Publisher- Speaking Tiger,           

                2018

By AJAY KUMAR SINGH

Dom Moraes (1938-2004) was a renowned poet and novelist. When he was not writing verse or fiction, he wrote columns for newspapers. He wrote profiles of people he had known or met. Moraes also wrote of times and places that many of his readers perhaps could not relate to. Yet they would read his columns anyway, because they loved the way he wrote them.

The profiles and sketches included in this book appeared at different places-- in the writer’s memoirs, anthologies, and magazine and newspaper articles published over a period of half a century, from the late 1950s to the early 2000s. The collection has been edited by Sarayu Srivatsa, a practicing architect, novelist and Dom’s long-time collaborator.

Dom wrote extensively about poets, writers and artists. On his umpteenth visits to Calcutta he met eminent writers like Sunil Gangopadhyay, Mahashweta Devi, and Shankar and wrote about these meetings with utmost evocativenss. At the end of the 1960s, the author visited Calcutta to do a feature on the Naxalites and went to Presidency College, the hub of Naxal activities then, to try and make contact with the terrorists. As Dom entered the college he saw a pretty girl walking and asked her where he could find a Naxalite. “Their leader is hiding from the police behind those bushes”, she replied. On the other side a handsome boy, draped in a shawl round his shoulders, lay down reading. The writer explained his mission to him and the boy showed his willingness to help. “He then rose, complaining that his piles hurt. I thought this a very prosaic complaint in a young revolutionary who looked like Byron”.

Dom’s journalistic assignments took him to the badlands of Bihar. In the shabby barracks of Patna Circuit House he met B.B. Biswas, an IAS officer, who was cuckolded by his wife Champa, almost half his age, by forging an adulterous relationship with a small-time RJD desperado. Her dangerous liaisons with Babloo Yadav had created havoc in the placid waters of the conservative Bihari society and had scandalised the whole country. Biswas however seemed enjoying his new status as a man being pursued by the press and comes out an effete and comical figure. He claimed to have ‘warned’ his wife from ‘hobnobbing’ with Babloo Yadav ‘for three years’ but during this period she was ‘forcibly enjoyed’ by the goon ! Biswas and his wife now alleged that Babloo Yadav raped her. “If it went on so long”, Dom wondered, “how was it rape?”.

The writer also met the RJD supremo Laloo Prasad Yadav. “We talk in English”, Laloo said after seeing an interpreter with Dom Moraes. Laloo started to answer his questions, though the interpreter had to clarify before Dom fully understood them. Once the writer thought he was speaking in Bhojpuri and turned to the interpreter for help. “That’s English,” the interpreter replied.

In another time-zone Dom had met KPS Gill over scotch and chicken in a swanky five star hotel in Delhi.

The former Punjab police chief had stirred quite a controversy a while ago after he had apparently cheerfully slapped the bottom of a lady IAS officer at a party in Chandigarh. A scandalised press reported that Gill had ‘touched her intimately’ and the lady took him to court and ‘pursued her case over the years as fervently as Gill had chased terrorists’. The writer beautifully tried to fathom the mind of this mysterious super cop.

Dom Moraes was Indira Gandhi’s biographer-- the book’s titled Indira Gandhi: Heiress to Destiny-- depicting her in defeat, after Emergency, and in triumph, when she returned to power. This book carries a splendid note on the fascinating turn of events that led to the making of Mrs Gandhi’s biography.

The writer had met the Dalai Lama at Hyderabad House in Delhi and was stumped by the SOP for meeting the godman. The private secretary to His Holiness explained the procedures: “Don’t ask any political questions. Don’t touch His Holiness. That’s sacrilege. When the audience is terminated, don’t turn your back on His Holiness. Leave the room backwards. Also, don’t ask His Holiness rude questions”. “How do you mean, rude questions?”. “Don’t ask His Holiness if he believes that he is god”. “It had never occurred to me to do so”, Dom said truthfully.

The collection is a master class on literary journalism. Dom Moraes seems to have seen people and places with the eye of a poet and wrote about them with the precision of supreme prose stylist.

(The review has been done by Ajay K Singh, who is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading)