Keki N.Daruwalla: A Study In Thematics

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.