A project that was meant to take the shape of a glossy history book on the Parsis, Daruwalla informs us in his introduction, ended up becoming a book of poems on the ancient Persian empire, the birthplace of Zoroastrianism. Serendipitously enough, I read this book almost immediately on my return from Athens, a city where you can’t lay a metro line without digging up sites of archaeological significance, a city which confirms your suspicion that the ghost of history can never really be laid to rest.
In the first poem of the “Pasargadae Sonnets”, the opening section of Fire Altar , Daruwalla dwells on the difficulty of conjuring up concrete pictures from fragments. “ To make a skeleton out of some bone splinter/an imperial precinct out of fluting columns,/an ice age out of one solitary winter ” is not easy but that is precisely what the poet proceeds to dream up. Even as he complains of a history that “fades” because the “signposts are so few”, Daruwalla creates those signposts. Not brick and mortar ones, but sonnets that transport you to another era and make conversations with the subjects of history possible. It is a relief that the poems remain largely gestural in nature; that they are not meant as histories in verse form for then, perhaps, the poetry would have gone missing. A tribute to Cyrus, the ninth poem of the Pasargadae sonnet, speaks of the words engraved on the face of his tomb: “Here I lie, Cyrus, King of the Persians./Stranger, don’t grudge me these few feet of space.” A king, long dead, comes alive briefly and the poem’s work is done. More moving though are the Euphrates sonnets in which Cyrus meets the Jews. Cyrus was the monarch under whom the Babylonian captivity of the Jews ended. He freed thousands of captive Israelites. The first poem in the Euphrates section is a poignant imaginative account of the moment when Cyrus first encounters the Jews: “ You met them by the waters of the Euphrates/their faces gaunt and ridged, their looks intense:/their eye sockets were as old as history./To you their language didn’t make much sense. ” Cyrus has to reach beyond language and connect with the Jews. The next sonnet has an interesting visual image of history being “reversed”, literally, as the loot of Nebuchednezzar is returned: “...each bronze pillar he brought/goes back, as does gold and silver, each vessel, urn. ”
Daruwalla offers us ways to lightly anchor our historical imagination and makes real people not just out of dead kings and queens, but also of ordinary, non-heroic folk. Thus, in the section “Letters from Tomyris” which touch on the rivalry between Cyrus and Tomyris, the queen of Massagetae, a pastoral-nomadic Eastern Iranian people, there is a poem titled “The Scout Reports to Cyrus”: “ These are strange people, sire, more barbarized/than any we’ve known. We can sit at meat/with the Ionians; but the Massagetae!/What does one eat with these acorn eaters/and date-pit devourers? ” Among the most engaging of poems are the dramatic monologues. Taut, controlled and dripping in irony, they speak against the grain of what is, from the perspective of the voiceless. Even a king can become voiceless in the context of historiography. In one monologue, an unhappy subject of history, Cambyses, speaks back to Herodotus, the historian and, in another, a captain insists that “ Delphi is for kings and Greek kings at that,/not for oarsmen or those who tinker with mast and rudder./Delphi is for guys who have a ruddy future. ”
Fire Altar is a witty and fascinating exploration of an age and of a people that will never really die in our imaginations. Poetry is a way of ensuring that they live on.
Fire Altar; Keki Daruwalla, Harper Collins, Rs.350.