My tryst with Dom Moraes’ writings

My tryst with Dom Moraes’ writings came through his memoir – My Son’s Father, a sequel to Gone Away that has been out of print since it was first published in 1960.  Then I got the opportunity to read his another memoir – Never At Home followed by Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land, co-author with his paramour Sarayu Srivatsa. In fact, I read all these books in the absence of Gone Away as its replacement because Dom was one of the few writers who met Laxmi Prasad Devkota at his deathbed and there is a chapter on it. My quest ended when LB Chettri handed me a copy of this book that he brought it from Australia.

The book is about his  journey that he undertook after coming from the UK. His father was established journalist in India, and he travelled extensively with him at a very tender age due to illness of his mother who was a doctor. When he came to India in 1959 completing a Masters in Oxford, he was already an established poet. In the book, he tells about his meeting with Mulk Raj Anand, a celebrated Novelist and other writers in Bombay. He came to Delhi and met Nehru, Dalai Lama, and there he also met Han Suyin, the author of ‘The Mountain Is Young’- a love story based in Nepal  published in 1958 who inspired him to visit Nepal. Together with Ved Mehta, another celebrated Indian writer who is blind, now based in New York, he visited Nepal and stayed in  a house of a Rana General.  Ved’s Walking the Indian Streets has had a story of his visit to Nepal and meeting with Devkota at his deathbed. The interesting thing in this book is that they were offered the two girls at night, but according to the article, they refused offer. ( Dom got married thrice, and stayed with another one Sarayu till his death in 2004). Ved Mehta has also written his memoir about his visit to Nepal in a book -Walking the Indian Streets(1960). Another interesting story but that is hardly to be believed is that they went to Bhaktapur and took horses to reach a certain place called Tokha(It doesn’t seem present day Tokha), enjoyed local rakshi and dance. Later at night he was offered a young virgin girl, the daughter of the headman, but the offer was declined politely. They travelled different places in Kathmandu, met Lamas, interacted with locals: praised some, criticized others. Later Dr. Shiva Mangal Singh Suman, Cultural Attache of Indian Embassy and a poet of some repute hosted a cocktail dinner with poetry recitation in their honor which was attended by Balkrishna Sama, Vijay Malla, Madhav Ghimire and others. He was not impressed by Nepali poetry at all, but was amazed to see the discrepancy among Nepali writers. Sama told him about dying poet- Devkota and advised him to meet him at Pashupathi Arya Ghat. Dr. Suman summons up Devkota as ‘Nepalese poetry has only been going on for about fifty years, you know. Sama is the Chaucer of Nepal and Mall the Eliot, but Devkota is the whole anthology from Chaucer to Eliot, so far as Nepali literature is concerned.’ At the request of dying poet Devkota, he recited a few poems. He writes,” And when I had finished:’You are a much more natural poet than I was…I was always more mechanical…too professional….there was so little time.” And for the only time he tried to smile. ‘You will forgive me for that?’

Dom then visited Calcutta and Gangtok before flying back to London. It is difficult to judge the literary worth of Dom with this single book because he had written many more after it.  Gone Away as well as of Walking the Indian Streets are important in the context of Nepal because both expose the Nepal’s literature in the Western world.