up believing, but he didn’t seem any the worse for it.
I hope he nearly knew he was the best-ever Indian poet in English. I wish he lived a couple of years more to see the reader’s reaction to the ninth part of his last great poem, which rings, ominously close to some parts of Rilke’s “Ninth Elegy” of the Duino Elegies, where Dom writes:
History, slow as a sloth, has maintained our race. One can savour Hitler’s slave camps in a film, But Yahweh did not come to comfort or save. A towel from Turin shows a fraudulent face.
The creatures I created told me for years. That we would end as we started, by accident, and turn back into the emptiness of the sky.
P.S.
It is now known that on the night before he died, Dom had talked of returning to the Somerset village of Odcombe and even settling there. On July 19, 2004, on Dom’s 66th birthday, 26 of his friends attended a simple ceremony in which a tablet was placed near the entrance to the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Odcombe.
The 18-inch by 2-ft tablet of Jaisalmer stone read: “Dom Moraes who followed Thomas Coryate’s footsteps and returned home.” Sarayu, it is stated in the report, sees parallels between Coryate’s life and Dom’s: “Coryate had to beg for money from the Emperor Jehangir and we had to beg for money to complete the book.” The book and Dom’s last beautiful poems now complete a lovely, loverly, lonesome life.
Image Courtsey: Amazon, Bridgeman Images, Kavishala
