SOMETIME IN THE 1980s, at a party in Bombay, VS Naipaul was seated next to a drunk man. The man introduced himself—Behram Contractor, better known as Busybee to the readers of his daily newspaper column on the city, “Round and About”—and asked Naipaul who he was. “My name is Vidia Naipaul,” came the reply. Busybee was amazed. “You are not the VS Naipaul, the famous writer?” Naipaul nodded. “You are a very good writer,” Busybee said. “But Dom Moraes is a better writer than you are.”
This was not the first time Naipaul found himself paired with Moraes. As a younger writer in London, while writing A House For Mr Biswas, a common friend had insisted he should meet the poet. Moraes tells the story of being persuaded by Francis Wyndham, an editor at the British publishing firm Andre Deutsch, to meet a “very promising young author from Trinidad.” Moraes wasn’t sure why:
“I don’t write novels,” I said.
“He doesn’t write poetry.”
“He was at Oxford a couple of years before you.” Francis said.
“That,” I said, “is ridiculous. Why should I waste this poor man’s time because he was at Oxford a couple of years before me?”
“It’s strange,” Francis replied. “Vidia said exactly the same about you when I mentioned this to him. You see, you two do have a lot in common.”
Finally he arranged lunch at the French pub. I liked Naipaul very much as a person. He was very shy — so was I — and as I had told Francis we had nothing whatsoever in common. Over lunch, we talked about books we had read. I have forgotten what they were. Later I mentioned the matter to a friend, who knew Francis and laughed.
“Don’t you know what Vidia Naipaul and you have in common,” he inquired. “Francis may have been too polite to say so, but you both have brown skins.”
Wyndham was perhaps being racist, and Busybee was certainly drunk, but Moraes and Naipaul did have more than Oxford in common. Both had journalist fathers; both enjoyed early success in Britain. Moraes was not yet twenty when he became the youngest writer to win the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for Literature, in 1958. Six years later, Naipaul won the same award: he was 31. Novels and poems brought them fame, but it is the nonfiction they wrote, partly to make ends meet, and partly to make sense of themselves in a world after empires and endless wars, that made them notorious. Naipaul travelled through the Caribbean after finishing Mr Biswas, then to India—the “wounded” land of his Hindu forefathers. He was in Iran just after the 1979 revolution. He was in Argentina when Juan Perón returned to power and military rule briefly ended, in 1973. Throughout his life he wrote memorably about his trips to Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda and the United States.
Moraes began with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, which he covered for the Times of India in the middle of his honeymoon. He narrowly escaped bombing in Algeria, predicted the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. The Indonesian government put him on a blacklist after he exposed the inhumane conditions in which the president, Suharto, had kept ten thousand dissidents captive on a remote island. Returning to India, he wrote commissioned accounts of his travels through Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Rajasthan. Moraes was a citizen of everywhere and nowhere before globalisation—he was born in Bombay to Indian parents, received an education in Oxford, took jobs in London, Hong Kong and New York, and returned to India in his middle age on a British passport. He confessed his predicament in three frank memoirs, and reprised it again in two biographies and 20 documentaries. If Naipaul, in A Million Mutinies Now, his third and final book on India, was hopeful about the majoritarian resurgence that would culminate in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and riots against Muslims in Bombay, Moraes reported the shock of the horrendous violence—in Bombay, in Bihar, and most poignantly in Gujarat after the 2002 carnage. Between them, the two brown men chronicled every point of view. Over a span of fifty years, they covered the world.
IT WAS THE POET who had a worldlier upbringing. Moraes’s parents, both Catholics, came from old Bombay money. His father, Frank Moraes, had graduated from Oxford. As Nehru’s biographer, and the editor of the the Times of India and, later, the Indian Express—Frank’s name is hallowed in Indian journalism. As a little boy, Dom accompanied his father to assignments and editorial stints in Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. The training began early, so to speak. Then there were Frank’s friends—the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, the photographer Marilyn Silverstone—to help him out with clauses and contacts.
In 1951, Dom published his first book, a selection of his reports on cricket matches for Indian newspapers. He was 13 years old. The British poet Stephen Spender was impressed by his poems and published them in Encounter, then a top international literary magazine. Later, he wrote him a recommendation letter for Jesus College, Oxford. A Beginning, Dom’s first book of poems, was released during his first year at the university. The following year, he won the Hawthornden Prize.
