Chapter Four : My Son's Father and Never At Home

• Chapter IV

Dom Moraes: My Son's Father and Never At Home

Dom Moraes was a man of chequered career, a , journalist, biographer, autobiographer, translator, and writer of travelogues. He is one of the significant Indian English writers of the first generation of post- independent . Dom was born in a wealthy Goan

Catholic Christian family in 1938, with a high educational background. He was the only son of

Dr. Beryl and . His father was a London returned barrister, a student of Oxford and the first non-British editor of ; and his mother was a pathologist. As a child of seven years, he suffered from the trauma of his mother's nervous breakdown and eventual descent into clinical insanity. He accompanied his father on his travels through South-East Asia, the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and , the places he had to visit once again as a journalist.

At the age of 16 he went to London and lived there for more than 20 years. From his adolescence Dom made himself controversial by trying to assert his identity as an Englishman.

He even became an English Citizen in 1961. In 1956, aged 18, he was courted by Henrietta

Moraes. They married in 1961. He left her, but did not divorce her. He married Judith and had a son, Heff Moraes. However, this marriage could not last long. He later married celebrated

Indian actress and beauty and they were a star couple, known across several continents, for over two decades. Their marriage, too, ended in separation.

A Beginning (1958), was his first book of poems which made him, at twenty, the youngest-ever winner of the Hawthornden Prize. Poems (1960), was his second book of poems,

148 John Nobody (1965), his third, and they all belonged to the English phase. Also, around this time, Poems 1955-65, was published by Macmillan in the USA.

Dom started to earn his living as a journalist and a television producer. He returned to

India in 1968 and began his Indian phase soon. Pritish Nandy, the then editor of The Illustrated

Weekly of India, began to publish Moraes' poetry; there were several interviews and features on him. Prior to coming back to poetry after a considerable gap of about sixteen to seventeen years, he was fighting alcoholism and failed marriages, and steadily writing prose - memoirs, travelogues, tourist for the Department of Tourism, Government of Madhya Pradesh, and others.

He had brought out in 1967, Beldam Etcetera, a pamphlet of verse. It was more than sixteen years later, in 1983, that he published another book of poems. Absences. In 1987, his

Collected Poems came out. Serendip (1990), his collection with many poems on Sri Lanka, won him the Sahltya Akademi Award in 1994. The next poetry collection was. In Cinnamon Shade:

New and Selected Poems, (Carcanet, 2001). Finally, Yeti Books, Calicut, published his last collection. Typed with One Finger (2003). This volume contains the entire text of Cinnamon

Shade: New and Selected Poems, as well as several new poems. His Collected Poems, 1954-2004 came out next.

Moraes conducted one of the first interviews of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader in 1959. The Dalai Lama was then 23 and Moraes, 20. He was a correspondent in various wars in Algeria, Israel and Vietnam. In he became the editor of The Asia Magazine in 1971. He also edited magazines in London, and New York. He became an official of a UN agency in 1976. He wrote 23 prose books, two autobiographies and scripted and partially

149 directed over 20 television documentaries from , India, Cuba, and Israel for the BBC and

ITV. Besides writing prose and poetry, the young Dom Moraes travelled much as a journalist. He became a globe trotter visiting many far flung countries such as Israel, Bhutan, Chile, West Irion,

Vietnam, Zaire, etc. But he never lived at one place. This perhaps set the tone for his future career as a wandering reporter. It also must have unsettled him; his works reflect a migrant's compulsive desire to witness and report and not to get involved.

In 1961-62 he was one of the very few public Indian figures to strongly criticize the

Indian Army takeover of , land of his forefathers, and Daman and Diu from Portuguese

India. Pandit Nehru, the then Prime Minister, was extremely dissatisfied and the Government of

India refused to issue passport to Dom. For the rest of life he lived in on the British passport. When the Gujarat riots erupted in 2002, with their heavy toll of Muslim dead, Moraes left for Ahmedabad the minute the news came through, claiming that since he was a Catholic,

Muslims would not see him as an enemy.

Moraes spent the last 14 years of his life with Sarayu Srivatsa who was more than a friend to him. He suffered from cancer, but refused treatment and died from a heart attack in

Bandra, Mumbai on 2 June, 2004. He was buried in the city's Sewri Cemetery and as per his last wishes Sarayu Srivatsa buried the soil from his grave in Odcombe, Somerset, on 19 July 2004

(his birthdate). Many of Dom's old friends and publishers attended the memorial service in

Odcombe. This chapter will attempt a critical analysis of his two autobiographies. My Son's

Father and Never At Home and point out the people, places and events which influenced him, as well as his development into what he became- a poet of considerable merit and a well- known journalist.

150 In the Foreword written for the second edition of the first autobiography, My Son's Father he wrote, 'Part of the reason for writing my autobiography was that I wanted my son to know what I had been like around the time he was bom. ... The other reason for this book was that my childhood and adolescence had been very traumatic for me. I seldom spoke of them with anybody. I therefore found it cathartic to write about them. It is probable that writing this book changed my life.' (Moraes,1991: Foreword)

He published his first autobiography in 1968, when he was thirty. However, it covers only first twenty two years of his life. In the preface he says that he has tried to write this book by

'editing' the episodes that made his life. Its grace lies in the freshness of sensibility which is one gift of youth. Dom Moraes asserts that the book 'truthfully presents a person in the process of growth, development and change, the progress of 'a child towards being a man'. (Moraes, 1991:

Preface)

This autobiography consists of thirteen chapters divided in two parts. Chapters 1 to 6 - A

Piece of Childhood, Chapter 7 to 12 - After so Many Deaths and Chapter 13 - Epilogue. Each chapter begins with a stanza from different poems of well-knovra as well as his own poems. It is very poetic and apt to his young age. For instance, he begins the very first chapter with lines from "A Letter" from Poems:

Almost I can recall where I was born, The hot veranda where the chauffeurs drowse, Backyard dominion of the ragged thorn

And nameless servants in my father's house.... (Moraes, 1991:3) When the influences on Dom's early years are considered, they are gloomy, of a lonely child in a sick house. In his childhood, what Dom was always aware of was the absence of his

151 father. As Frank Moraes was a senior journalist, he was always on tours of different countries on business, and mother, a doctor, working in a hospital in Mumbai. Before the symptoms of insanity were seen in his mother, Dom's life was happy like any child in a household. When

Frank Moraes was in Bombay, he had many visitors in the evening. Dom remembers him sitting in the veranda with his friends talking and drinking, till late night. His father was one of those promoted by the British and a friend of many of the nationalist leaders.

He has written most comprehensively about himself, his parents and the position which resolute his future as a man of letters. The following extracts from the prefatory note to his travel book Gone Away underscores his ancestral back ground in all its peculiarities.

....My family came from a part of India that had been colonized by the Portuguese, which explains the family name, also the family religion, which was Roman Catholicism. (1983: 19)

He points to something more enlightening about his parents in his autobiography.

My mother and my father had nothing to do with India: they were simply themselves, as I was myself, and our relationship had to be worked out independent of what we were.

(1991:163-64)

This restricted concern of parents for their own comforts and well-being at the end of the growing son's emotional ambition thoroughly injured the sensitive boy to develop warm ties with his roots. Stephen Spender, a significant formative influence on Moraes, refers to the poet's development from 'a traumatic childhood and adolescence to manhood' and perceives the emotional strain on such poets,

152 " ...caught between their Indian birth and their extreme sensitivity to EngUsh language and culture."(Spender, 1969: 4)

His father had a good library at home and he also took Dom to the Royal Asiatic library when he was in Mumbai. These libraries helped Dom to become a voracious reader. He started picking up books of Edger Rice Burroughs and Conan Doyle and often buying handful of comics from a bookstall. His childhood was spent in the company of adults and servants. Being a lonely child having love for reading, Dom involved himself in the stories and characters. He talked to himself telling stories of Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, etc.

One can easily note the close interflow between life and letters, the life of the poet and the poems coming out of it. For example, his dream-world addiction which was a result of his overwhelming loneliness. There are a substantial number of poems in which he is not quite himself, speaking through what he would go on to call his "masks". Moraes is, in turn, Sinbad,

Dracula, Frankenstein and Merlin, the magician (from the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table). He is a lonely prophet ("I followed desert suns/Alone, these thirty years..."); a general returning home, weary after some medieval battle; Jason from Greek mythology, on a quest for the Golden Fleece, discovering in the end that it is nothing but~

a burst quilt someone had left

To ooze its heart out on the shore (2012:73)

Among the memorable moments of his childhood Dom remembers his meeting with

Gandhiji, when he went to meet him with Sarojini Naidu. She introduced Dom as 'Beryl's Son'.

In 1944, when Gandhiji was on hunger strike, Dom's mother as a pathologist was sent to look after him. Gandhiji was affectionate. He told Sarojini Naidu to tell Beryl to acquaint her son with . Had this advice been taken seriously, Dom would have been a different person!

153 He neither liked the environment of the Campion school he attended, nor the Catholic attitude of the teachers. But he was attracted towards a young and beautiful teacher, Miss James.

He remembered his mother as Miss James smelt of flowers but, he says, "..affected me in a different way from my mother."(p. 16) The influence of the 'beauty of woman', thus, came to him as a child. Perhaps it was the first incident in Dom's life to get attracted to the fair sex. His attraction was converted into the dreams of Miss James. In these dreams he rescued her from many difficult situations and was rewarded with kisses on the cheeks! Loneliness and reading thus led the precocious child into the world of fancy.

Dom went to Ceylone, (Srilanka), with his parents as his father accepted the offer to become the Editor of the Times of Ceylon. Some days spent in happiness. But his mother was not well. She had severe hysteric attacks. The house was filled with doctors. As a small boy he was terrified of his mother and also resented her. His intense loneliness sought a relief in the affectionate company of bearer Vincent and the driver Kuttlingam. Vincent was a loving father and knew how to entertain children. He told folk tales to Dom, from his town Manglore and sang songs. He prepared the dog Kumar for the dog show and they won the competition. He has portrayed Vincent as a good companion of his childhood. The pet dog Kumar also proved to be an intimate companion. The love and care a child should get from his parents but in the case of

Dom, he got it from servants and pets.

Once mother attacked little Dom with a knife. One day his father found her standing over his bed with a knife. Father sent her back to Mumbai. Little Dom, once again, was left with adults. In these days he read adult books, adult novels. He started to write poems. He travelled the beautifiil Lankan forests. A Sinhlese person took him to listen to the fish singing. They went to the local amateur theatre now and then. It was a happy and memorable trip for him. He kept a

154 record of this trip in the form of a journal. Later, when he went to AustraHa and other countries, there also he kept a journal. It was a kind of training for him to be a writer. Years later, Dom received the Award in 1994 for his collection of poems Serendip (1990).

