Formerly, Parsis in defence services fought gallantly for their country. Today, they brawl among themselves. Recently, members of the richest Parsi organisation in India spent Rs. 3 crore of the community’s money, in litigation against one another. Witness Ratan Tata versus Cyrus Mistry. It would put even the Mr. Modi versus Master Rahul battle in the shade.
Parsi poet Kersy Katrak’s collected poems have just come from the ubiquitous Poetrywala publishers, headed by Marathi poet Hemant Divate. I hope other publishing honchos or honchis (feminine for honcho, my two bit contribution to the English language) as they sip their cocktails during this festive season, read this and feel embarrassed at their neglect of poetry.
I met Katrak in 1966 when he was 30 and I a year younger. There were two sides to him — flamboyance that went with deep introspection, a theological inclination that embraced many beliefs, and a fascination for the esoteric — wand and pentacle, that sort of thing. (I think this streak had to do with his being ordained a Zoroastrian priest at the age of 12). This small quote from poem ‘Nostradamus’ will prove my point:
Everything is magic you said. Today
I understand this better. The old devices: wand and sword
Chalice and hieroglyphic letter, no longer seem absurd.
All this went with a deep love for good food and good wine and luxurious living, till he went to Mirtola (near Almora) where he roughed it for years with wife Usha and other ashramites, under Ashishda’s tutelage. Katrak was a good actor. My brother had seen him act as Jason to Usha’s ‘Medea’ (that’s how they fell in love) and he said he got gooseflesh watching the play. Usha was the daughter of H.M. Patel, Home Minister once. Too much luxury can turn you off. The exit routes are two, the world of the spirit or naxalism. Before he went for dhiksha, to Sri Madhava Ashish’s ashram, he stayed the night with us in Ranikhet.
The first poem (1960) on the painter, Jacob Epstein, shows the class. Wandering through the Tate Gallery one sculpture ‘ …stopped me — The Visitation — Epstein’s profound/ And solitary Virgin, acquiescent to the confronting angel’s will./ The lifted dreaming eyes by extension postulating/ The presence of some high invisible hill/ of spirit…’ Writing about a painting may not be so tough, it is how you end the poem that counts: ‘ Remembering now this slight and tasteless truth/ Remembering the girl and the Virgin’s solitary head,/ I mourn the going of my own brief youth,/ As I mourn Epstein dead .’
His first book A Journal of the Way has always been a favourite of mine with poems as stark as ‘Woman on the Beach’, or introspective as ‘Malabar Hill’, ‘Nostradamus’, or ‘New Year Poem’. Despite all the talk about the spirit, he is grounded in reality. ‘I think aloud,/ Having measured my strength against the sea/ And gather my perspectives like a shroud./ And constantly this night there come to me/Reminders of all I cannot be ’ (‘New Year Poem’). One needs to put some of these poems on the bedside to read them again and again. Many of the poems are autobiographical — bhikshus , magic, pentagrams, love for the wife, all swarming around each other. Throughout his oeuvre, the poems swing between terror and grace.
My apprehension grows
Although the night is calm;
I, like all lovers know
The world will do us harm.
If lovers are bereft
This may be all that’s left:
To hold a shred of peace
While frontiers increase….
To live the life alone
Circumscribed by choice,
To listen to the bone,
Practice the singing voice.
Love is central, and the grace emanating from it. His fascination with the round of the seasons, snow and solstice, almost amounting to wonderment can’t be missed, nor his constant dialogue with things of the spirit, often ending in a reference to the bone, his attempt to ground the poem. One needs greater space to do him any justice. And one can’t end here without mentioning the splendid and thorough 30-page introduction by William Mazzarella, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, who has drawn attention to Katrak’s advertising career, and of course his poetry. Katrak’s neglect by the Indian literary establishment is inexcusable.
Keki N. Daruwalla is a poet and short story writer.
