Book Review: Fire Altar- Poems on the Persians and the Greeks

Book: Fire Altar- Poems on the Persians and the Greeks

Author: Keki Daruwalla

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 200

Price: Rs 350

Keki Daruwalla is something of a square peg in the world of poetry – a policeman, an intelligence officer and a bureaucrat, who writes as much about riots, floods and famines as he does of nature, love and life. Today, 44 years after his first collection of poetry was published by the legendary P Lal's Writer's Workshop in 1970 and with a Sahitya Akademi award as well as a Padma Shri to crown his career, Daruwalla is acknowledged everywhere as one the most important poets of modern India. But acclaim or age – Daruwalla is 77 – hasn't dimmed his ambition or lessened his craft, and he remains as receptive to the call of the muse, though he confesses that the words comes to him a little tardily these days.

We're conversing in the living room of Daruwalla's two-storied, homely bungalow in south Delhi where he's lived for nearly two decades now. The poet, a widower, lives alone, attended to by a household help who proffers a solicitous glass of orange juice and the poet's coffee – milk, no sugar. "I don't do anything else (but read and write)," says Daruwalla. "Once in 15 days I go to the club to have a meal, and now and then to the IIC (India International Centre)."

All around the room are mementoes of people he's known, countries he's visited — a set of six exquisite miniatures by Bengali painter Bireshwar Sen ("I met him in Lucknow"), Egyptian plates, an intricately embroidered panel by his mother — "it must be around 1925". And, of course, books all around — collections of poetry, philosophy, a brown-paper-bound copy of Firdausi's Shah Nama — indicating the breadth of his reading and the catholicity of his interests.

Fire Altar, Daruwalla's most recent collection of verses set in the "hoary past" — the Persian Empire of Cyrus and Darius who lived nearly 3,000 years ago, and their wars with, and eventual defeat by the Greeks — is testimony of this. Though published late last year, most of the poems were written back in the early 1990s in the span of 20-25 days, and came out in dribbles in literary journals abroad. Why they remained unpublished for nearly two decades is unclear, though one gets the sense that Daruwalla has worked on several verse series, plays, stories, etc, when the inspiration has taken him, but then lie in his computer for years. Sometimes they get lost, as did two chapters of his autobiography, when he changed his computer. He is also writing a novel, his second after The Pepper and Christ (2004), on the Parsis,
There's an interesting story that Daruwalla tells of how he came to write Fire Altar. "Manjulika Dubey, who was then with Roli, asked me to write a history of the Parsis." That was in 1986. Soon after, Daruwalla was posted to London; before leaving, he chanced upon a copy of Herodotus's The Histories at a used-books shop in Connaught Place and picked it up on an impulse for Rs10. He still has it handy, and fishes it out in five minutes with a conjuror's glee.

Herodotus, for the majority of us ignorant of his career, is a fifth century Greek historian who wrote an account of the wars between the Achaemenid emperors and the Greek city states. Herodotus led Daruwalla on to Xenophon, who wrote a biography of Cyrus, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, praising him as the ideal, compassionate leader. Later, Daruwalla asked the MI6, the British spy agency, to find him a copy of Plutarch's rare essay, The Malice of Herodotus — an unusual undertaking. What he read here meshed in with the history of his own community, the Parsis. Zoroastrianism, the religion Parsis practice, flourished under the Acahemenid Empire, and declined as the Persian Empire was defeated first by Alexander, and later the Islamic armies. It was to seek refuge from the latter's persecution that a small band of Persians — Parsis — landed up on the coast of Gujarat.

But Daruwalla is no bard, telling the story of the mighty kings of Persia in verse, or like Shelley in Ozymandias, singing a dirge to how time lays low all kings' glories. What Daruwalla does is use the details of history to animate a man at a particular time and place, or to draw out some universal truth that the contemplation of events so far back has occasioned in him.

Here's sonnet no. 4 of "Pasargade Sonnets", a nine sonnet series that forms the first of 12 sections in Fire Altar:
"Nothing grounds you like architecture;
nails you to a landscape like your tomb, for instance."

Pasargade, in modern-day Iran, was the first capital of the Achaemenid Empire and founded by Cyrus The Great. But nothing remains today of Cyrus or his greatness, except his tomb. Sonnet no. 4 is a reflection of how even the most glorious history ends up"fraying into mythos", a line from Sonnet No 2 in the same series, and tombs are not just the only concrete evidence of a life, but the supreme reality of life itself. "...a tomb sees to it/you carry your destination in the heart."

Daruwalla is, however, disappointed in Indian audiences. At a reading of Fire Altar, he chose to read A Boat to Delphi, based on the story of Croesus, the wealthy king of Lydia, who sent a messenger to the oracle of Delphi to ask whether he should go to war with the Persians led by Cyrus The Great. The priestess at Delphi gave an enigmatic answer that a "great empire would crumble" if he did. Croesus went ahead with the war and was defeated. When he went back to Delphi to ask how the prophecy went wrong, the priestess shot back — "but did you ask me which empire?"

"Nobody laughed," Daruwalla rues. "Nobody cares for poetry today. If you ask someone whether they will buy a book of poems or a sachet of condoms, he'll buy the latter."

Looking back
Daruwalla was born in 1937. After doing an MA in English Literature from Government College, Ludhiana, he joined the IPS in 1958.

Among the posts he has held are Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on International Affairs, assistant director at R&AW and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Starting with Under Orion in 1970, Daruwalla has published nearly a dozen collections of poem, a novel, and three collections of short stories

Daruwalla was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award in 1984 for The Keeper of the Dead and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1987. He was given the Padma Shri earlier this year