Sailing The Word-Stream

To put this into perspective, remember that Daruwalla has been a force in Indian poetry for far longer than many up and coming novelists in India, and consider what the going rate for a novel that emerged after a five-year sabbatical might be. One might add that the contents of Night River are decidedly less ephemeral than the contents of most Hollywood blockbusters: the last two superb sections alone, Stalking Mandelstam and Island Poems, are worth much, much more than the price of a movie ticket.

Musing on the distinct strangeness of receiving change back from a hundred rupee note, I wondered whether to applaud, because as the publishers no doubt figured, the low price is likely to pull in more readers, or to regret this further evidence of the devaluation of poetry in English. Most of these musings, however, were swept away once the poems themselves were revealed.

The first section, a loose collection of miscellaneous poems, is not perhaps the best introduction to Daruwalla for novitiates; and for readers more familiar with his work, there is a certain sense of disappointment, of repetition in his themes. The range is as expansive as usual: in the first four poems alone, Daruwalla moves from a muted elegiac note to spirited comedy to a ghazal on Partition.

There are a few false notes, like the ersatz insouciance of Under the Ionian Seas ("No space - chaps fall into the night's swill, can't make it to the boat") or the trite closing lines of Letter from Helsinki ("That has always been my trouble, Mama,/ figuring out the face from the mask,/ good from evil, dream from reality"). He compensates with poems such as the ironic How the Blood Bank Got Gutted and a superb section entitled Chopper Poems (Traversing the Drought). His touch here is as deft as always, and he doesn't attempt to belabour the point about the morality of altitude. There's the odd bonbon, too, as in his review-in-verse of Vikram Seth's Arion and the Dolphin, where the pretty wrappings and a momentary sweetness compensate for the lack of any lasting import.

It's the next section, however, where the meat is. Osip Mandelstam, the poet who was persecuted under Stalin's regime, tends to inspire almost as much poetry as the great man wrote himself. Daruwalla's tribute rises above the bouquets of the mass, and he announces that in the very first line of Through a Row of Doors: "All midnight knocks are cliches", and underlines it later: "This the Cheka always knew:/ the rhyme as cartridge,/ the poem as musket." He makes his obeisance, too, to Mandelstam's own verse, especially to that famous line about Stalin, rendered in Daruwalla's translation as "the Kremlin mountaineer, the assassin and peasant-slayer... Roaches laugh on his upper lip and face". In other poems, he carries on a dialogue that only two poets can, as one poem addresses its mirror image.

After this retracing of Mandelstam's arrest, silencing and final end, Island Poems is the perfect conclusion: gentle, meditative, providing the perfect coda to these musings, and providing at least one perfect line: "One sail can people an entire sea." Forget watching What Lies Beneath and Gladiator; this is a better way to spend three hours.