Poetic Nuances

But poets just won't give critics a break. Many of Daruwalla's short stories turn out to be about in-laws rather than outlaws. Even in the most obviously political story, set in an imaginary Latin American dictatorship, the action only gets going when the Chief Censor ("You are my Minister for Permanent Unrest," says the President) encounters two old chums at his in-laws' house.

In a book of several winning surprises this is the strangest, most remarkable work, not least because it is uncertain whether Daruwalla has ever been to South America. If he hasn't, it is proof of Oscar Wilde's aphorism that you don't have to go to Japan to write about Japan; you can imagine it sitting on a bench in Hyde Park. It is not the ironic coup de grace (will wearing a bullet-proof jacket during a political assassination save or condemn you?) that is as unusual as the atmosphere Daruwalla conjures up of a society in a dictator's grip, riddled with underground revolt, religious ferment and ecological disaster—where "the sea is dark as a solid, the hinterland dark with rumour".

That kind of poetic line, perfectly balanced in symmetry and metre, illuminates Daruwalla's prose which can, in a couple of sentences, capture the essence of place and time. Consider the opening lines of And On You Also be Peace: "Mirza Koocha was the kind of place where people replaced the wrought-iron grills of their balconies with material made of packing cases; where the cotton bow twanged in the morning as people brought out their old quilts and mattresses and got them redone... It was the kind of place where a retired schoolmaster passed all his mornings in a neighbour's veranda reading newspapers."

The stories, clearly written over a passage of decades, reveal Daruwalla's love of medieval history, knowledge of Sufi mysticism, Persian poetry and observation of social nuance. In Of Abdul Qasim, he takes you into the mind of a Sultanate emperor; in The Owlet Beats the Drum he embodies the convulsive schisms of 13th century Islam as a battle between religious dogma and earthly desire raging in the person of the heretic-saint of the vanished city of Saqsin in Arabia.

But Daruwalla's poetic sensibility sometimes tends to become a disability. Because the crisis in many of the stories peters out before it develops, the characters and situations have no dramatic centre. But where Daruwalla succeeds in bringing matters to a head, as in A Plague of a Hundred Volds or The Potting of the White, the characters acquire surprising conviction and inject new life into the yarns.

Still, a basic question needs asking at the end of Daruwalla's book. Does shorter fiction have a future in our time, other than being read by a few critics or selling a few thousand copies before it disappears into the black hole of remaindered copies?

Of course it does. Many of the stories here are readymade for intelligent, sensitively-produced television drama. But one of the monumental failures of Indian television is that it has sadly neglected drama. In the proliferating miasma of television trash, no less dictatorial or stifling than the allegorical tyrannies that are described in The Minister for Permanent Unrest, it is worth saluting the few writers and publishers such as Keki Daruwalla and Ravi Dayal who soldier on regardless.