Silence was like a cancer—he fought it in erratic flashes of brilliance
I dream of hawks
Of doe like girls, the sun endless delays,
Bullocks and Buicks, statesmen like great aucks,
And I grow homesick for an Indian day.
But there, last year, a moral issue arose.
I grabbed my pen and galloped to attack.
My Rosinante trod on someone's toes.
A Government frowned, and now I can't go back.
But he did come back in 1979, became a part of Mumbai and through his columns, a part of India which despaired at the direction the country was moving. This concern brought about Out of God's Oven (co-authored with Sarayu), which recounted first-hand accounts of some of the terrible landmarks in our recent history, like the killings in Gujarat, the demolition of Babri Masjid, terrorism in Punjab and caste wars in Bihar. His association with Sarayu transformed him. He gave up whisky, a romantic fixture from his early days in England:
My income and my debts remain the same.
Still, I can feed my typewriter each day.
My agent tells me that I have a name.
An audience waits, he says, for what I say.
My audience!—kempt, virtuous, and strange:
those delicate flushed girls with eyes like stars,
so lately come from college,
long to change the creature they observe in dingy bars.
The creature they observe sways where it stands,
Lifting uncertain arms as if to bless.
Even so great a gesture of the hands
Can hardly hold so vast an emptiness.
In his last years that emptiness suddenly seemed to have disappeared. Book upon book followed, prose and poetry. Had Dom suddenly become aware of his mortality and become conscious of so much unfinished business? Or had he, mysteriously, been revitalised and had, creatively, become young again?
When it was discovered he had cancer, he decided that he wasn't going to let it dominate him. He refused the conventional and extreme forms of treatment, led as normal a life as possible and embarked on one new venture after another. At the end, he was working on at least two books, possibly more. He fought the disease with the weapon he knew best, which was to write and write and then write some more. The victory was almost his in the end.
Anil Dharker is a journalist, writer and friend of Dom Moraes