While still an undergraduate, Dom became part of a bohemian coterie in post-war London. He met TS Eliot, studied under WH Auden, went out drinking with the painters Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. After graduation, Dom returned to the Indian subcontinent for four months. He travelled the hippie trail from Kathmandu to Calcutta with Ved, a friend from Oxford—later Ved Mehta of the New Yorker. His father made arrangements for him to interview the Dalai Lama and Nehru. The book that came out of this brief homecoming was simultaneously a memoir and a travelogue. Gone Away: the title itself laid bare his intent to leave.
But this narrative of the father’s son rapidly rising in the world was punctuated by a bottomless fear: a fear that Dom inherited from his mother, Beryl D’Monte. Beryl, a pathologist at Bombay’s Cama Hospital, suffered from severe manic episodes through Dom’s early years. She had already been institutionalised once by the time he started going to school. He grew up watching her seizures and fits of domestic violence. Beryl was the reason why Frank had to travel everywhere with his son. The endless screaming, the spells of ominous silence, the broken dishes, the days when nurses had to be called in to restrain her at home: from a very young age Dom was overwhelmed by the feeling that his childhood had ended. It is a fear that can be glimpsed in his poetry, where, in the middle of a sequence of Greek and Gothic images, you run into a candid poem like “Autobiography” or “Words to a Boy,” with lines that seem to swiftly reveal the crack underneath Dom’s astonishing confidence. This is from “Letter To My Mother,” written in London:
You do not understand me.
I am tidying my life
In this cold, tidy country.
I am filling a small shelf
With my books. If you should
find me crying
As often when I was a child
You will know I have reason to.
I am ashamed of myself
Since I was ashamed of you.
Shame, by itself, is not a reason to remain away from home. Beginning with Odysseus at least, literature is replete with stories of reluctant repatriation. Besides, by the time Dom came to write Gone Away, his mother was living alone in her brother’s hotel in Bombay, and Frank had moved to Delhi with Silverstone. The prospect of a return was impossible for Dom because he had seen the fate that awaited writers in a newly independent India, those wanting to fill a small shelf with their books. He had seen his father being pressured, both at the Times Of India and the Indian Express, to accommodate the owners’ other business interests. In Bombay, Mulk Raj Anand had told him that most poets ended up writing for Bollywood, since unlike publishers, production houses paid—“In fact they pay enough to make them stop writing poetry.” In Delhi, while interviewing Nehru, Dom noted the sadness with which the prime minister had glanced out of the window and wished he had more time to read and write. Not far away from Nehru’s office, near Kashmere Gate, lived a man who ostensibly had all the time in the world to read and write: Nirad C Chaudhuri, prose stylist extraordinaire, author of A Passage to England and The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, infamous at the time for his love of the lapsed British Empire. Dom and Ved found him living on the top floor of a congested wooden house at the end of a dirty street. When they walked in, Chaudhuri was naked, and fast asleep on the floor of the veranda, so that at first they mistook him for the house help. The old man offered them coffee and lectured them on life and literature for over two hours. His advice to the young Moraes was unequivocal: “If you stay here, you will perish. They will not understand you here.”
And yet, it wasn’t as though Moraes felt understood in England. Outwardly he cultivated the air of the dissolute Soho artist—the long hair, the liquid lunches in pubs, the nights spent in a haze of books, cigarettes and “talk, talk, talk”—but he felt somewhat frivolous inside. A few years later, he would write in his second memoir, My Son’s Father, that his friends in London seemed to lack “any true awareness of the world.” He married a woman seven years his senior—Henrietta Bowler, immortalised as Henrietta Moraes in Francis Bacon’s scabrous portraits—and then mysteriously left her one morning after telling her he was going out to buy some cigarettes. He moved in with another woman: Judith Anne, a drama major. They had a son together, Heff—the occasion for My Son’s Father—but Judith broke up with him soon after. At thirty, he saw himself as both homeless and stateless. In 1961, he tore up his Indian passport on television to protest the Indian army’s takeover of Goa. Being Frank Moraes’s son, he followed up this protest with a swift assertion of privilege: before long, Dom acquired a British passport.