Many of the poems of this collection are based mainly on his Srilankan experience. The eight- part title poem "Serendip" with a prologue and epilogue, about the island country Sri Lanka is a significant one. His deftness in encapsulating the ancient and modem history and culture of the country comes through in the following lines taken from Collected Poems:

South, the Sinhala; northward,

Angry descendants ofElara.

In the forest, the survivors:

Luminous eyes sealed by leaves,

Footsteps no longer privileged. (1987:198)

Back in Bombay, Dom became a refugee in his auntie's family full of relatives. He met his paternal grandfather also. Dom liked him and learnt Latin from him. Dom tells about a visitor at his aunt's house - Aunt E, Dom liked her because of her beauty and dared to watch her stealthily. This was perhaps the first sexual awakening in the mind of a 10 year old boy.

Dom's formal education was broken up by travels throughout Asia with his father. The

India he knew at home was privileged, aristocratic but with his father he saw the negative effects of war. At Queensland, Australia, he met an Indian who came there as a camel driver in the

Great War. Unable to go back, he lived in Australia, married an Australian woman and had many children. Dom remarks:

'He was the first expatriate I had ever met .... Not knowing that in a few years I should be one myself, in country that didn't want me'. (1991: p.61).

155 For the first time he heard about terrorists and about the tension of terrorists in Saigoan,

Vietnam. They visited South East Asian Countries, Jakarta, Indonesia. In New Zealand Dom had an uncanny, strange experience, the same he had at the Kanheri Caves near Bombay:

'.. Looking at the mud boiling or at the lake shivered by fish,.. I seemed to look down at myself

.. From a long way away.. In certain types of landscapes, these symptoms have recurred in me ever since.'(p.62)

The exposure to the realities of life opened him up to a wider range of experience. In his late teens Moraes met D.G.Tendulkar, who introduced him to the predicament of India's poor.

...I had never known what life in Bombay was really like, until Tendulkar showed me. The instincts of socialism fostered in me by the work of people like Gorky and the thirties' poets, flared up. (p. 217).

D. G. Tendulkar also introduced Dom with Russian Literature. Tendulkar was influenced by communism when he visited Russia. But, afterwards was impressed very much by Gandhiji. He wrote biography of Gandhiji in eight volumes. Dom liked Turgeniev and Gorky, so he would call

Dom 'Domski'. Painter Manishi Dey also became a friend of Dom. He praised Dom's poetry.

He was the first 'Bohemian' seen by Dom.

For a sensitive, creative, and educated lonely person reading is one of the most easily available escapes from the harsh realities of life. It was, therefore, natural that Dom took to reading. Dom's reading became his passion. He read widely - books on nature, history, human history, archeology, even books about cricket. Quite unconsciously, Dom was going into training. However, his poems were a copy of what he read - Swinburne, Yeats and Golden

156 Treasury. For instance, Yeats' poem "An Acre of Grass" is about the poet's old age. It reminds the researcher Moraes' poem "Grandfather".

An Acre of Grass Grandfather

Picture and book remain, Grandfather in the corner keeps no time

An acre of green grass

For air and exercise, The lather chair creaks sharply with his breath

Now strength of body goes: From breakfast till we tidy him away

Midnight, an old house Before we dine, to the sweet fusty air

Where nothing stirs but a mouse. Of his small prison, through whose window bar

Drawn by the moon he pokes a feathery head

A mind Michael Angelo knew And tilts his dandruff up towards the stars

That can pierce the clouds, And then realizes that he is not yet dead

Or inspired by frenzy

Shake the dead in their shrouds; He hears the radio says in the next room

Forgotten else by mankind, An eagle has escaped from Regent's Park

An old man's eagle mind. And balances back, flapping in the dark,

(Yeats, 1967:.62-63) (Moraes, Dom, taken from YouTube)

157 Both poems are about old age. Yeats' poem is about his own old age, and Moraes's poem is about grandfather's old age. Both use the image of an eagle. Yeats uses it as the strength of mind and Moraes uses it as a symbol of freedom from life, i.e. death. The use of simple language is evident. However, the Yeatsian poem expresses the creativity even in old age using the image of

Michael Angelo, and Moraes's poem tells about the old age only. The picturesque quality is the characteristic of both poems.

He was not happy with what he wrote. Once he discovered an anthology compiled by S.

Maugham which included poems of Eliot, Auden, and Stephen Spender. Dom was excited, he understood for the first time how to write poetry. At the age of 13 a local newspaper published one of his stories and writers like and G. V. Desani took notice of Dom. He even wrote a book on cricket at the age of thirteen! Later it was published by an American publication in 1951.

The most influential incident was his meeting with the two British poets W. H. Auden and

Stephen Spender. In a way, it was a total turning point in his life. Dom met Spender and told his wish to be a poet. Spender began to laugh and said gently, 'Perhaps you are one' (MSF, p. 76).

Dom was greatly inspired by this. It was an intoxicating event for a budding poet and had a lasting impression on Dom. Spender's second visit to Mumbai proved of great inspiration for

Dom, and Spender even recommended him to the English critic Neville Coghill in Oxford.

At this time Dom met one more remarkable person, , a famous anthropologist who studied the life, culture and history of the Gonds, a rapidly declining tribe in the forests of Madhya Pradesh. It was Verrier Elwin who introduced Dom to the work of Dylan

Thomas, David Gascoyne and Sydney Keyes and to the Metaphysicals, and advised Dom to read

158 classics like Wordsworth and Byron. He praised Dom's poems and confirmed Dom in his belief that he was a poet. He was a direct contrast to Dom. A British person, became an Indian citizen was a counterpart of Dom.

When Illustrated Weekly published some poems of Dom, was assistant editor there. He advised Dom to work on his verse. He told Dom what Yeats said, 'we must labour to be beautiful' (p. 88). Later, he went to learn French and he wrote a poem 'French

Lesson'. It is a poem he says "..which was about her (Colette, his French teacher)... I tried to express my emotions with precision."(p.91)Ezekiel praised this poem. He proved to be a shaping influence on Dom. Ezekiel also advised him to read the critical essays of Pound and Eliot. Under the shaping influence of these poets, he was able to overcome his loneliness caused by the traumatic experiences on his home front and cultured their style to render a creative use of his loneliness. Moraes hardly felt inclined to treat India as his homeland.

...The poets were my people. I had no real consciousness of a nationality; for I did not speak the languages of my countrymen, and therefore had no soil for roots. Such Indian society as I had seen seemed to me narrow and provincial and I wanted escape it. (p. 100)

His mother now became more silent but more destructive. She broke crockery. Not only that, once while she was smoking a cigarette, she very carefully ground the burning end into the back of Dom's left hand. He bore the scar on his hand and in his heart all his life! He had another bitter experience of his mother's insanity. In the rainy season, mother didn't allow his pet dog Kumar in the house. He was there in the balcony in the heavy rain of Bombay. With anger in mind he sat with the dog in the balcony with an umbrella and a raincoat. But the poor animal died that night. Dom lost the last remnants of his childhood. After Kumar's death he

159 became very cruel with his mother. He came to know that he had a power to hurt her by telHng her that he was leaving her. Eventually, her illness flared up so vehemently that his father sent her to a Hospital at Banglore. As Dom grew older he associated his mother with India, and hated both.

Dom had to go to London early to secure admission in Jesus College and for that to appear for the entrance examination in English and Latin. Before leaving for London he decided to travel India. Being the son of rich parents, the journey, the flights were normal to him even in his childhood, which are not so easy even today to a common Indian person. He visited Kashmir,

Shrinagar; to the South he visited Aurangabad, Ajanta, Mysore, Hallebidh, Belur. He describes

Hallebidh and Belur "The temples...stood amidst a dull, scrubby waste, beaten by the sun...The whole floor was a sea of human excrement..."(p. 107) Later, when he went to Athens, Mycenae especially influenced him and, according to him it was reflected in his poems . However, he has been criticized by critics on his remarks. M.K. Naik feels that there was something about Moraes as a poet. To quote Naik:

When Dom Moraes tells us in My son's Father that the tombs of Mycenae in Greece

influenced his poetry more by way of images of kings and burials, than the ruins of India

and that the only memory he carries of the Belur Temples is not of their architectural

beauty, but of the courtyard behind the village full of excrement, one can only say that

the loss is not India's but perhaps Dom Moraes. (Prasad, 1983:34-35)

He says that he had nostalgia for Bombay. He was conscious of what he was leaving behind as he was leaving for London. The researcher doesn't think he was. A boy who was so anxious to leave India, Bombay and his mother couldn't think so. This is Dom's justification about his anxiety to leave India.

160 Chapters 7 to 12 form the second part of the book. The section "After so many Deaths" uncovers an important phase of Dom's life, his migration to England for education. The journey to England seems to have started on an exciting note! This part describes his life in London as a student and his identity as a poet. In 1955 Dom went to London. While on board the ship there was a beautiful woman Alice going to London with her daughter Celia. Dom fell in love with the mother and not the daughter who was of his age. The absence of motherly love and the company of adults in his childhood made Dom relate himself with grown-ups rather than contemporaries.

In London also he was lonely at first. He would go to the coffee bar and sat there drinking till it was closed at night. Dom justifies that here he developed a habit of heavy drinking. The references to wine/ drinking occur in his poems. For instance, in his poem "A

Letter" he writes about his coming to England-

At sixteen I came here to start again:

An infant's trip, where many knew to walk.

I stumbled dumbly through the English rain,

The literature, the drink, the talk, talk, talk. (2012:21)

In another poem, "One of Us"(for David Gascoyne) he says -

We used to drink in the same place.

I never knew his name because

Of knowing him only by face: (2012:23)

Dom met Spender at the office of the Encounter with some poems. Spender had published some of them. Dom was very happy and felt confident also. He visited Spender's home and there he saw Spender's study full of books, painting, and a gramophone piece: a perfect picture of a poet's house. But it was at Soho that he found the world he had wished for. In London he soon

161 became part of a then and still famous bohemian world of Soho; his circle of drinking friends and acquaintances included the painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, the poets George Barker,

W. S. Graham, the publisher David Archer, and Henrietta (born Audrey Wendy Abbott), the beautiful, amoral, witty, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, thieving, drug-taking. Queen of Soho whom Dom mentions as 'K' in his autobiography. Dom was fascinated by the environment. He also visited his poet friend Oliver Bernard's flat. The disorder of his flat, the baked beans, the

Soho meetings, the departed mistress of Oliver were exactly what Dom says, 'I had visualised literary life to be like'.(MSF, p. 131)

Stephen Spender suggested him to meet Forster and also gave him a letter. Dom met him at Cambridge. Though Forster was not a poet, he accepted his request to read his poems. On his advice Dom went on tour de Europe, to France, Italy, Greece, Rome and some other places. In this travel he had good as well as bad experiences. He reached Paris. The description of Paris shows the poet as well as a journalist in making. He met David Gascoyne, a famous poet, who had completely dried up. Perhaps it was the future of Dom standing in front of him in the form of

Gascoyne. He had an album, when Dom asked him if he could see it, he happily handed it to

Dom. It was full of paper cuttings of cookery, delicious cuisine!

