By Roma do Carmo Fernandes

 They say he was a man whose voice was barely audible, except to those who knew him well and could translate his whispers. They say he seemed serious, almost stern, but that’s not surprising: he was called Damn Morose at Oxford.

They say he was rather dissolute, a drinker, a smoker, and a man who left almost all the women who loved him. His prose was lucid, his journalism legendary. But it was for his poetry that Padmashri Dominick Moraes (1938-2004), Dom will be remembered.

"Dom was a fine poet and his poems had a subtle and skilful use of symmetrical form," says Adil Jussawala, one of his poetic contemporaries. Jussawala believes that there was world of private meaning in the poetry, and this Dom left inaccessible to his readers.

In ‘Cainsmorning’, for instance, Dom takes on the voice of Cain, the first of the children of Adam and Eve, the primal couple in the Bible’s metaphoric story of creation. Most other narratives choose the position of Abel, the good son, the brother who was loved by the Lord, and who was murdered by his brother, in literature’s first fratricide.

The mountains sneered, the river whispered slayer!

He left a saraband start in his brain,

And turned his face to heaven, and saw his prayer

Melt in the cold, the grey, the faceless rain.

His control of the rhythms of the English language was near absolute. As long-time companion Sarayu Ahuja says, "Dom loved the Bible, specially the Old Testament." It is likely that this would have been the King James Version, written when Shakespeare was alive. Together with the Bard of Avon, this version has been credited with much of the music of the English language, including the use of a faultless iambic pentameter, the beginning of the rise of this form, which took over from the more ornate rhythms that mimicked Latin and Greek prosody.

If the poetry was often complex and inaccessible to the lay reader, Dom’s prose was lucid and clear. The poet and civic campaigner Gerson da Cunha says. "He was a writer of excellent prose. He covered a wide range of themes." Da Cunha says, "Although Dom was not a very seasoned journalist at that time, his coverage of the Eichmann trial was excellent. Cricket was his special forte. The press box was not very happy at such a young man doing such a good job," says da Cunha. But perhaps the subject of Dom’s writing was Dom himself. The first volume of his memoirs, My Son’s Father, was published in 1968 when Dom was only 30. In the foreword written for the Penguin edition of 1990 he wrote: "The London press criticised my presumption in writing an autobiography at the age of 30. In actual fact, ‘My Son’s Father’ effectively ends in 1960, when I was only 22."

At 19, he became the youngest and first non-English recipient to win the Hawthornden award, an English literary award for his book of poems ‘A Beginning’ published in 1958. ‘My Son’s Father’ is one of the few books about a troubled childhood that never collapses into self pity, never relapses into easy sentiment.

Farzana Contractor, editor of Upper Crust and a close friend of Dom says that this was her favourite book. She goes on to say, "Dom was a great poet but for me, I always loved his prose more. He used simple words because he never wrote to show off. He wrote to be read and understood. He wrote because his heart was telling him to."

Its descriptions are vivid and Dom never steps back from the pain of a lonely childhood with a troubled mother and an absent father. One of the most striking episodes is his encounter with Mahatma Gandhi, into whose presence he was led by Sarojini Naidu, who had offered him an orange as a token of affection. Gandhiji was not impressed by the young genius to whom he tried to speak in Hindi.

"The only Hindi I knew was the pidgin Hindi in which I spoke to the servants. I confessed this fact to Gandhi."

He clicked his tongue, but switched to English, and asked Ms Naidu whose son I was. ‘Beryl’s,’ Mrs. Naidu said. Gandhi said, ‘I must tell Beryl to teach him. All our children should speak Hindi.’ I was by this time rather crushed, but he turned back to me laughing, pulled my ears (at this time rather protuberant) and said, ‘you have ears like mine, beta.’ This cheered me up, and with a sudden inexplicable impulse of love, I offered him Ms Naidu’s orange, still clutched damply in my hand."

In the second volume of his autobiography ‘Never at Home’, Dom says that it was his journeys that began when an agent suggested he write a travel writing and journalistic writing, which influenced his later poetry.

Journalism brought him into contact with a series of interesting people. He wrote Indira Gandhi’s autobiography and interviewed Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. He met Mother Teresa and Satyajit Ray.

Although Dom made a living writing prose and even film scripts he never stopped writing poetry. In 1960, his second book of verse ‘Poems’ became the Autumn Choice of the Poetry Book Society. However, for Jussawalla, this was a bit of a disappointment as he felt that Dom had stopped making demands on himself, "it was too sentimental and soft for my taste," says Jussawala. But he says that according to him Dom did recover in his third book of poems ‘John Nobody’, published in 1965. In 1983 he published, ‘Absences’ and in 1987, the collected poems came out. This was followed in 1990 by ‘Serendip’.

When he was first diagnosed with cancer he did not sit back and wait for life to take its own course, he wanted to use the rest of his time doing what he did best, write.

In 2002, he wrote ‘Out of God’s Oven’, about the riots in Gujarat. Sarayu fondly remembers that when they were writing the book, she was using the computer and Dom continued to use his typewriter and, he kept wondering how she was able to finish editing and print pages before him. So she tried convincing him to get a computer but he was against it simply because he thought that the computer would think for the people and that would hamper his writing skills. He also said that feeling the paper after he had typed out his poem made him more attached to it rather than just seeing it on the screen.

She eventually bought him an electronic typewriter and she says one day Dom frantically called me to say that the damn typewriter that I had bought him was not working. When I reached there I realised that he had forgotten to switch it on and when I told him this he said "Oh I didn’t know you have to turn it on."

In 2003 the last two books that were published were ‘The Long Strider’ based on Thomas Coryate, who walked from England to India in the year 1613, and ‘A Variety of Absences’, a collection of memoirs.

His close friends remember him as a man with a strange sense of humour, a cigarette and a drink in his hand and a fund of risqué stories about other poets and writers. But to those who love poetry, he will always be the man who crafted these lines:

I have grown up, I think, to live alone

To keep my old illusions, sometimes dream

Glumly, that I am unloved and forlorn,

Run away from strangers, often seem

Unreal to myself in the pulpy warmth of a sunbeam.

I have grown up, hand on the primal bone,

Making the poem, taking the word from the stream,

Fighting the sand for speech, fighting the stone.