But the toll of these adrift years was most evident in Dom’s work. While his career as a journalist took off, he stopped writing poetry. Three collections of verse had been published after A Beginning. His poems were just starting to channel the anxieties of his own experience through his love for fables and myths. The critic Bruce King calls it “one of those mysteries of literary history that soon after Moraes began to show maturity he should stop writing.” But the poet’s own view of the matter was more circumspect:
After I had published my first two books of verse I decided that my facility was my own worst enemy. This problem solved itself in a way I would not have wished. Between 1965 and 1982 I ran into a writer’s block, but only about poetry. I travelled very extensively during this period, and wrote a lot of prose. But it was painful to be deprived of the power to do what I most wanted to do. I realized that what poets have always whined about was true. We serve a ferocious master.
Moraes was different from his fellow Bombay poets—Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla—in that he also published more than twenty works of nonfiction. My Son’s Father was followed by A Temporary People—a book on the forgotten cyclone of 1970 in Bangladesh, then East Pakistan. He went to Vietnam and Indonesia, took on a couple of book projects for the United Nations on the mid-century population crisis and completed a biography of Indira Gandhi. He moved out of England and married an old friend, the actor Leela Naidu. The couple settled in India after stints in Hong Kong and New York. Up until the end of his life, his reportage would appear in newspapers and magazines abroad. He used to write a weekly column for the Times of India and sometimes review books for Outlook. Younger poets such as Ranjit Hoskote and Jerry Pinto have described being daunted by his output when they first met him in the 1980s. By then, he was writing poems again and living in Bombay. Every other day his byline was printed somewhere in the world. According to Hoskote, at one point Moraes was turning out six columns a week for different outlets.
NOT ALL OF THE PROSE was written with an eye on the future. Many of the selections in Under Something Of A Cloud and Where Some Things Are Remembered, two recently released volumes of his nonfiction, seem to bear out an unkind remark attributed to Ezekiel. “Do you know what Dom’s columns are like?” Ezekiel apparently said. “‘So and so stepped into my room and we shook hands. I offered him coffee, and Leela brought him a cup. He told me he had boarded the flight at Bangalore at such and such time. Both of us cursed the weather—sticky and hot. Then he left. I saw him to the door.’” Last year, the poet and writer Keki Daruwalla wrote that most of Moraes’s columns were “useless,” though this year he seemed to find them “entertaining.” The general consensus is that the poems are of value; the prose, not so much. There is the implication in Bruce King’s comments that, for Moraes, not to write poetry was in essence to “stop writing.”
Questions of literary value are not separate from those of production in India. This is a country, after all, where writers are remembered only when their books get published, and initial print runs, at least for literary work, seldom exceed two or three thousand copies. Moraes became acquainted with this scene when he started publishing poems again in the 1980s. His standing in Britain had dimmed. In fact, the move to Bombay had been triggered in part by a meeting with his agent who told him that publishers abroad had started perceiving him as “Indian.” In a 1993 review of Never At Home, the third of Moraes’s memoirs, William Dalrymple reports that Moraes “has not published anything outside India for fifteen years.” Many Indian readers actually discovered Moraes when Penguin India issued his Collected Poems in 1987, and later generations have had a similar experience with the publication of another Collected Poems in 2004, and a Selected Poems, edited by Hoskote, in 2012. But his nonfiction, on the other hand, was never collected or re-issued. The closest we came was the publication of A Variety Of Absences in 2003, an omnibus edition of his three memoirs.
His essays and reportage have vanished in the limbo of our literary scene. It is in this context that the two new books were anticipated. Both Under Something Of A Cloud and Where Some Things Are Remembered have been edited by Sarayu Srivatsa—herself a writer, architect, Dom’s partner and collaborator after he separated from Naidu, and the executor of his literary estate. But her choices in these volumes lack the necessary diligence; her intent seems not so much to clarify as to obfuscate.
The introductions to both books set the tone. Moraes is presented as a troglodyte, typing away in a corner of the house, a connoisseur of all things British, a mystery to the servants, a mystery to his friends, a mystery to Indian society at large. We are told that Moraes’s “mind bred words,” that he wrote “with pure grit,” that he interviewed people “with a degree of humility, compassion and with utmost sincerity,” that “the object of his craft was to weave imagery … into his otherwise lucid, tightly written travelogues and reportages to set a definite mood, scene and situation.” Even as the writer is made to seem aloof, his process is explained away in meaningless platitudes. Nothing seems specific to Moraes. Srivatsa might as well be describing any writer, any poet—indeed, any creative type.