At Rome, Dom met Princess Marguerite Caetine, an American married into an

Aristocratic family. She edited a literary magazine Bottege Oscure. She was a motherly figure.

This old woman loved literature and a group of young writers and poets was always around her.

She printed Dom's poems and also gave handsome remuneration. Through her Dom met many poets. He went to Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Dom had experiences which were not good. People deceived him by giving wrong address, took much money from him. In Belgrade the porter told him that the hotel was near and took him on foot a few miles. As a result he fell very ill. He

162 stayed in a house where a young and beautiful landlady Dragika nursed him. She told how she was raped by 10-12 German soldiers. But there was no shame or hate in her voice. Now she had lost her husband and the room in her house was the only source of earning. Dom had an affair with this woman.

His purpose behind coming to London was fulfilled when he met real 'poets'. Even some of them became his friends. The most important among these was the meeting with T. S. Eliot. In the spring, he met T. S. Eliot. This great poet was very gentle with a new poet like Dom. Dom had already sent some of his poems to him. He told Dom that he liked some of them. Dom says that his feeling towards Eliot was peculiar. "His poetry and criticism were a part of my mind and sensibility: like a son", (p. 157) Was it because Eliot was an emigrant in England? Dom told him of his plan to live in England. Eliot asked him if he thought of the profession after education and even advised him to think about future as no one could earn his living only by poetry. This far- sighted poet also referred to journalism as an option as a career. His advice proved to be very practical. The same advice was later given to him by Principle Christie after Dom completed his graduation.

It was Oliver Bernard who introduced Dom to David Archer. David had started a new bookshop round the corner into the Greek Street opposite the Palace theatre. David Archer, a

Soho habitue whose literary bookshop had become a meeting place for the British poets and writers. He was a strange person. Even the eccentric citizens of Soho thought him strange. He liked to claim that he read only detective thrillers. He did not actually read the poets and writers he published; he 'smelt' them. His taste in poets was infallible, but not his accounting practices.

He used most of the inheritance his father had left him to rent the premises for his bookshops.

Sometimes he would refuse to accept money from customers, and often he would empty his

163 wallet to help an impoverished or thirsty friend. He had an unusual way of paying the poets he published: a five-pound note folded into a matchbox. Archer shut down the Parton Street bookshop during the war and reopened it in the late fifties on Greek Street in the heart of Soho.

He was the one who had published the first volumes of the poets like Dylan Thomas, George

Barker, David Gascoyne - the poets who later became renowned in literature.

When Dom went to visit his parents he had a feeling that he was an exile from the life in

Mumbai. He even felt stranger to his mother. For emotionally orphan Dom, Kutthalingam, their driver was the only person who was a link between him and his life in Mumbai. On his return,

Archer asked him in a very awkward manner if he could publish Dom's poems. Dom couldn't believe his ears at first. But it was true. Archer had a gift of 'sensing poet without reading their poems. In the same way he 'sensed' Dom as a good poet.

The three years at Oxford years left the longest lasting impact on Dom, a poet-to-be. At

Oxford he met Julian Mitchell and Peter Levi. They showed Dom Oxford as a place. Then slowly more friends came, young poets like Del Kolve, Rhodes Scholar, Patrick Garland,

American poet Kenneth Pitchford, John Fuller and Quentin Stevenson, Ginsberg and Corso, whom he met in Greece, also came to Oxford.. These were the friends with whom, for the first time, Dom could share his sadness and his confusions. They were happy that Dom's book was published. Julian had started a magazine Gemini and Dom published his poems in it.

It was in 'The Coach and The Horses' pub that Dom first saw K. She came there with her boyfriend. She was a beauty - everybody got attracted towards her. Dom lost his heart in the first sight. She was 25 and Dom was 17. Looking at her he remembered his affair with Dragika.

Slowly they became friends. Dom married K, but soon after marriage Dom understood that the

164 early love period was over. Their relationship became problematic. In anger K's voice shrilled and his voice became uncertain. The naked hostile emotion associated K's voice with that of his mother. This realization of images shook Dom. And he withdrew farther from K. In the last term at Oxford, his relationship with K became worse. A friend telephoned him that K had found another person. To his surprise he was not angry but felt free. Next day he left her. Dom's failure to form and continue relationships were rooted in his 'broken house', his weak relationship with his parents and his fickleness. Was this a result of circumstances or wrong choices out of momentary passion or infatuation? One may say that all these are examples of immaturity.

Dom befriended an Indian in his last year at Oxford - Ved Mehta. He was blind since he was three. Though Ved had spent his adult life abroad, he thought of India as his country while

Dom thought of England as his. Perhaps it was the friendship of/ attraction of different attitudes.

However there was one similarity- the nature of an expatriate, a wanderer. When the boys were discussing about their future plans after graduation, Ved asked Dom, "..would people like us fit in at home?"(p. 219) He was uncertain about accepting a job offered to him in New York, and in fact, he accepted it later. However, he told Dom that there was nothing 'Indian' in him. He could adjust himself anywhere but India. It was an encouraging discussion for a youth like Dom who did not think himself as an Indian. Later, in an article published in Impact in 1971, he wrote, "I am an Indian by birth, but I have lived in England since I was a boy and hold a British passport.

The historical accident of British Rule in India worked on my family, so that I lived an English life there and spoke no Indian language ...So English was my attitude that I could not fit in

India. When eventually I came to England, I fitted in at once". (Moraes ,1971:183-184).

165 His second visit to India was a visit of a stranger. He had the eyes of a tourist. As Dom was a 'foreign returned' person and a famous poet, there were many invitations to read poetry and lectures. The British Council, then U. S. I. S. and some colleges invited him. His school invited him and the Catholics tried to catch him as a 'Suitable boy' to marry some girl among them. It was something 'very Indian' and he did not like it.

His life as a lonely child, and later his life as a youth living in London are major influences reflected in his poetry in his first three volumes. His total isolation as an individual following his father's busy schedules and his mother's madness, his dislike for India, the country of his birth, his seduction by Henrietta (K), are all those factors which pushed him to his destiny as a lonely youth. It has come out vividly in his poems. What strikes one, again, is stark realism of the poet.

In A Beginning (1958) Dom reflects this. For instance in a poem 'Kanheri Caves', he refers to 'a mild antique race'(obviously the Westerners) who left us (Indians) like 'a faded photograph'.

Only two centuries after Christ, this cliff

Was colonized by a mild antique race,

Who left us, like a faded photograph,

Their memories that dry up in this place. (2012:5)

"Many poems in A Beginning are about reality and failure, including the failures built into the relationship between imagination and reality, between desire and experience... the loss of virginity and innocence and awareness of the effects of time become significant themes...."as

Bruce King opines in his book Three Indian English Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan,

Dom Moraes. (p. 108). The loss of the innocence of childhood and a sexually guilty youth are depicted in the poems in this collection. For instance, 'A Man Dreaming' where-

.... women now

166 Were led toward his bed, never more easy.

He was prevented by his wound, his misery.

And then he knew his dream for what it was.

At once a sexual pain that swamped all pain.

An angry spasm shook him. Then he woke.

He caught his breath and rearranged his brain,

But took some time to know himself again. (2012: p.8)

There is a tone of self-criticism and confession clearly evident in the poem.

Dom was much restless because in these days poetry went away from him, a fallow period had set in. Auden advised him to translate some poems. At this time in 1958, Dom's book

A Beginning was awarded the prestigious Hawthorndon Prize. Dom was the youngest person to get it and the first non-English writer also. Even the Queen read the book and was pleased. Dom became a celebrity. But he was upset to get such fame. He thought it was too much at such a young age. It was the symptom of the maturity of Dom. Alan Tate, an American poet whose new critique taught Dom a lot. He wished to satisfy Alan Tate's intellect and worked hard on his poems. Nearly a year had spent after his first book. Now as he was working hard his gift had returned to him. Poems (1960), was his second published book of poems, John Nobody (1965), his third, and they all belonged to the English phase. Also, around this time. Poems 1955-65, was published by Macmillan in the USA. By this time Dom Moraes started to earn his living as a journalist and a television producer.

In John Nobody (1965), we find Dorn Moraes in the throes of existential angst.

"Dedicatory Sonnets", begins with "Finch's", obviously a pub. The life of the poet in those times is strikingly drawn in the following opening lines:

167 That day, bored with myself, I leant upon

The chipped bar, chinking thoughts together like

A late drunk twopence short ofbusfare home

Who knows that taxis will not take a cheque. (Moraes, 1987:63)

"John Nobody", the title poem, is saturated with angst. "Disillusionment" is the catchword here.

The man's tenants have left him, leaving him penniless. It irks him to note that the woman he loved is with another man. "It irks ...." is the opening phrase of two stanzas. Look at the way he describes the scene of his first seduction:

A woman dancing on a windy shore,

Lifting her white arms beckoned me to bed

It was the winter of my seventeenth

Year when I lost what some call innocence. (Moraes, 1987: 100) Beldam Etcetera (1967), is the next collection. "Letter to My Mother" is an important poem in this collection:

I address you only,

My lonely mother.

Where seven islands squat

In a filthy sea

You say your rosary. (2012: 105)

Dorn's detestation of Bombay, where his mother lived, is explicit in these lines. He feels sorry that his mother's madness had made him flinch:

/ was ashamed of myself Since I was ashamed of you. (105)

168 According to Anjum Hasan, "In his grasp of metre and rhyme, in his extraordinarily consistent ability to make music in the language, Moraes is in some sense an 'English' poet, yet his influences seem to date further back in time. He is especially drawn to the English

Romantics, and to the immortal landscapes in which they located their eternal subjects—art, love, death and doom. (Hasan, 1 August 2012)

The subjects in many of Moraes's poems are people in his life: his clinically insane mother, with whom he was never able to make peace; his succession of lovers and partners; his friends and acquaintances in the London of the 1950s and 1960s. Such poems are glittering pieces of autobiography, both glimpses of development of the poet's style as well as records of his feelings on specific occasions about specific people. The influences, which shaped his poetry, were his own personal background and his experience in various fields. The themes that recur in his poems are: absence, departure dislocation, invasion, exile, loss of the innocence of childhood, and guilt of sex stricken life. In his poems, which have been called hermetic but are never obscure, we meet the isolated child, hurt and confused; the young outsider in England, making up for his insecurity by his dazzling presence; the solitary exile, steering among the illusions and uncertainties of belonging.

