On Reading Keki N. Daruwalla

The Robert Browning of modern Indian English poetry, He is a writer of dramatic monologues Where the action is internal, Not external, Happening within, Taking in And the characters Like dramatic personae Participating. Robust and unsentimental, cathartic and purgatory, He explores in his own way The cultural, sociological and psychological Spaces of man, A poet sardonic and sarcastic, Hard of heart and mocking, The shots from the barrel of the gun Saying it all. A Padma Shri expected to come to him earlier, Now has in 2014, A writer So cocooned and kernelled, With the meaning muffled and muted in When the words uncoated, The layers of the onion peeled off, A poet full of internal rhyme, curtal vocabulary, Succinct, synoptic and verbose And bombastic. In the beginning, he used to dwell upon the things Of the U.P. and its mountainous regions, But his assignment with the RAW Taking him to different climes and spaces And he borrowing from To crisscross us With his knowledge of nationalities and foreign histories, A poet of a different psyche and space, Travelling and telling about life differently.