The books themselves are no less vague. Eight of the nine pieces in Under Something Of A Cloud, the volume devoted to his travel writing, have been culled from longer books and they appear here without so much as a caveat. The date on each essay corresponds not to the date of publication but, inexplicably, to the year in which the events described took place. Moraes’s account of his childhood in Sri Lanka, for instance, is made to seem like something he wrote when he was seven, in 1945, though the excerpt is from My Son’s Father, published in 1968. Srivatsa’s criterion for what constitutes travel writing also seems rather sterile: passages where Moraes seems unsettled, moments where he is coming to terms with the newness of a place or struggling to put the people he meets in perspective, have been edited out. I wondered about these absences as I picked up Where Some Things Are Remembered, an anthology of Moraes’s profiles and interviews—or, in Srivatsa’s words, a “collection of Dom’s People”—and found the same chapter from Answered By Flutes, the book Moraes wrote about his journeys into Madhya Pradesh, recurring in both volumes. Perhaps these pieces were chosen and revised on the basis that they may be doing double duty.
But the larger absence in these pages is aesthetic: a lack of pattern and revelation. Why choose a frustrating conversation with Lalu Prasad Yadav, where interviewer and interviewee do not seem to understand each other at all, instead of Moraes’s meeting with Nehru in Gone Away, where both parties can persuasively read into each other’s silences? Why recycle the same excerpt from Answered by Flutes, but leave out a better one from the book where Moraes runs into Verrier Elwin’s son, once his classmate in Bombay, now “dying of despair, poverty and a peptic ulcer” in Jabalpur? Given that the majority of Moraes’s essays, written over fifty years, still remain scattered in archives, it is hard not to see Srivatsa’s project as an abdication of editorial responsibility. The selections from his previous books appear even more dilettantish when you remember that the books themselves were never reprinted. Moraes died in 2004, but fifteen years later, we must still wait for a complete sense of his achievement in prose. Too much remains hidden.
THE LITTLE THAT WE HAVE available suggests a writer of uncommon poise, able at once to suggest much with an offhand phrase as well as engross the reader for pages with colourful stories. Moraes’s talent as an essayist is for the absorbing anecdote, not the creative experiment. He wrote prose as his father’s son—a raconteuring journalist. In his poems the loquacity is not always apparent, subsumed by the usual compression of the form, but the business of going on for paragraph after paragraph appears to have brought out a certain irreverence:
Nobody had ever expected me to finish my three years at Oxford. I was always in trouble. When I felt like going to London, or even abroad, I always went; I brought up trainloads of drunken poets who turned the college into shambles overnight; I didn’t turn up for tutorials. My college, however, had endless patience. This was especially due to my Principal. He shielded me from the wrath of the disciplinary authorities. Occasionally, in the quadrangle, he winked at me. We understood each other.
This is from the preface to Gone Away, where the principal does not come across as the only winking figure. There is a streak of self-indulgence in nearly every chapter of that book, so that certain things do not feel quite accurate. It isn’t just Moraes’s capacity for drink—barely a night passes without him awake drinking till three in the morning—but his ability to retain the tiniest details and lecture on Anglo-Saxon poetry even while sloshed is, if true, superhuman. There is a moment in Kathmandu when Dom and Ved are waiting in the drawing room of a Rana’s palace, surrounded by opulent furnishings, “elephant’s-foot ashtrays” and the heads of taxidermied tigers on the walls, “glaring soulfully through glass eyes”:
‘I expect someone will come for us,’ I said.
‘Coo, Dommie!’ Ved said, ‘this really is a palace.’
At this point I became aware of an enormous Himalayan bear crouched next to the sofa. It glowered at me. I gasped.
‘Now what is it?’
‘There is a bear next to us. It must,’ I added, groping for commonsense, ‘be stuffed.’
‘Honestly, Dommie, I know you have a fantasy-life, but what do you think? Have you ever known anybody who kept a live bear in their drawing-room?’
‘I only wondered,’ I was beginning lamely, when the bear rose, snarled at us, and shambled loosely out through the farther door.
Despite being blind, Ved Mehta found Dom’s account of their visit far-fetched. Later he wrote in an essay, “We were never once accosted during our stay in the palace by so much as a Teddy bear.” Mehta attributes Moraes’s licence with facts to an Oxford ritual of regaling each other with tall tales over drinks. But regardless of the truth, notice how, in the above passage, a glance at the “glass eyes” of the tiger—and the elephant feet!—seems to naturally segue into the presence of a crouching bear in the room. One can almost track Moraes’s imagination taking over from life.