In the lines of his poems there is the pain of an insecure and vulnerable self, which was never totally at-home in this world. He found the right metaphors for the imaginative world of a man who was homeless in a fundamental sense.

/ have grown up, I think, to live alone

To keep my old illusions, sometimes dream, Glumly, that I am unloved and forlorn... (2012: 12)

169 The question that has dogged about Moraes and his work is, of course, the perennial one: Is he an Indian poet? Despite his long years in Britain and his world travels, Moraes in fact spent most of his life in India in Mumbai. Interestingly though, in his poems, the country is always held at arm's length. When he invokes legendary historical figures to speak through, they are those who were 'outsiders' to India, like Babur and Alexander. When he talks about the Indian landscape, in poems such as 'Kanheri Hills', he seems to prefer ancient and deserted scenarios to

living and populated ones. "...I came back, but not by my own choice, /to sour polluted land,

strewn with dead roots", he says in one poem, while in another, addressing his dead mother, he writes:

Your eyes are like mine.

When I last looked in them

I saw my whole country,

A defeated dream

Hiding itself in prayers,

A population of corpses,

Of burnt bodies that cluttered

The slow, deep rivers, of

Bodies stowed into earth

Quickly before they stank...

(Moraes, 1992:01)

A poem like "1668", signifying a year after 1667, in which a band of British marines

landed on the islands which would later form Bombay, and which were part of the dowry the

Portuguese princess, Catherine de Braganza, brought to Charles II of England. However, Moraes

is vehemently criticized by critics for his colonioal sympathies. In his poem 1668, he thinks of

Mumbai-

170 Dowry for a dupe, corposes' ransom,

Fiction of the brindled Portuguese

Whose Christ marooned in the marshland

Held a wry hand up in benediction. ( Moraes, 1990: p. 58).

"Moraes' instinctive colonial predilections prompt him to treat India as a variant to be defined in terms of a fixed coordinate- a centre- Goa a Portuguese colony, and Mumbai a Portuguese gift"

(Suryanath Pandey,1999: 67)

Ezekiel feels that while Moraes' Collected Poems is an "impressive collection" from which "much may be learnt . . . about the art," yet he writes like an English poet, and does not reflect any significant aspect of Indian life." (Ezekiel, quoted by Huq Caiser, in The Daily Star,

May29, 2004) The researcher agrees with it. For instance "Interludes" is a suite of seven poems.

The first poem ' Autumnal' is about the feeling of the passing of the time, and with it, the youth, too:

Trees dying, leaves shaken

Down on this country or that:

No autumn kiss will awaken

What has gone away. (2012:102)

The third poem 'Song' takes the story of the Magi, though overshadowed by uncertainty as presentiments of mortality. 'Cloak' again presents a story from the life of Christ. The cloak is that cloth which was wrapped to Christ's body when it was taken down from the cross. The fifth poem 'Fragment' depicts Dom as a war correspondent in Vietnam in the early 1970s. The sixth poem 'Architecture' relates Dom's memory of his fascination towards Aunt E, but converts into another memory where the destructive power of bombs ruined the domes and cupolas.

171 Miles from his aunt, the old child

Watched the domes and cupolas defaced

In a hundred countries, as time passed. (2012: 107)

When Dom returned to India, he went with Ved Mehata to Nepal. He took interviews of

Nehru and then the Dalai Lama. Back home he was busy in writing a book. Mother was happy.

Dom tried to reestablish his relation with her. But he didn't visit church with her and he never left his father's company. Dom tried to convince mother that he had decided to go back. One night he was going out for dinner and he told his mother about this. While he was getting ready he heard a scream and a crash outside. Dom reflects, "All the horror of my childhood returned to me mixed with the memories of scenes with K ...."(MS'F, p. 229). All kindness in Dom vanished in seconds; he caught his mother's arm and shouted at her. His sharp voice made her silent at once. Next day she packed her things, she was normal and sad. She was going to Banglore so that when Dom would go to London she won't be there to create a scene. Dom felt guilty and expressed his love for mother. He flew back to London.

This part portrays his life in London and Oxford as well as development of Dom as a poet and as a man. He had many experiences. At last he reached the place he thought he belonged. It was a place where real poets lived. He could meet them, discuss with them, share his thoughts and could read his poems to know their remarks. Here he learnt more about the art of poetry.

Elder poets like Auden, Spender, the American poet Alan Tate gave this young poet their valuable time and advice. Yes, he liked the atmosphere of Soho, which was free of any worry, talking, drinking, parties, even sometimes fights: everything was like what he thought of a poet's life should be. He met many girls and women and had affairs with them. Living with adults perhaps made him dislike the company of people of his age. It was only when he went to

London he at once got mixed up with the people elder as well as contemporary to him.

172 Don was always profoundly attentive to the bodily peculiarities and movements of people around him. Dom has a special gift of portraying people, their appearance, or a peculiar habit that makes a person special- painter Manishi Dey was a fat 'baby faced' person, Forster's face was like a 'clever rabbit'; Dom saw 'a tall elderly man who held himself so rigidly it seemed as though he were afraid he would explode'. This was David Archer. Dom describes T. S. Eliot 'a tall heavy man with attentive aquiline head bowed a little', who had 'kind eyes'. Dom describes

Auden's face using geographical terms 'a kindly landscape'. This characteristic is also observed in his descriptions of the atheletic body in Green Is the Grass. In one of his earliest poems, 'At

Seven O'Clock', from his first collection^ Beginning, he focuses on a childhood experience:

The masseur from Ceylon, whose balding head

Gives him a curious look of tenderness,

Uncurls his long crushed hands above my bed

As though he were about to preach or bless. (2012:4)

The last chapter of this book gives the happy description of Dom's house with his wife

Judith and their son Francis and the dog Thomas. They lived in London. It was 1963. He was thirty now. Till this age he had done many things. He published second book in India - Gone

Away (1960). Then he published his second book of verse, Poems in the same year. He scripted documentary films for television. He travelled to Israel and Russia. He had established himself as a writer and earned a lot of money. But he spent it all as usual carelessly and was short of money.

Then Dom writes about his happy married life with Judith. Dom couldn't believe all this

- that he was a man, had a wife and a son. He was writing and was happy. He wrote this autobiography in hope that if his son would read it, he would understand the person Dom had

173 been and would accept the person now what he was. As he says in his second autobiography, 'To all intents and purposes, I had taken root'. (Moraes, 1992: viii).

'Dom brings a breath of fresh air to this genre as such ...This book is not like any other autobiography, primarily because he was thirty at the time he wrote it and also because of brutal honesty with which he treats his childhood and family. It is this very un-Indian trait of baring all, spots, blemishes et al that sets this book apart'. (Book Review, May 31,2007)

This volume ends with a happy note. Like a fairy tale ending with the proverbial- 'and they lived happily ever after'. However, life is not a fairy tale. Dom's life was never the life of a settled person. He himself never felt at home anywhere, neither in India, the country of his birth nor in England, the country he thought of as his own.

Never At Home

Moraes says in his poem 'Sinbad', 'Some of us never know home'. His search for identifying his true self did not end up with My Son's Father. He continued his insistent struggle and the result was Never At Home published in 1992. The very title sums up the spirit of Moraes'

life. The odyssey that started from Bombay, with a significant halt at London, finally completed in the country of his birth, thus making the circle full. Dom wrote the second autobiography in

1992 when he was 55. Almost 25 years had passed after he wrote his first autobiography at the age of 30. He continues from where he left off. The first book narrated the story of his life up to the age of twenty two. The second book brings us to the last decade of 20th century. In the first book Dom begins each chapter with lines of his own poems. In the second book, however, he becomes more prosaic. His poetry is intensely personal and self-immersed. But at the same time he developed an acute social consciousness, best expressed in his journalism. Never At Home

174 deals mainly with his life as a journalist. Reading about Dom's travels on various assignments is itself an exciting experience.

The present book contains twenty chapters. The book begins with Dom's arrival in India with his third wife Leela Naidu, at the end of 1974, nearly after two decades. He was not willing to come to India as he had to meet his mother who was in an asylum in Banglore (NIMHANS).

He always tried to go away from her. But at the same time there was an obligation to meet her being her only son. He had such sour feeling for her that he thought the very existence of his mother in India was 'the albatross round my neck, the monkey on my back'. (Moraes, 1992: 2).

As Hoskote points out,

"Moraes's difficult relationship with his mother had defined his personality and choices in

significant ways. Not only did it inform his desire to escape the motherland, which he

identified with his mother in its alarming lack of balance, but it also burdened him with

nightmares of his childhood sufferings... he would never forgive her for the atmosphere

that she had often created..." (Hoskote, Ranjit, 1012: ixv)

He always had an ambivalent relationship with India, despite being born and brought up here. This is perhaps because in his formative years he identified with Britain and its literary traditions.

At the same time, there was hardly any part of India he had not visited. He understood and valued the plurality of Indian life. It is reflected in his poem 'A Letter to My Mother'. He wrote the first part of the poem in England at the end of the 1960s. Here he presents the second part in which he once again tells her :

175 Your dream is desolate.

It calls me every day

But I cannot enter it.

You know I will never return.

Forgive me my trespasses. (Moraes, 1992: p.01)

The mother died in 1889, after living thirteen years in a cottage atNIMHANS, Banglore. Moraes always experienced acute nausea in her presence; her death came as liberation.

In opening chapters he records those eight years which he skipped in his first book. He thinks it necessary to commemorate not only about his own life but also events which were important in history and he was present as an observer or a participant in some of them. Dom uses flash back technique and goes back in the year 1957-58, his days at Oxford and London.

Having finished at Oxford with a fourth-class or 'poets' class' in 1959, Dom returned to Bombay for a two month visit. He was welcomed with exaggerated enthusiasm as a 'foreign returned' young man. This embarrassing situation just after a decade of independence depicted the burden of the British Raj. Though Dom had opportunities of good jobs in India, he had already decided to return to England. There was nothing that he liked ever since he stepped in India. In his Goa visit, for instance, he was critical about the situation of Goa; of how Goa became free from

Portuguese and became a state of democratic India. He expressed his opinion that the Goans should have given an option. Dom's indiscretion created a good deal of unrest. Nehru was very upset and wanted to withdraw his passport. It was with the help of his father's friend that he collected his British passport. Though all this mess took place, Dom says that he couldn't understand why they were making an issue of his opinion! Moreover, he freely accepted this in the cynical John Nobody (1965), alternately thoughtful and ironic.

