Keki N.Daruwalla: A Study In Thematics Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Keki N. Daruwalla is a student of
Greek and Shakespearean tragedies,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Seneca,
Shakespeare, Marlow and Webster,
Horror and terror,
Human wrath, revenge, anger and violence,
Bloodshed, accident, sin and retribution,
Poetic justice,
Buddhistic dhamma, as you sow so will reap,
Hinduistic karma and its bhoga,
The Parsi Tower of Silence
And the birds of prey circling over,
The Holy Fire burning in the temple
And purifying it all.

A poet of the Blakian tiger
Bloody, bestial and brutal,
A Coleridgean mariner unexpiating
For the albatross,
A kind King Sivi compromising with the falconer
For the fall of the wounded bird in his court,
Valmiki moved by the killing of one
Of the bird pair
And the resultant shriek of the female partner
In agony and anguish,
All these things
With a very heavy heart
Ruthlessly and callously
Does he describe
With the Ted Hughesian words
And the hawk as the protagonist,
Neglecting the tender and innocent heart
Of nervous Sylvia Plath.

A poet of death, disease and epidemic,
Daruwalla is a poet of a hard heart,
Very, very unsentimental,
Talking in the toughest language of words,
Not of plague,
But of cholera and the cholera wards
Of the British period,
Refreshening the memory of,
A policemen on duty
About the road accidents
And the futile discussion
Of fate and its awkward working,
man and his karma,
Previous sin and expiation,
Opening a plethora of discussion
With regard to unavoidable accidents
And their causes,
The areas under curfew
And the shoot at sight orders given to,
Tensions easing,
The areas under surveillance
And the police patrolling the areas.