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Journalism of Courage
| Out of God’s Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land By Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa Penguin India Price: Rs 450 |
This superbly written book is the product of a unique partnership in prose styles, where the crafted strength of Dom Moraes’ language finds its perfect counterpoint in Sarayu Srivatsa’s spontaneous style. The sympathy of these thought processes translates into an effective synchronicity. Yet Dom’s Anglo-Indian background, the burdens of his education, the baggage of his memories, are in startling contrast to Sarayu’s South-Indian Brahmin memories and upbringing. Together, they illuminate a landscape and palimpsest so vast and detailed, so panoramic and thoughtful, that it brings to life the entire variable tapestry of Indian life. The story of modern India unfolds gently, prodded and questioned by Dom’s unblinking observation and quizzical asides.
In what one reviewer describes as his “full control over that uncertain space between seeing and knowing”, Dom Moraes re-explores all the old enigmas, the tired contradictions, the unchastened realities that constitute the inner life of India. The travelogue is a time tested, time worn device, a trusty steed for philosophy and rambling prose. It is a tribute to Moraes’ control over his material that God’s Oven maintains its pace and rhythm without ever losing focus or direction. This unerring journey through memory and reminiscence, through the ideas of India nurtured by successive generations of intellectuals, power brokers and ordinary people, is a triumph.
As Moraes and Srivatsa laboriously peel and uncover layers of identify, they arrive at a core of unknowing: “Sarayu throws the yellow scarf into the air, and the wind buoys it up and sets it afloat. Her eyes follow it as it sails away down wind, fluttering far down the course of the river, even now too far for her even in the unknown future to find.”
The book begins with brooding introspection. It is April of 2002, and the Gujarat riots are already into their first month when Moraes lands in Ahmedabad. He records his experiences with sombre clarity.
Back in a drawing room in Mumbai his friend, the architect Charles Correa, remarks sadly, “Perhaps the country I thought I lived in never existed. It’s a terrible feeling.”
The elliptical journey to the heart of darkness is circumscribed with detached resignation. We move back to the early fifties, as Moraes travels by train across India. “At the end of a year’s travel, I was convinced that there were three Indias. One was found in the cities and I disliked it. One was quite separate, found in the villages. I pitied it and wanted to love it, but it puzzled me. The third India no longer existed and perhaps never had, but might have been beautiful if and when it did.”
The varied cast of this crowded book is brought to life with penstrokes of vivid portraiture. A telling vignette recalls his father Frank Moraes’ initial encounter with the first newspaper baron of independent India, R.K. Dalmia. Several years later, the young poet joins The Indian Express, the newspaper his father had edited for twenty years after leaving The Times of India, and comes face to face with the new compulsions of editorial freedom.
The other dramatic personae are as compelling. Sarayu leads us into a long philosophical aside by Murali Menon on the fiduciary dangers of pickle-making. They travel to Kolkata, where Dom records his conversations with Sunil Gangopadhyay and Mahasweta Devi, who has “the air of a friendly headmistress”. There is an account of a dinner with K.P.S. Gill. “Some of his actions had provided his critics with heavy ammunition, but I felt this was his nature, arrogant and unwise in a way Yeats would have approved of.” The other usual suspects include Bina Ramani, in the process of initiating something called HIM (Honest India Movement), I.K. Gujral, Dr Kurien of the Anand Cooperative, and Nanaji Deshmukh, caught in an unusual breakfast meeting.
These sightings of the bold and the beautiful are interspersed with other realities peopled by friends and strangers, memories and caricatures. The poet goes with Sarayu to the Akshardham Temple, where his inability to understand the discourse on defiled and undefiled, on touched and untouched food, infuriates her Brahminical instincts. There are many such cameos, told with honesty and insight. There is detachment here, but never alienation. Before he hits the road to Bhagalpur, Dom meets Laloo Yadav. They converse in English. It’s a long conversation and the poet is growing impatient. “I had been with him for more than an hour, and realized that Laloo had to end his performances somewhere, and was perhaps in search of an exit line. Finally, I asked him about his childhood. ‘In the childhoods,’ he cried, throwing up his hands, ‘I had no clothesies! I had no foodsies! I had no bootsies even!’ This struck even him as sufficient. He slumped back in his chair, with the look of one who has been emotionally drained. The interview was over.”
Moraes was a beloved iconic figure to a generation of readers, the very prototype of a poet. In the concluding chapter “Time and the River”, he and Sarayu visit Ayodhya, where she at last encounters the river she is named after. If poetry can be written in prose, Dom has managed it. Written after long silence, this meandering book is a joy to negotiate.