176 ...And I grew homesick for an Indian day.

But there, last year, a moral issue arose.

I grabbed my pen and galloped to attack.

My Rosinante trod on some ones toes.

A Government frowned and now I can't go back. (2012:63)

He had always made himself controversial by insisting that he was more British than Indian. And he had always been critical about everything Indian. He criticized 'the Indian habit' of talking about 'the cultural heritage of the nation and then attempting to foist it on others'.

(Moraes,1992: 42). He said that it had irritated him for years. According to Makarand Paranjpe,

"It is not that Dom is the only alienated Indian English poet. A whole generation of his

peers felt similarly displaced. But, none, I would venture to say is as out of place as Dom

is. While Nissim Ezekiel, his contemporary and senior, finds himself reluctantly

reconciled to India, Dom stubbornly holds out. Even the titles of his books, Gone Away

or Never at Home underscore this estrangement. His poetic personae—from Alexander

to Babur—invariably reinforce the point of view of invaders and conquerors."

(Makarand Paranjpe, Dom; A Critical Appreciation)

On the advice of Prin. Christie he thought of journalism as a means to earn money, like his father. Poetry in itself could not sustain any person. With the help of his literary contacts like

James Michie, a poet and a publisher, he started his career when he was just twenty two years old. His first assignment, ironically, was to write a book on India. He reached in Bombay with a foreigner's eye. With the help of his father Dom interviewed Nehru and Dalai Lama. The Lama and Moraes both were in their twenties and besides the language barrier they had a very warm conversation. He visited Nepal, witnessed a brutal tradition of leaving a dying person near the

177 banks of a river when he visited the famous NepaH poet Devkota; he returned to Bombay to collect some material on Hindi films. He published his book Gone Away: An Indian Journey completed in 1960. This experience showed him a possible career outside poetry. It also gave him a true friend James Cameroon, a famous foreign correspondent. Cameron offered a television programme to Dom. After this book, Dom successfully completed a serial of four documentaries about India with an Australian T.V. Producer Tim Hewat. He had a chance to meet famous film maker when they hired his crew. He went back to London and married Judith in 1963. In March 1966, their son Francis was born.

Dom got an opportunity to go to Israel. His visit to Israel seems to have been both exciting and creative. It was exciting because the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi, was on. The Nazi, named Adolf Eichmann was only a beaurocrat, not among the top rank Nazi officials. He executed orders and killed prisoners mercilessly throughout his wartime career. Mosad caught him, and he was to be produced in public and was being trialed in Jerusalem. He befriended

Carmi, a famous poet, in Tel Aviv and translated into English some of his poems with Carmi's help. Later on a few other Israeli/Hebrew poets were translated and eventually published in a collection Brass Serpent appeared in England and America in 1964. By now Dom was twenty three and had begun to tire of the Soho life in London. Dom began to detest the lack of seriousness in many of his contemporaries in London. He describes it in his poetry. In 'A Letter' he said:

I wrote about them: it was waste of breath. For many they were home, for me too wild, Too walled for me those valleys full of death

Who had grown up as wanderer and child. (2012:21)

178 Carmi introduced Dom to many artists, painters and writers. In a way many of them were refugees and directly came from Europe. The artists Dom met in Israel impressed him with their sense of artistic drive and seriousness. He met them and sensed similarity in his and their situation and quickly became friend of these people. Among them there was a painter Yosl

Bergner, from Poland. Dom was influenced by him and his first writing about Israel was influenced by Yosl. His first sojourn in Israel produced two remarkable poems. ("Two From

Israel") One poem was dedicated to the great Hebrew poet Nathan Altermann; the other to the

Israeli artist Yosl Bergner.

The situation in Israel made him aware of the wrath of the people, the Jews, towards the

Nazi. His habit of drinking helped him getting a story. There was barman called Avram. One day

Dom saw the Auschwitz tattoo on one arm of Avram. Dom talked to him. He told without emotion that he lost his wife and son and his 62 relatives in the war. He served food to

Eichmann. He had such anger and contempt that one day he said, 'I'd like to poison Eichmarm's food .... to kill him with my bare hands. But there is a difference... Between being a Jew and being an Israeli ... as a 'JewT should like to kill him. As an Israeli, I must protect him till he is tried and sentenced ...'. (NAH, p. 29). He also interviewed Israeli Prime Minister David Ben

Gurian. Dom describes him as the 'Nehru of his country'. After the trial he was tired but satisfied. This was the first serious assignment of Dom. He revisited Israel in June 1967. He heard about war to break out in the Middle East and he went to cover the 'Six Day War' for a women's magazine Queen. Once again he was in Israel with his friend Carmi. His travels in

India and his reporting from Jerusalem had everything to do with the world. His journalistic fragment and the many books he created from these pieces display a deep fretfulness for the poor and the exploited especially for the poor and exploited India.

179 Once Stephen Spender had warned him about dangers to a poet who pursued a career connected with another sort of writing, but Dom didn't agree with this view. A poet has to do something to live. He felt that he had chosen right path. He felt that he had vocation and profession as a poet and a writer. The practitioners of these two vocations are wanderers.

He had started to work as a freelancer. In his assignment to cover the war in Algeria in

1961 he experienced the action in war. When he went into a bar with a man, that man went to the front of the bar and the front blew up. It was so unexpected and horrible that Dom was on the floor. The destruction of the bar and people was horrible. In his poetry he had mentioned death but now he knew what death could be, he says,

Like many young poets, I sometimes mentioned death in my verse, trying to create a specific effect, which I imagined the word conveyed by itself I now knew what death could be like; it could be people starving to death in India, or gassed into extinction at Auschwitz, or blasted to tatters in a bar in Algiers. I therefore felt that I had chosen the right path, or that it had chosen me. (Moraes,1992: 39)

As a freelance journalist, Dom worked for different publications and Press, he interviewed many interesting people. For instance, he had to interview one Miss Christie Keeler, who had been a principal participant in the sex scandal in 1962, that had nearly brought down the Harold

Macmillan's Government. Another experience was to interview an old poet Edmund Blunder, a , who was in tears to remember them who died in World War I. Blunder visited France every year to look all the battlefields. Dom interviewed a Smithfield butcher (for the Daily

Telegraph), then the leader of National Front. The Nova was a publication of International

Publishing Corporation (IPC). Dom joined as the editor of the Arts section of the Nova. For two

180 years he travelled in Eastern Europe for newspapers, for T. V. serials and films. Even he did T.

V. films on wild life.

As he had completely dried up, he was restless about his inability to write poetry. He had to make compromises to earn his living. He started to write in Sunday supplements. He had to cover racial riots in London. The correspondents also asked him to interpret between Pakistani immigrants and themselves. He felt irritated as his attitude towards such incidents was neutral (as of any Western person). So he didn't like covering racial stories. He said, "I felt English, my attitudes towards life were English,... I thought myself accepted in England... I didn't have to disguise my difference... The colour of my skin was not British, but my mind was". (NAH, p.

43) Hoskote points out that it was only in 1968, after the poet had lived in Britain for a good decade, that he noticed he was not quite British:

As a person of privilege, with his Oxford accent, public appearances on television and in the newspapers, and his almost entirely white circle of friends, Moraes had felt himself to be immune from the race question; it was only when he began to research and write about the new arrivals, disoriented and dispossessed as they were, that he realised that he too was in fact an immigrant. (Hoskote, 2012: xliv)

Dom's idea that he was accepted by everybody in England, proved to be false. The problem of identity crisis / lost identity seems to follow Dom like a nasty dog. For example,

David Archer, in a Christmas party mentioned Dom as Indian. Later on he became extremely conscious of the fact that his English friends saw him as an 'Indian'. It was very important for

Moraes to be accepted by the British society and his anger knew no bounds when once a policeman hopped him up because he looked like an immigrant. He later realized that in reality

181 he was an immigrant in England. It was at this time that he discovered that he could not write poetry, it was a wholly barren and dark period and his restlessness increased as he was failing in the very purpose of his residence in England. His life as a poet had made him feel closer to

England and its people but when his poetic proficiency left him he felt more of an alien in the

British society. He had not been accepted in Indian society because he did not get mixed in

Indian society or literary world. On the other hand he was not accepted in England where he was a foreigner. He lost his nationality as well as his occupation. An artist has to create an identity, which Balchandra Rajan defines as 'the process of creative self-realization'. He says,

...A sense of nationality can grow out of the discovery of identity and it is important that this should happen frequently, if one is to establish a tradition that is both distinctive and rooted.

(quoted from -Meenakshi, 1971:01)

In this mental crisis Dom met Irish, Scott, Welsh writers and compared the situation of

Indian English writers with them. They are present in English literature and they always want to be properly evaluated and appreciated. Because, like the Indians, they were either criticised vehemently or were totally neglected. Here for the first time, he speaks about himself as 'Indian descent' among others. Consequently, when the BBC asked him to make a film in its 'One Pair of Eyes' series, he decided to make a film on 'Immigrants', on Asian immigrants, particularly

Indians and Pakistanis, He visited the ghetto of the Pakistanis. Many workers lived there who worked in the factories of washing wool, a very dirty work which most British workers refused to do. He also faced the problem of racism. He met South African Singer Mirium Makeba and the Zulu actor Todd Matchekisa, living in exile in London. Todd became his friend who thought

Dom a racialist. In South Africa the Indians are more racialist than the whites are, because they're frightened of their own colour. He wondered for the last sentence applied to him. He

182 says, 'Perhaps what I didn't know was the colour of my mindV(NAH, P.70) There is a permanent war going on in his mind between the external reality and the reality about himself.

A new and gentle angle of Dom's nature becomes evident in an event. Dom knew about his friend and publisher David Archer's bankruptcy and he tried his best to support David Archer by collecting some amount as a trust fund for him. A fair amount was collected. Stephen Spender,

Cecil Day Lewis and Mary St. John Hutchinson were the trustees. David somehow came to know about the trust and he embarrassed the trustees by going to demand money to those people who had already given money to the trust. Dom felt sorry for him. He felt a responsibility which couldn't be satisfactorily fulfilled. For Dom, David became a cross he had to bear, till he left

London in 1968 and even after that till David died. Dom bore that cross because of his love for

Archer.

