|
|
|
Saturday, July 15, 2006 |
|
|
THIS ABOVE ALL
Enclosed with the letter informing me of his
plight was a clipping of an article from a Bangalore paper written by
Gita B. Dore entitled Letting Go; Death can be life-giving". It
is very well written account of how Gita let her father go when he
died at 81 — the same age as my pen-friend. She writes about him as
a very loving person who was always giving. "When the final
curtain call came, he went away taking all my grief with him,"
she writes. And adds, "I was supposed to sob and cry. I was to
have gone through waves of depression. It didn’t happen.... He had
lived his life totally and completely... He would always laugh and say
"when I reach the finishing line, I will ask the man upstairs:
‘What is my score?" I am convinced the analogy does not apply
either to my pen-friend or to me. When an old person dies, one can let
him go in peace but not the other way round when the young go before
their time. The old have a right to ask: "Why did he go before
me? And old have every right to grieve over his (or her) untimely
departure. I have the same approach to the Jain belief that death
should not be mourned over but celebrated. It applies to the death of
an old person who has lived life to its fullness, someone ailing or in
pain, or half-dead and in a coma; for them death is a welcome relief
and cause for celebration among survivors. But when young person or a
child dies, celebration is unnatural and uncalled for because one
questions which keeps nagging one painfully is "Why did it happen
to him and not to me?
Versatile poet Keki
Daruwalla (b. 1937) is a rare phenomenon among poets writing in
English. He respects the lakshman rekha between prose and
poetry: he does not cut up lines of prose to different lengths and fob
them off as verse; he conforms to accepted rules of metre and rhyme.
He is not obscure but easy to understand. He has a wide range of
themes extending from the divine and the mystic of different religious
down to earthlylove, erotica and the bawdy, humour laced with sarcasm.
He takes politics and the politicians in his stride and pokes fun at
them. He mixes the past and the present in his silver shaker to
produce newer varieties of cocktails. All these qualities are evident
in his Collected Poems (1970-2005) (Penguins) of which the
first part is from his latest compositions. The first is his summary
of the battle Kurukshetra between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. We,
the Kauravas: We are the Kauravas, though we don’t know
why. Father was blind and mother willed herself Into blindness with
a band across the eyes. As metaphors go, you can’t beat that, can
you? Leaves you free to sink into any old manhole left open by the
municipality. The other guys just asked for five villages: some
measly thatch huts, a few cos munching away at the stubble and
perhaps a tethered goat or two; and the usual paraphernalia, detritus
- cattleherds to graze their cows, barbers to shave armpits, faces
and other places, kahars for the palanquins when their girls set out
for the marriage bed. That’s all they wanted, though they ended up
edging us out of hearth and kingdom and weeping over our bloodied
corpses. We shall always be the Kauravas, mind you, nothing will
change that. Dusk will fall earlier for us, gaudhooli or no
gaudhooli (which if I may translate For Stephanians and anglicized
folk, means ‘cowdust’. The second is truly hilarious poem on
present day Pakistan and its ruler who wears many masks and uniforms:
a be-medalled military dictator, President-elect of a democracy in
open collared shirt, a Mujahid in salwar kameez, a forward-looking man
in western style coat and tie, a backward looking Taliban in kulla and
turban worn by Forntier tribesmen. The poem is entitled News from
Osama: When elections were held in Saudi Arabia, Osama Bin
Laden won handsomely, Beating Fahd and Feisel, And other clan
chieftans hands down. When Prez Musharraf’s disinformation
minister brought him the news, with no distortions for once, the
president asked his ADC to switch on his ‘philosophic expression’. (The
ADC had a switch for each expression on the President’s face: the
pro-jehadi grin, the anti-Mujahideen grimace, the benign pro-freedom
fighter smile, the pursed lip pro-democracy frown.) Hearing the
news, the President gave a philosophic nod, saying, ‘Osama’s
victory proves that votes and terror are linked. You see now why our
great democrats — Ayub, Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq never trusted
elections:"
Lalu lore
Rabri:
Ka karat ho (What are you up to?) Lalu: Ek dost ko chitthi
likat hun (writing to a friend) Rabri: Par tuhar likhna to
aawe nahee — but you don’t know how to write. Lalu: Voh
sasura ko kaun padhna aawae hai? That son of a gun does not know
how to read. (Contributed by Shivtar Singh Dalla, Ludhiana)
|
|
|
Recently I
lost a close relative 28 years younger than me. I received a lot of
letters of condolence. Among them one was from a man living in
Bangalore. I have never met him but we have been writing to each other
regularly for some years. His predicament is somewhat the same as
mine. He is 81 years old, one of his daughters is stricken with
terminal cancer and expected to die any moment. He flew over from
Bangalore to Gurgaon to bid her farewell in the knowledge he will
never see her again.