At the same time, Moraes was also capable of a more sober, elegiac attention. He understood that people invariably embodied the times they had lived through. He could place a person he had just met on the street in the wider map of the past. It is a quality that comes through in two of Moraes’s finest essays—“The Passing of the British Working Class” and “A Walk On London’s Wild Side.” They were both published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1970, around the time he was moving out of England. Moraes wanders about the country and meets racist skinheads, drugged-up Hell’s Angels gangs, mournful pensioners and widows of coal miners. He remembers an Oxford classmate on a scholarship from Lancashire; he visits a strip club frequented by elderly members of the pre-war trade unions.
What emerges is the portrait of a land in the middle of not just economic, but psychological, decline. The difference in his subjects’ ages and temperaments is immaterial, since they are essentially characters in a myth that they have told themselves for far too long. To Moraes, they are all, metaphorically speaking, “more than two hundred years old.” Their underpaid ancestors had effectively subsidised the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, and at the height of the British Empire they had agitated successfully to usher in labour reforms in the mainland. Their descendants would rally again to “take Britain back” in the 2016 Brexit referendum. But Moraes captures them in their purported glory of emancipation, in the brief moment when the working-class dream of the welfare state had become reality. At one point in “The Passing Of The British Working Class,” Moraes runs into a retired farmworker, Mr Dancer, who claims to have been alive when Queen Victoria had died—“I was only a lad, but I remember.” Mr Dancer confesses to Moraes that he feels estranged from his grandson George:
My grandfather and my father and I, we worked long hours, it was hard work, and the pay wasn’t much at the finish. But we were proud of our work, if we did a thing we always did it well. Now young George, he works half the hours I did for three times the pay. He’s got things we’d never dreamed of having. But he’s no pride in his work. It’s only a bore, like, to him. All he wants to do is put his feet up and watch the telly. I don’t understand him, sir, but, tell the truth, when I ask him about it, I don’t think he understands himself.
The wonder here is that Moraes understood both Mr Dancer and his grandson. A brown man, born and brought up in Bombay, shows an instinctive awareness of post-industrial Britain. Names like Bletchley and Darwen and Haworth are casually tossed off, as though Moraes has lived in these places all his life. And indeed, he has—through books. Darwen, he remembers, is “slap in the middle of William Blake’s dark, satanic mills,” and a few miles away, “the ghost of Heathcliff still ululates over the moors around Haworth, where Emily Brontë and her sisters and drunken Branwell once, twitchingly, lived.” When Moraes visits a recovering addict in his posh London flat, and watches a nurse inject him with a shot of methadone, he notices that as the needle pierced the addict’s vein the nurse closed her eyes—“and her lips were parted, as the Madonna’s might have at the transfixion of Christ.” Literature has liberated Moraes and lent him the confidence to pass himself off as more English than the English. Often he gives the impression that he has stumbled into a landscape of immense darkness, something he must have picked up from the tomes written by English travellers on the misery of Indian lives.
IN INDIA, HOWEVER, this confidence grew intransigent. Moraes would seldom allow the people of his country to speak. Instead, he was always speaking for them, acting as a stubborn liaison between them and the world. The home advantage makes for rather lugubrious reading; the gossip in him lapses into an overzealous guide. Rarely does he encounter an articulate Indian in all his travels. If Moraes does let anyone speak, they deliver brisk aphorisms, or furnish a few relevant facts and figures. A police chief in Bombay greets him with the information that “the constables are paid about $20 a month, plus accommodation, or housing allowances of about $3 a month.” A friend in Delhi reminds him of “the Indian way” of doing things. A housewife declares her financial worries, or volunteers the names and ages of her children. One has little sense of them as individuals, capable of understanding one another or themselves. Moraes finds traces of diminution in the appearance of a city as big as Bombay: “Since so many old houses have been pulled down and replaced by skyscrapers, the whole face of Bombay seems to have tightened into a scowl, streaked in the monsoon season with rain.” Occasionally, he cannot resist a crass joke: “Gossip is rife in India. It spreads not only from the lipsticked mouths of society ladies, but from the less attractive lips of politicians.”