On his visit to the U. S., he observed the riots at Detroit. He interviewed President

Johnson at Washington. Dom met many diplomats - Israelis and Indians - who were of the opinion that the US forces would experience a huge defeat in Vietnam. Dom observed two extremes in the society. One was black Vietnam veterans living in ghettos - they were angry as many friends were killed in the war (World War I) that was not theirs, and the Washington society - full of parties, glitter and flash, ft was miles away from the plight of the people living in ghettos. In thus tour he also went to Mexico to write a series for a magazine and visited volcanos in Guatemala.

Dom couldn't write poetry. He feh restless. He celebrated his 30th birthday. He had done much work but he felt that his life so far had been 'a series of missed opportunities'. (NAH, p.

93). He had begun to experience acute anxiety about the direction in which his poetry was going.

183 However, he had written a few beautiful poems. One of them, 'Son', is devoted to their son's birth.

/ had stood by the bloody bed.

She had cried lonely as a wolf.

I had put my hand behind her head.

She had been lonely and herself.

Now I was lonely and myself,

And standing by the newmade bed,

When he cried lonely as a wolf

I put my hand behind his head. (2012: 83)

His first autobiography concluded with an epilogue in which he described himself as a householder and a responsible father: a responsible man. But here he confesses that he did not feel responsible at all. He made money but spent it recklessly. His relations with Judith were falling apart. In 1968 his publishers suggested him to make a film on , and Dom, with Judy and Francis, undertook a difficult tour across India. He had two things in his mind when he came to India - one he wanted his son to see his father's (Dom's) country and two, it was an attempt of Dom to reconcile his relation with Judy. He toured the country extensively and though he was aware that the subcontinent offered him a more interesting life than was to be found elsewhere, he felt anathematic and 'claustrophobic' at the idea of making a home in his

Motherland. Besides, his motives proved unsuccessful. Francis was too small to remember the trip and at the end to this fateful trip Judith went to England with Francis leaving Dom forever and he felt all alone in the world.

The situation at home was even worse. The mother was living with his father these days.

In 1963 Dom came to know of the illness of his father from a friend Peter Jaysinghe. When Mr.

184 Moraes was near death because of lung infection, his mother sent all servants away and disconnected the phone. Mr. Moraes had to live in hospital for six months. Looking the situation of Mr. Moraes, the propriter of the paper, Mr. Ramnath Goenka was concerned and moved the headquarters to . Mr. Francis Moraes went to Delhi with his friend Marylin. Dom's mother lived in Bombay in a hotel on Juhu Beach, which was built on the land rented from her brother.

While in India, two incidents made Judith to think about her stay in India. Judy experienced terror as she was tortured by some boys on the beach in Bombay when they went to meet Dom's mother. They laughed at her, followed her and threw stones at her and Francis. Later, she had to face another incident near Taj Mahal in Agra. It was very hot and the engine of their motor car was overheated. So they had to stop in a nearby village for water. Their car was surrounded by villagers who pointed at them and laughed, tapped on the windows and made faces at them. They were alarmed and small Francis started to cry. These two incidents added a new tension in the relationship of Dom and Judith. She was shocked by the indifference to the value of human life.

She had a very bad impression of India and Indians.

Dom's adventurous tour to the Himalayan ranges with his wife and son was a story of success as an adventurous journalist but a failure as a husband to retain his relations with Judith.

They visited Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan. In this tour he completed two assignments. The first was to write on hippies spending Christmas in Kathmandu. Among them many were English and some were Russian, French and American refugees. Dom met some of them. They were homesick.

They were miserable and nearly all of them had hepatitis. The other was at Pokhra, in the shadow of snow laden Annapuma. He heard two British officers talking to the Gurkhas in their own language. They were there for recruitment. Dom felt that one should be able to speak to all

185 sorts of people in their own languages and obtain any knowledge of what the world is like. While he himself never tried to speak even Hindi, the national language of India!

Dom's fickle nature is seen when he met an English girl in the bar, came there for a research on the Gorkhas. She was bold enough to invite Dom. He did not hesitate and had a brisk affair with her while his wife was busy with their son! Judith must have sensed the changed behavior of her husband. She felt like a prisoner and she was 'penned' up with the son while Dom was a free bird meeting people, wandering. She felt that she had no place in his life.

The Himalaya was an unforgettable experience for Dom. They went to Siliguri, Sikkim.

Dom witnessed unrest in Sikkim due to Thondup Chogyal's marriage with an American woman.

With the help of the Chogyal Dom got permission to enter Bhutan. They went to Nathula Pass, a high security area, crossed Chumbi Valley and visited Western Sikkim. They had the first sight of Kanchanjuga and other peaks. It was such a beautiful sight that Dom felt "electrified and dumbfolded" {NAH, p. 132). Dom, not only describes people, the poet in him describes the

Sikkimese music and dance which expresses the fear of the spirits in the mountains,

"The immense lonelines of the Himalayas and their ability to instill terror into human hearts, were caught up not only in the sound but the dances", (p. 129).

In Thimpu he met the king in his European style castle, furnished in Western style. Dom's friend

Ajit Das happened to be there. He showed Dom Bhutan and introduced the politicians. He advised Dom not to go to the 'Tiger's Leap'. But Dom didn't follow it and later regretted as it was the most difficult place to go.

Many other assignments of Dom were also on India. He visited Rajasthan thrice to cover historical monuments in the deserts of Rajsthan, Udaypur, and Chattisgarh. In Chhatishgarh they

186 filmed on the small shrine of Meerabai, in 1969. There was a woman living alone in the silence in that deserted place, singing Meerabai's song of the place. It influenced Dom intensely

(emotionally). After much speculation he decided to complete his book in India. Dom made two programmes for the the BBC T. V. In one programme 'Pair of Eyes' Dom reflected on his return to India after so many years and secondly, a political study of contemporary India.

In 1971, Dom married Leela Naidu, the actor, who had been celebrated by Vogue in the early 1960s as 'one of the ten most beautiftil women in the world'. She helped Dom in editing films, gathering material for books and research projects. She was also an editor of a magazine.

But she never came forward as a collaborator with Dom. She helped him in his dangerous encounter with the Naxalites, when he was working with the New York Times. He and Leela went to Culcutta. With the help of a friend, the DYGM of Police, Ranjeet, Dom met an activist -

Samar Sen. He was a poet also. Dom worked hard, took risk and made many contacts, met many people. He made a good article. It became hit in England.

On his return to London Dom found many changes. All his old acquaintances in the

Press had new staff who knew little about him. He was lucky with the New York Times which sent him to Belfast, Ireland to write on the unrest there and to interview a leader Ian Paisley. The next assignment was to interview Hugh Macdiarmid in Scotland. Thinking about his career, he felt that, compared to India, London was eventless. He decided to return to India.

The early 1970s were Moraes's busiest and active years as a successfiil journalist. Dom had done an assignment on the situation of Indian Princes that took him to the North and again to

Rajasthan. These Maharajas were the toys in the hands of the British rulers and a few of them never supported the nationalist movement. Among his memorable articles was the one on the

187 cyclone hit area of East Pakistan (Now Bangladesh) in November 1970. Here he experienced much disaster. More than five lac people died in this calamity. The islands were desolations of mud and water, no houses remained. On his return to Dacca, Dom got a seat on a boat. It was very difficult to go through the tidal river. But there was no way. This natural disaster was followed by political and military pressure. He met many young Bengali poets who talked to him about contemporary political situation. He knew that the opinions of the West Pakistanis about the East Pakistanis were not good. They looked down on the East Pakistanis, as slaves.

Eventually, Mrs. Gandhi helped East Pakistan and it emerged as a new nation - Bangala Desh.

But this independence was not easy or happy. The new country had lost thousands of people.

The West Pakistan Government did not trust the intellectuals at all. Many professors and student leaders of the university were arrested and killed. Dom remembered them, he never heard of his poet friends who recited their poems in front of him. He knew that most of them died in the massacre. Moraes published the accounts of this experience entitled "The Tempest Within" in

1971.

On his father's advice Dom met R. V. Pandit who wanted him to go to Hong Kong.

Originally coming from a Brahmin family of Vasai, Pandit or Thomas Ignatius Rodrigues was a

Catholic. Once a poor man, Pandit worked as an assistant of Frank Moraes, living in one room above a China Hotel. R. V. Pandit now owned a magazine, a publishing house and the most expensive bookshop in Bombay and hotels in Monte Carlo and Nice. Now he had become a businessman. When Dom met him he told the situation of his magazine Imprint to Dom and offered him the post of associate editor, he wanted to reinvent Asia Magazine. It was a hard job, but also challenging.

188 An incident shows how Dom and even Leela thought about their being Indians. In Hong

Kong, Dom was busy in his work and Leela in looking for a suitable flat. She found one of

Babington Row. But the land lady politely refused to give the flat to them when she knew they were not English. So, with the help of a British friend Derek Davis and the Financial Secretary they got it. Derek told that he assured the land lady that neither Dom, nor Leela were really

Indians. Leela was half French and Dom was a British national. In this way the Moraeses were glad to get the flat by denying their 'Indianness'.

Dom and others were sent to different countries on assignments. Dom visited Malaysia,

Penang etc. It was a new adventure for him. Dom had been to all these places as a young boy with his father, in 1950. He hunted a dozen small stories in Kualalumpur, Penang and in

Philippines. In this tour Dom interviewed President Marcos and was influenced by him. At that time Philippines was affected by flood dangerously. Even in this situation people were angry and bitter about Marcos Government. How did he not know about the reality of Mr. and Mrs. Marcos when he was a globe trotter and had the knowledge of important global events?

He went on a sales tour to Australia, Japan, and Korea to collect advertisements. He observed that Japan and Korea showed an American influence compared to other Asian countries. He tells about a curious thing about Taipei, capital of Taiwan. It became a centre of pirated books, especially American books. Many people in those days went to Taipei to buy new

(pirated) books on cheapest price. Dom also visited Quemoy and Matsu islands, parts of Taiwan.

An army captain was with him to escort him. On specific days the Taiwanese bombarded the mainland and the mainland also bombarded Taiwan. It was a remarkable experience

189 He investigated the underbelly of the Vietnam War in 1972. Vietnam had a different story to tell. Even in those days Vietnam was always at war. It gave him a lifetime experience. As a boy of eleven, he went to Saigaon with his father. At that time it was called French Indo-China.

