Poet Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Born in Loni, Burhanpur, Lahore, Punjab in the then time British India, in 1937
The son of Prof. N.C. Daruwalla,
After the partition moved to India,
Studying at many places through different mediums,
Did his post-graduation in English
From Govt. College, Ludhiana, University of Punjab
To qualify for the IPS examination finally in 1958
And the posting and its aftermath took him
To Dehradun, Meerut, Agra, Barabanki, Farrukhabad, Lucknow and Ranikhet,
And from there to the Cabinet Secretariat
To the RAW
To National Commission For Minorities
After his retirement.

A Parsi by faith
Just like Adil Jussawalla, K.D.Katrak and Gieve Patel,
A police super cop by profession,
Of the rank of the Supdt. and AGI,
Daruwalla penned a book for the first time in 1970
And it was Under Orion,
Brought out from Writers Workshop, Calcutta
Of P.Lal
And from there he moved on
To contribute and add to Indian poesy
In English,
One book after another,
A modern poet of the modern times
Searching a poetic language.

Apparition in April in 1971,
Winter Poems,1980,
Crossing of Rivers,1985, The Keeper of The Dead,1982,
A Summer of Tigers,1985
Landscapes,1987,
Night River,2000,
The Map-maker,2002,
The Scarecrow and the Ghost,2004,
Followed by one by one,
A poet so hard of heart, bold and daring,
Undaunted in courage,
Unsentimental and cathartic and purgatory.

A poet Zoroastrian, of Parsi faith and belief,
Telling of the Towers of Silence,
The Fire Hymn
And the vultures,
The good soul and the bad soul,
He is of his stature,
The scarecrow even cannot drive away the birds
Which are looked upon as ominous,
Crossing over to foreign trajectories and tracts
To contribute to,
Forgetting the roots
Of nativity and the tongue,
One of lost link and lost connection.

A poet of dramatic monologues, where the action is internal,
He is Robert Browningian and Ted Hughesian
As for his monologues
And hawkish poetry,
The clots of the blood going off,
The gun speaking the language of leads and firings,
Yes, the double-barrelled gun,
Stuttering rifles,
The cities and towns viewed under curfew,
The riot-affected landscapes,
Burning in communal fires,
Enmity, malice, revenge,
Shoot at sight promulgated.

One of the landscapes and whom call we a landscapist,
He derives from disease and death,
Accident, tragedy, fate and destiny,
The morgue and the post-mortem house,
Arthritis, cholera, diarrhea,
The imagery of the vulture, the hawk and the kite,
The falcon and his falconer,
The hunter and the call of the hyenas
Deepening with the evening,
Blakian tiger, Hughesian hawk,
From Aristotle's Poetics
A tragedian in verse,
For whom poetry but a book of literary terms,
Bombastic, verbose and full of unemotional rhetoric.

The areas under the flood,
The flood waters swirling, engulfing and inundating
A larger chunk of soil
With the land's fall,
The red yellow water like the brewed coffee,
The villages under the half-deep waters,
People crossing over in knee-deep waters,
The livestock in trouble,
The buffaloes wallowing and being swept over,
The water level somewhere frightening
And he views and paints the landscape
In his robust way of delineation,
With nothing to depict with painted colours
Wetfully or emotionally.

A short story writer just like Jayanta Mahapatra and Shiv K.Kumar,
A novelist and an analyst on international relations,
A Visiting Fellow at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford for 1980-81
Under the Colombo Plan studying politics in South Asia,
One in the team of Commonwealth Observers for the Zimbabwe elections in 1980,
Daruwalla has also edited a book on Indian English poetry,
A recipient of Sahitya Akademi award
For his book, The Keeper of the Dead in 1984,
Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987,
Of the coveted Padma Shri from the Govt. of India in 2014.

A poet who believes in the philosophy of Charvaka
As Adil sides with Eklavya
Or Karna,
Daruwalla's observation is poignant,
One of psychological probe,
Dipping and marking the unrest of desire,
Coating and uncoating the things of life,
Faces masked and damasked,
He can tell easily about
The pace of the Ganga and its river ghats,
Life pulsating on them,
The saints doing the suryanamaskar,
Chanting the Gayatri mantra
With an observational and sardonic insight of own,
A poet so synoptic and full of compunction.