Gone Away, Dom Moraes
Rahul Singh

DOM MORAES died in his sleep in Mumbai just the other day. He was only 65 years old. Though he produced a substantial body of work in both poetry and prose, not to mention journalism, one felt that his best years were still ahead of him. He had not fulfilled his immense potential.

He was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago. The doctors advised immediate treatment. But he knew the debilitating effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. He did not want to be deprived of his full faculties and so refused treatment.

"Look what happened to Frank," he told me soon after the cancer diagnosis. "I don’t want to go like him."

Frank Simoes was, like Dom, a Goan. He was also a writer but had spent too much time in advertising and only began to do some good creative writing in his later years. He spent the last months of his life sick and in bed. The cancer defied the chemotherapy treatment. He, too, was in his early 60s.

Dom had the potential of being a great writer, among the best of his generation. Yet, he did not reach the heights of a V.S. Naipaul or a Salman Rushdie, which he had the potential to do. Once, about 20 years ago, Naipaul was passing through Bombay. He was at a loose end and rang me up.

"Come along for dinner with me. A friend, Hiro Shroff, has invited me and I’m sure he won’t mind me bringing you along," I suggested. He tagged along and we entered the party rather unobtrusively, nobody recognising Naipaul. Both of us happened to sit next to Behram Contractor, a master of gentle satire (he also died some time back) in the Bombay papers, who wrote under the pen-name of Busybee. Behram, who had already had a few drinks, introduced himself and asked Naipaul who he was and what he did.

"My name is Vidia Naipaul," came the reply. Behram pondered over this, with a look of wonderment. "You’re not the V.S. Naipaul, the famous writer?" Naipaul admitted he was. "You’re a very good writer," responded Behram after a pause, "but Dom Moraes is a better writer than you are." Without a word, Naipaul turned his back on Behram and started talking to me. Later, Behram complained to me: "Your friend, Naipaul was so rude to me." "What did you expect," I laughed. "You can’t compare Dom with Naipaul."

Behram was, of course, wrong. Naipaul, who went on to win the Nobel Prize, was in a different class altogether. But had Dom led a less wayward and more disciplined life, I am convinced he could have been close to that level. He handled the English language as few others could.

But sadly Dom’s enormous early potential was frittered away. At the age of 19, when he was still a student at Oxford University, he won one of the most prestigious prizes in poetry, the Hawthornden Prize. He was the first non-Britisher and the youngest to win it. He was lauded by the likes of Auden and Spender. Even earlier, he had written an acclaimed book on cricket, one of his enduring passions.

Soon after Oxford, he travelled to India with a university friend of his, the blind writer, Ved Mehta. Ved wrote Walking the Indian Streets and Dom Gone Away. If I recall right, E.M. Forster, the renowned author of A Passage to India who was then an honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, wrote a glowing account of Gone Away in a leading English paper.

A brilliant literary career awaited Dom. Somehow, it never materialised, despite a series of books, on Indira Gandhi, on the population issue, on his upbringing (My Son’s Father, perhaps his most lyrical and touching work), on India after half a century of independence (In God’s Oven) and on an unusual character who, in the 17^th century achieved the incredible task of walking all the way from England to India (The Long Strider).

Too much alcohol and too many women in his life were his undoing, as have been the undoing of so many good writers who could have been great writers.

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