Now, in 1972 he was in Hawai, the capital of North Vietnam. In the past there were French soldiers, now there were American soldiers. He met a very remarkable French man in a hotel. He had arrived in Indo China, shortly after the World War II. Now he was successful in his

'business' and what business ?! — He had the business of young boys and girls. He even invited

Dom to see his 'collection'. When he talked about this to Terry, his friend, Dom discovered the networks of degeneration and corruption. Like the French man whose 'business' was to provide young girls and boys, he met another. He was called St. Blue. He was active in many illegal things. He had shares in bars, he had built an illegal house in Havaii and was very comfortable even in the critical situation of war. Like him there were many senior officers, they had nothing to do with the suffering soldiers. Because of constant war, once a beautiful country reached in a devastated state. The Vietnamese hated the American soldiers. The black soldiers were in the worst condition as they were sent ahead of the white troops to be killed by the enemy. They were more apt to communicate with Dom because of his colour. By talking to him they tended to unburden themselves.

Dom proved his excellence in journalistic career. He was awarded 'citation for excellence' by the Overseas Club of America for his New York Times', 'Pieces on India'. Pandit was impressed by this. Now he sent Dom to Indonesia. Apart from small stories like the one about an oldest taxi in Asia - a 1902 Lincoln and its driver who was much older than his vehicle, he made the most significant feature about an island of Buru. Dom came to know about

Indonesian President Suharto's dangerous penal colony of Buru. It was a great prison island. On

190 this prison island the previous president Sukarno was ousted, Pramudja Anonta Toer, the greatest

Indonesian writer and other intellectuals were kept there. Suprato, the previous Attorney General was also here. With a group of 8 journalists Dom and Frank went to Bum. After a long flight they reached Ambon where they slept in barracks and the officers with them were drinking liquor with a small discoloured object hobbling about in it. Schumaker, a Dutch freelancer told them how cruel these officers were. He informed that it was a human baby foetus! "They mix it into the liquor they drink, to give the virility". {NAH, p. 235).

Buru was full of thick 'hairy' forest. Dom saw many prisoners there. Everybody was looking ill. They were suffering from eye diseases also. At last Dom and journalists met the writer Pramudja and Dr. Suprato. Their situation was very bad. All the journalists spoke to the prisoners. They wanted to know about their family members. It was clear that their letters couldn't reach to their families. Dom and others gave the writing material to them but the staff destroyed all. Even they wanted to take away all the tapes and the written documents. But Dom and others bribed them with liquor.

The next day, after facing storm is the sea, they reached Djayapura. They were happy that they were successfiil in their task. Dom knew that he couldn't compare it with the making of a good poem. But he had a new mask - an adventurous news correspondent. He could safely hide behind it. They went to Port Biak where they saw a cave fiall of skeletons of Japanese killed during the Second World War. Buru and Biak both oppressed Dom.

Dom's life- time adventure was his visit to the West Irian islands. It is perhaps the most adventurous of Dom's tours as a journalist. West Irian, now West Papua or West New Guinea, is a province of Indonesia. This region has had many rulers and so that it has many official names

191 [Netherlands New Guinea (1995-1962), West New Guinea (1962-63), West Irian (1963-1973),

Irian Jaya (1973-2001) and now Papua (2002-03) or West Papua.] It is a region full of thick

'hairy' forest. When Dom visited, it was 'West Irian'. The army commandant refused any help but told them that they needed escort as they were entering the area of a tribe of man eaters.

Fontunately they met some Dutch missionaries. The priests told about the Dani tribe in the

Baliem valley. The tribe people were the connibles. They practiced a ritual form of warfare conducted between the clans and afterwards they ate each other's dead. They were still wild.

Dani tribe was discovered in 1938. Though normally they were gentle people, they killed a few outsiders. They didn't like the Indonesians as the Indonesian soldiers treated them very badly.

To reach the island, Dom and Frank had to travel by a small plane as far as Wamena, the nearest Indonesian military outpost. A young American pilot loved to fly this small plane in the hilly, stormy and rainy area. Certainly it was a dangerous adventure to fly there. However, they reached an Indonesian military camp. Beyond that there was no sight of human habitation. Here for the first time Dom saw the carmibles. A priest had come from Wamena and behind him were a large number of natives, the Danis. They were naked and their bodies were full of grayish mixture of earth, ash and fat of pigs to keep the cold out. So, naturally they never bathed. They came to Wamena to sell yams, fruits and small piglets in the market. The priest of Wamena was successful in bringing two boys, one of them could speak English. Dom called them Cassius and

Brutus. All of them set on foot for Giwika, the nearest mission station. Here they had to meet

Father Jules Camps who was still alive and had been living there for 14 years among Danis!

Dom's poem 'Mission', is based on their adventurous flight to Wamena in the Baliem valley,

Low cloud, the first pass Made through morning mist, rabbit 'sfoot

192 Rubbed, bourbon sucked down

Quickly, vomit on my boots—

The kid pilot's (only his third mission).

The navigator screeching in derision.

Smoke of their breakfasts below

Like grey unfrightened wings of doves

Slowly flying up from their nests.

The kid pilot pulls us on his gloves.

We have to come in low.

Red pointers on the counter to come to rest,

The second pass: and people turned to smoke

Rising to us like angels from the forest. {Selected Poems, p.92)

The cannibal tribe Dani lived in the West Irion islands. The Dutch missionary Father Camps and others helped the tribe to come out of their isolation. The last stanza perhaps tells Dom's experience in when he was in Vietnam and experienced bombarding by the American air force.

However, there was other side of the Danis also. Dom and Frank experienced it immediately. They heard sound of drumming, loud whistles and chanting. The boys immediately understood what was going on and hid themselves into high grass. Frank took his camera to take some photographs, but the sound of 'click' made the cannibals aware. They were surrounded by the warriors with sharp spears. Dom and Frank said, 'Ey Narak' (which means 'I see you man')and fortunately it served. The Dani warriors laughed and talked. The boys came up and started to interprete what the carmibles were saying. They took out some tins of yam and knives

193 and offered the Danis. They liked it very much. Now Frank took some photographs of these people.

At last they reached the mission house. Father Camps arrived on his motorcycle. He was a strong man and could speak English better. The cannibals were very adamant. In all these fourteen years he was successful in making one convert, but he also died. The Father was a very devoted person. He knew that he could not do the work for which he was sent there. But still he was there. Dom was touched by his devotion. He says, '.. He had done something more valuable.

He had acted as a liason officer, a bridge between the Dani and the total impact of civilization.

He also acted as a block to the Indonesian idea of enforced culture. An unknown man in a hardly known valley, he was playing a role history had assigned to him", (p. 252). Staying with Father

Camps was an unforgettable experience.

This was the world, exotic and unburnished. Dom prepared two big articles from this trip.

"The Prisnors of Bum" and "The People Time Forgot". The first article created restlessness and violent response from the Indonesians. However, Amnesty International asked about Dom's and

Frank's affidavits about the camp's condition at Buru. They presented their affidavits with the tapes and photographs. Sometime later 7,000 out of 10,000 people on Buru island were released!

It was a really remarkable service to humanity by Dom. He humbly says, "This wasn't entirely due to the article, but it had been the first report out of Buru and played its part", (p. 257). Dom himself was much satisfied, "It was the most effective piece I have ever written as a joumalisf.

(p. 257) "The People Time Forgot" was published in a form of book with Frank's photographs.

When Dom looked at the book afterwards, he hardly believed that he had been at such a place.

194 Travelling to different places is like entering a storehouse of unfamiliar and unusual experiences. In fact adventure was in his blood. And if there was no adventure he became restless. Facing unexpected situation was something he liked. His way of collecting information was different from other journalists. He usually met and talked to local people. Thus he was always successful in getting much material for the lead story and also for fillers. Before visiting any country he worked hard. He tried to acquire information of that country. And then he added new information to his knowledge. It proved to be very useful later, when he actually visited many places in the world. He often gave information about local food, costumes, colourful characteristics of the place, its present and past. He also gave some off-beat information. Thus the lead story and the fillers became very interesting and live.

After this adventurous tour, in 1972, Dom met TarzieVittachi, a Ceylonese Journalist and an employee of the United Nations Fund for Population Activity - UNFPA. Dom had to write a book on the problems of population all over the world. For the book Dom had to travel a lot. Of course he would be paid heavily. 1974 was the world population year and Dom would complete his book in these two years. He became a part of UNFPA.

The exhaustive journey took Dom in many distant Asian and African countries. He met

Mr. Salas, the Chief of UNFPA in New York and the contract. Dom's work started from India,

Dom says, 'ironically' (p. 260) Then, to Singapore, to Malaysia and then Philippines. He had a great deal of experience of the world, he saw poor malnutritions people all over Asia. In Africa he had a very unexpected and horrible experience on a flight. He was going to Kinshasa, Gabon on an old and fragile plain. The plane was going over a thick forest and Congo river and at once the plain caught in an electric storm. Somehow the pilot was successful in coming out and landing the plane.

195 His book A Matter of People (1974) gets across his anxiety for the poor in a humorous, hilarious and isolated manner. The book was specially made by the United Nations Fund for

Population Activities, for it Moraes and his wife Leela spent six months traveling in South Asia,

Africa and the Americas. The resulting book is a series of glance on the world population calamity. His images of Calcutta and his meeting with Mother Teresa are very good. The population problem varied from country to country. But there were some specific obstacles in each case. In Asia, peasant tradition and superstitions connected with fertility, in Africa, the tribal system and the belief that the whites wanted to destroy the population of the blacks; in

South America, machismo and the Catholic Church.

Now Dom had finished the book, he suggested Salas that with his book the UNFPA would produce a book of essays by different people about their view on human life. Dom didn't want that the demographers or other population experts should contribute in this book. Instead, he wanted unexpected names, people from different fields: lonesco and Gunther Grass. He had an enthusiastic response. Now it was proper time for his book to appear. Dom entitled his book,

A Matter of People.

From Germany (Hamburg), Dom and Leela went to London to meet his father. He was in terrible condition due to his heavy drinking and old age. Before going to the U. S. they went to

Dom's father's house to say goodbye. Father put his hand on Dom's shoulder and said, 'Be a good boy', as he used to say when Dom was a child. He thought that he wouldn't see his father again. It proved to be true. It is strange that Dom didn't go to see his father nor did he went to attend his funeral, when Merilyn told him about the death of his father.

196 In his childhood, their house in Bombay was frequented by people of every faith and class, all serving a single end, political and cultural independence. Dom Moraes remembered the odd assortment of persons, some recently released from prison, some hiding from the police, whom he encountered in the tall, cool passages of his childhood home. This was the inclusive culture he was heir to and he remained aware of the cultural and spiritual freedom he experienced as a child. His father's social principles inculcated in Dom during his travels in Asia,

Africa, and the America and had their effect on Dom as a poet and in his career as a journalist.

