The Maker of Myths

18 januari 2006 Perhaps in an earlier age Keki Daruwalla would have been a bard, the repository of the oral folk-lore and legend of his people. Traditionally such tales were recounted in verse, which gave elegance to a simple tale, and made it easier to remember. Tales borrowed from other cultures were absorbed into the body of legend, enriching the tapestry, giving it a touch of gold, as it were. To his own foundation of Parsi history and legend Daruwalla has added shreds of Hindu mythology, echoes from the Bible, Islam, Judaism, African tales, Greek history, philosophy, and a dash of science. The effect is that of a wall covered in posters, with the shredded top layers peeling away to expose older layers beneath. Daruwalla moves through the history and geography of civilizations and their myths and legends, writing of the Magi, magical kings, stars, and immense distances, in an extraordinary collage of overlapping images. It could be surmised that a childhood and youth spent largely in northern India, exposed to cultures other than Parsi, assisted in the development of this collage.

Daruwalla has produced nine volumes of poetry. His first (Under Orion) is more immediate in its telling of riots, plagues, and bandits than his later works. Yet in this first book he lays the foundations for the dramatic, mythic monologues that recur throughout his later work. The first hint comes from ‘Dialogues with a Third Voice’ where he says,

Beneath every cliché as it floats like spawn
you hope to see the myth-mask.

. . . Where will it take you
this search for the myth-worm
behind the membrane of fact?

Some sections of this long poem are like incantations:

There is no time like myth-time:
spurt of the taut grape
cedar glooms
fables of the sky
and fables of the earth
meeting on a young horizon.

Any time is myth-time
a tent of camel hide
flapping in the wind
bread and goatcheese
wine and the smoked meat of the lamb.

And children wide-eyed squatting on the ground
there is no time like children-time
red laughter in silver oaks
words like the little
harness-bells of lambs
words like the sound of young water
cries like the pheasant runs.

Any time is death time
for child-god or breastless maenad
with the sky a snake-pit
agog with snake-haired furies
the rottenness of death
unmitigated by maggots.

But there is no death like myth-death
first dismemberment and worship
blood turning to berries red flowers
and then a transfer to the skies
re-enacting myths in a starry drift.

There is no time like myth-time
green orchard and golden fruit
virile gods and young nymphs
a mankind burdened with guilt.

A hungry people, a sad people
Have the happiest myths.

For a bard, this is a promising beginning. He has turned to the old tradition of the epic poem as vehicle for his stories. And in this one poem he has collected almost all the prototypes of the images that will haunt his poetry. They will recur again and again.

Crossing of Rivers tends to read a little like a script for a National Geographic documentary on Varanasi: in the very first poem he describes in minute detail a boat-ride down the Ganges past the burning-ghats:

When we disembark, the water-front ahead
is smothered by night, red-peppered with fires
as doms and mallahs cook their unleavened bread.

Dante would have been confused here.
Where would he place this city
In Paradise or Purgatory, or lower down
where fires smoulder beyond the reach of pity?
The concept of the Goddess baffles you –
Ganga as mother, daughter, bride.
What plane of destiny have I arrived at
where corpse-fires and cooking-fires
burn side by side?
(‘Boat-ride along the Ganga’)

And this is just the start. He continues adding details until the documentary is fully scripted. It is in the last part of the book that the myth-images reappear. The bird and the snake are omens of death, and as such fit into the general theme of the book. Even the title gives us a clue – the Greeks believed that the dead crossed the river Lethe to the Underworld, transported by Chairon, whose fee was the two silver coins used to weight down the eyes of the dead.

Briefly suspended in Winter Poems, the development of Myth-maker and Bard continues in The Keeper of the Dead. The hawk, symbol of freedom, has been snared, and becomes a prophecy of doom, the harbinger of drought. (In Landscapes the dead hawk reappears as a fossil.) History is a rich source of stories for the Bard. ‘Pestilence in 19th Century Calcutta’ ends literally on a grotesque note: the Englishman who paid for his Sikh servant’s funeral gets a bill: “Five Rupees for roasted Sardar”. Daruwalla moves in time from the scribe writing a letter in third century BC, to the appearance of comet Kohoutek in the twentieth century. He ranges from Mohenjo Daro to Edinburgh and Skopje, each new location enriching the whole. This process continues in the next two books.

In The Map-maker, his most recent book, Daruwalla delineates a geography for us to explore. He draws the mountain chains “with raingods in their armpits” and glaciers “like glass-slivers in their folds”, puts in deserts, seas, and islands using the old map-makers’ symbols of fabulous kingdoms and rivers of gold. From mapping the earth, to mapping the skies: confronting the cold astral fires of the universe, Daruwalla recalls Borges; a mirror reflecting the sky throbs with space. The images of mirror, sea, sky, star, and time constantly recur. Daruwalla is creating a new geography, of the uncertain present, and an unknowable future, perfect for the telling of yet more fabulous tales.