This is Keki Daruwalla’s ninth collection of verse. Known for his wide choice of subjects, he roams even further afiled in The Map-maker. In this volume he experiments with monologues and narrative verse. These dramatic pieces are often praised out of dark and unknown crevices of history. He bares the souls of his protagonists and in the same breath unfolds a story. A young student fleeing to Jaffa and Tel Aviv from Nazi pogroms explains how he took to Hebrew. A Bethlehem shepherd answers queries about the adoring Magi, whom he had seen as an urchin. A Ghana scholar is haunted by nightmares, because he avoided any mention of slavery in his thesis on the history of cocoa. A disciple of Muhammad Ahmad, the notorious Mehdi of Sudan, recalls his patron, as does a disciple of Lord Buddha, who takes off from the text of the Fire Sermon. There is a sense of adventure in the themes tackled in this volume – delicate ones like mirrors and time, semi-philosophical ones like Maya. And there are ruminations on the galaxies, on space and time, on miracles and the millennium. The volume ends with a fine piece of narrative verse, entitled ‘The Immolated Kings’, the story dug out of myth, but the narrative and poetry typically Daruwalla’s. The volume bears testimony to his scholarship, his wide range of interests and his travels. The recipient of a Sahitya Akademi award in 1984 and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987, Daruwalla is widely acknowledged to be one of India’s major writers in English.
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