Under Orion By Keki N.Daruwalla Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Under Orion is the first book of poems
Which Daruwalla collected
To publish in 1970
And since then
Has been in partial light
Till he emboldened his stance,
Substantiated poetic stature
As the people were not interested in
The verses written by the Indians in English
And the craze grew it
With the introduction of Indian English poets
Under pressure from the UGC
And its peer teams
As and when the Career Advancement Scheme for teachers
With the Ph.D., seminars, workshops
And orientation and refresher courses were made mandatory,
When the teachers started searching greener pastures
Into the realm of dissertations
Instead of pure English matters and stuffs.


The first poem with which the book starts is
The curfew poem,
The description of a riot-torn situation,
The area under the curfew
Fro the communal flare-up,
The police patrolling the streets
Manless and with the stray dogs
Moving here and there,
Tension brewing, prevailing around,
Human wrath, anger, enmity, vengeance,
Hatred, malice,
On the boil
And it spilling,
The gunshots and firings
Taking over the area in control,
Fear gripping the people,
Windows and doors remain shut
All through the day,
Dawn to dusk,
But the belly knows it not,
It has to be filled.

After the brewing,
Spilling of tension into the streets
And the curfew clamped upon,
Patrolled,
Pestilence cases taken over,
The epidemic and the epileptic discussed
The area returns to normalcy
And the poet too returns,
Switches over to the Shiva poems,
Shiva: At Timarsain and Shiva: At Lodheshwar
And others of the early sorts.

Daruwalla is actually a poet
Of diarrhea, cholera, plague,
Typhoid, small pox,
Haemorrhage, accident and death,
Disease and death,
The flood and famine,
Drought and hunger,
The falcon and the falconer,
The hyena and the wolf
Rather than the deer,
The lamb,
But the tiger,
The rifle with the trigger
And the bayonet.