Such sentences do no more than reinforce a feeling of futility. Moraes is making up for an absence of insight with something scenic but, ultimately, vague. His biography of Indira Gandhi is crammed with this sort of filler material. Cavorting Mughal princes, family intrigue, benevolent rulers, beastly natives: Mrs Gandhi has all the elements of a historical fantasy. The book branches out from a few interviews Indira Gandhi granted to Moraes when she lost the elections after the Emergency. Moraes is taken in by her presence to an alarming extent, and willing to attribute everything she says and does to her decent intentions. Politics is reduced to personality in a way his subject would have wholeheartedly endorsed. Early in the book, Moraes is describing an incident which led to Indira Gandhi’s arrest during the Quit India movement, when things take a dramatic turn:
Thirty-five years after this incident, Mrs Gandhi, in New Delhi, murmuring partly to her hands and partly to me, said, ‘I have always been very quiet, and when I was younger people thought there was no fire in me. But this fire has always been there, only nobody saw it except when it flared. But it has always been there,’ and she raised her head and looked at me with one of her more bewildering expressions, the large, hooded and strangely beautiful eyes defiant against denial, anger in them, but also posing a quizzical kind of question. The question would not have been asked by those eyes to many of those people with whom she dealt as Prime Minister: and, with the question unasked, and the eyes presenting their answer, I have never been surprised that so many people were afraid of her, and still are.
Moraes might as well have asked himself a “quizzical kind of question”: was he afraid of Indira Gandhi? Elsewhere in the book, he is less subtle, likening her to Julius Caesar and the scheming Congress leaders to “potential Brutuses,” never mind Caesar’s unsanctioned excesses. The crimes of the Emergency were “probably not her fault, but … the fault of the nature of India, and the nature of Indians, forced upon them by centuries of autocratic rule, which is what the people most appreciate and understand.”
Moraes’s strategy for clearing Gandhi of any blame is wearyingly familiar. He will report the opinion of a dissident or protester and quickly follow it up with the cavil that the freedom with which they could voice their dissent, or march in protest, proves that things were never as dire as they claim. At times Moraes seems afraid that the book is becoming too much of a case for the defence. He will then reflect for a page or two on his own resemblance with his subject—“both with an inbred shyness born out of tumultuous childhoods: both with a certain dislike of too much talk and loquacious people: both… with a total tiredness of, and a total interest in, this burning and turning world.” He suggests that people carried out her orders because “they were so delicately delivered, by someone accustomed to power.” Reading Mrs Gandhi, you begin to long for the prudent pleasures of Moraes’s poems. Perhaps he was right to think that his facility was his own worst enemy.
Moraes wrote perceptively on India once he had shed this knowingness. That came about after he had returned to the country for good and spent years roaming its length and breadth. The change also coincided with his return to poetry. He learnt not to wince when he was told that a “very grimy reproduction” of Rembrandt’s self-portrait in a Mysore museum was in fact the original. Deep in the ravines of Chhattisgarh, when an Adivasi mistook a camera for a revolver and raised his hands, Moraes was careful not to laugh. He grew to realise that autocratic rule was far from what Indians “most appreciate and understand,” that in a land as paradoxical as himself in its many identities, silence often spoke louder than words. When the only surviving witness to a massacre in Bihar rolls up her trousers and shows Moraes her prosthetic leg, he “was deeply moved … I said, ‘I don’t think you like talking about this.’” In a refugee camp after the 2002 Gujarat riots, Moraes meets a father worried about his daughter: “‘She does not speak,’ he says. ‘Since it happened, she has not said a word. She only cries.’”
A late poem by Moraes speaks to this transformation. In “A Day in Ayodhya,” Moraes and his lover end up in the town after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and hire a 12-year-old guide, Tulsiram, to show them around. Despite his age, Tulsiram is “careful, not like a child,” and hardened to the sight of beggars dying on the street:
We leave the woman dying and ask the boy
since the hard men first came into this town
and pulled its peace apart like a white dove,
how do things look? Tulsiram won’t say.
Moraes, too, won’t exactly say how things look. He notices the crowd of pilgrims, the lanes that resemble “combat zones,” the members of a certain party stocking up tiles to “build His house”—but by and large, he keeps his thoughts about the town to himself. He lurks around the centre of the tragedy, maintaining a studied silence. Instead the focus is on the boy, who takes the poet to a Muslim neighbourhood—“We try and speak with them, they run away”—and later, to catch the sunset from the riverbank. By the time Moraes and his companion leave Ayodhya, Tulsiram has become “our child.” Moraes, no doubt, recognised something of himself in that boy: child as well as adult, restrained as well as impatient, innocent as well as wise.