His travels and reporting brought him into intimate contact with world events. These in turn inspired his poetry later in his life. Some of his poems, 'The Generar(from John Nobody, 1965),

'Kinshasa', 'Rictus'(from Selected Poems, 1987) convey his experiences converted into poetry.

For instance, 'Kinshasa' is based on his visit to the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Though his stay at Kinshasa was very short, he had experiences of rivalry of tribes, conflict and violence in African regions and many such things affecting the lives of people and increasing their sufferings. Kinshasa had become a symbol of all this in this poem.

Gesticulations of the sculptured men

Fail to encumber the moist element,

Reflected frailties seen by us in bronze.

Memory shriks back from the shanty drums

Heard over rivers for many miles.

Gaudy cranes dance on stilts: billed drills Bite into bitumen for the swallowed oils. Amulets, pegged feathers, knucklebones

197 Hang in the starved huts of the killers.

Medicines, patented for death, beg pardens.

Elephantiasis roosts in the trees. ... (2012:93)

'Rictus' is a poem taking its title from a Latin worn which means 'wide-open mouth'

symbolizing an aboriginal lust for blood, an embodiment of the hungers of flesh. The traumas of invasion and conquest as experienced by Dom on his wanderings in the war torn countries are reflected in his poems. This poem has two parts:

The lonely traveler is warned That ours is not safe territory Since Rictus from the cave returned,

After three years captivity

A little gnawed by rats, but still

More frightening than he used to be...{2Q\2:\09)

Moraes lost his way as a journalist when he returned to India in the mid-70s, on deputation from the UN to the Indian Government, apparently asked for by Mrs. Gandhi. But he had to face the dissatisfaction of the government officers as Mrs. Gandhi called a 'foreigner'.

(Dom was considered as a foreigner even those days) It was clear that none of them would help

Dom. He faced many difficulties in making films to educate people. Consequently, the motif failed totally. In short, Dom's presence in Delhi was without point. Some brief visits to

Mauritious and Singapore were a relief But he was supposed to stay on his post, doing nothing.

It was tedious and boring.

198 Dom tells about his interviews with Mrs. Gandhi, her nature to suspect every person, the change in her temper. In Delhi he witnessed the Emergency. Sanjay Gandhi's scheme of birth control in the North failed totally as the sterilization was made with force. He also witnessed the defeat of Mrs Gandhi in elections. After this she planned her great victory carefully after her defeat by the Janata Party. He witnessed the magic of the name 'Indira Gandhi'. Mrs. Gandhi had a great gift for timing her moves. She planned her first appearance after election in which she faced defeat. It was in West Delhi where due to floods, the area was full of brown water.

When Dom reached there, she was standing in a land rover, somebody held an umbrella over her head. People were standing in that brown water with umbrellas. Dom remarks, 'It was the most extraordinary spectacle'. (NAH, p. 214). The Janata Party Government had no definite policies and the insufficiencies were coming out. Mrs. Gandhi took the advantage of it.

However, she had her own paranoia. She was a person of a strange nature. Her cook was killed in an accident but she was convinced that they (her opponents) killed him. Dom says that

Mrs. Gandhi could be maddening but she was the most charismatic person he ever met.

According to Dom the considerable mistrust she had in those around her made them distrust her.

Some of them warned Dom about this. He didn't take notice of these predictions. But when they came true, he was utterly amazed. He was successful in obtaining her permission to do a literary biography of hers. However, the fat commissions trotted out by foreign publishers floundered when Mrs. Gandhi, with characteristic suspicion suddenly rounded on him, and refused to cooperate. She behaved rudely when Dom went to meet her, in 1979, with her appointment to talk about the book. Instead of meeting him, she gave a letter to her secretary to give it to Dom.

It said that the book was filled by Dom with malignant statements about her son Sanjay and she

199 wouldn't cooperate him any further. Then he tried to meet her after she had won the elections in

1980. She talked to everybody except Dom.

At the end of 1976, Dom resigned the UNFPA. But the job in the UNFPA had done more for him, gave him much money as well as a lifetime opportunity to travel the world. He was grateful. By now Moraes, had begun to think about his disillusionment with dreams and desires.

His British citizenship was not good enough reason for him to return to London. Many hectic years had passed, most of his literary and journalistic circle had scattered, and his reputation had

ebbed away. With trepidation he decided to stay on in Bombay. And then one day the muses began to wing their way back. His muses came to him in his native city Bombay.

When he went to London he very clearly understood that he neither had any identity as a poet nor as a journalist, in the West. On returning to Bombay, Dom thought to restart the Asia

Magazine in India, the magazine he had left 10 years ago. But no publisher, not even Pandit,

supported him. Afterwards, R. Goenka, the owner of , where Dom's father

was the editor, approached him. He wooed Dom to regain the favour of Mrs. Gandhi who came back in power. As his purpose to win the favour of Mrs. Gandhi was not satisfied his behavior with Dom changed. It all ended in resignation of Dom from Goenka's group.

One of the important assignments of Dom was a book on Madhya Pradesh. In this journey he met a Government officer named Mr. P. S. Dhagat. With him Dom travelled nearly

30,000 kilometers in Madhya Pradesh and especially about the tribal area in Bastar District.

Dom's friend Verrier Elwin also worked in the tribes of Madhya Pradesh. Verrier Elwin was no more; Dom felt that Verrier's work should be continued. He told it to Mr. Dhagat who took the task of opening school and dispensary. In 1984 he went to Bhopal once more to do another story

200 about the tribals in Mandla district. He also went to the most infamous Chambal Valley of

Madhya Pradesh. The valley has a long tradition of dacoity. The deeply cut ravines around the

Chambal river was an ideal cover to the bandits. Moraes gives an interesting account of how he

was successful in rescuing a boy of 19 from being a dacoit whom he met in a police station of

Gwaliar, the nearest city to Chambal. The social principles of his father inculcated in Dom

during his worldwide travels showed their effect in many such incidents.

Every person, he says, wears a mask, which he allows the world to see, it is not a difficult

thing to do. Moraes's mask was that of an informal person, indifferent and unchanged by the

worldly affairs, he wore the mask of a poet and his identity lay behind it.

It was by keeping the identity, not the mask, that I remained alive, the identity contained all

the experiences the mask had, but experienced them differently. A great part of my identity lay in

my ability to write poetry, and also in knowing exactly what world I belonged to. (Moraes,

1992:310)

Never At Home moves at a breathless pace, never flagging. The earlier book was more

introspective, more revealing; but perhaps Moraes' later life, as described in this book, had

much less of these qualities and consisted mainly of his scurryings around the globe. Tejpal

has rightly described this in his article on Never At Home as 'A breathless account of Dom

Moraes' globe- trotting days. (Tejpal, India Today, May 22, 2013)

Moraes does touch on his personal demons — of identity, his parents, and the loss of his poetic inspiration — but only obliquely, and without dwelling on them for long. W. B. Yeats also

faced this and he expressed it beautifully in his poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion"

201 Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

(Yeats, 1966, p. 202)

However, Dom does not mention it even when his muse returned. Thankfully towards the end of the book, his life is once again moving away from fallowness to fertility. In 1982 Dom was in Bombay, without work, wandered around the city. And suddenly he felt the sensation of writing poetry. He wrote poems after 17 years and published them privately with the title

Absences (1982). The book had a remarkable response, in India as well as in England.

He started to write for Indian papers. It gave him money much less than he earned in the

West but it was highest in the Indian standard. Though late in his life, he realized that it would be a great mistake to leave India and to go once more in these places, once familiar, now greatly changed. He did not want to commit the mistake his father did in his last days.

Mrs. Gandhi was murdered by her guards. There were riots in Delhi. Dom first realized how 'potentially dangerous' country India was. He interviewed Bimal Kaul, the widow of Beant

Singh, one of the two guards who shot Mrs. Gandhi. When it was published, Dom had to face inquiry by the Government officers who came from Delhi. It was scary to Dom. It added to the images of desolation Dom had about India.

202 Now that Dom settled in Bombay, young Indian poets came to meet him, to seek Dom's advice. Dom remembers that when he was in London, his friends were elder than himself. They had taught more about poetry by talking about painting, women and cricket. Dom taught the young Indian poets through conversation. By doing this he was healing himself from not having his son with him. He also published poems of two young poets - and Vijay

Nambison, both of whom have now earned some stable critical recognition in India.

He knew it very well that to forget the past was not that easy and the apprehension of the fiiture was undesirable. He received a letter from Francis, now his name was Heff, a derivative of the Hefflumps, (elephant-like animals that feature in A. A, Milne's Winnie- the-Pooh stories). He wrote that he had seldom met Dom and Leela. He knew some of Dom's books and that he didn't know Dom really or history of Dom's side. In reply Dom wrote a poem 'Key' and sent it to

Francis with necessary information. Francis didn't reply. In a way, this is another circle completed. Dom wrote his first book My Son's Father in a hope that his son should read the book and should understand his father. And after so many years his son wrote in his letter that he did not 'know' him.

Makarand Paranjpe regrets the negligence of the literary circle and the readers towards

Dom Moraes: "That's because he is one of the least read, least anthologised, least studied, and least written about major Indian poets. There may be reasons for it, but such neglect is regrettable. Moreover, as a writer whose unrelenting honesty compels us to look at ourselves and our surroundings with unblinking and unblinkered eyes, I am sure he does not expect pious platitudes or predictable plaudits". (Makarand Paranjpe "Dom: A Critical Appreciation")

203 Reading both volumes of Dom Moraes' autobiography, an impression one gets is that of a severe identity crisis. He lived in India on the British passport. Though what Makarand

Paranjpe says is true, it is Dom who is responsible for it. The Christians in India are likely to suffer from such a crisis as their roots are not in this culture and country. They are as it were, transplants. In such case the 'roots' are not deep. Dom (as Paranjpe has pointed out) was marginalized as a poet in India; and England did not accept him for being of an elien ethnicity.

The title of the second volume, thus, brings out this identity crisis very subtly and appropriately.

Dom tells how the title Never at Home came to his mind.

'While finishing this book, some years ago, I gave instructions to the household that I was not to be disturbed... I finished the book, rescinded the orders, and immediately had a telephone call from a friend who had had urgent business with me over past few days.

'Where the hell have you been?' he asked. 'I've been phoning you all day for a week. I've even phoned you at night, and they say you're somewhere else, they don't know where. Are you never at home?' This question answered a question in my mind, and gave me the title for this book.' (p341) A poet, a journalist and a 'nomad' could not find more appropriate title than this one.

204