Dom Moraes (1938-2004)

OBITUARY

His voice was so quiet that you had to lean forward, straining, to catch what he said; until he startled you by summoning up a resonance and a richness from somewhere deep within.

"Writers, if they are good writers, don't talk much about writing," Dom said the first time we met, and he talked about everything else instead.

I was not one of Dom Moraes' circle of intimates; the few encounters I had with the poet (the writer, the columnist, the reporter, even the cheerful, committed drinker: all these stemmed from this primary version of his self) happened in the evening of his life, after he'd crossed 60.

I didn't see the young Dom, the precocious boy-poet who shared his anecdotes of Stephen Spender and Henry Moore in a London long since gone.

I never met the Dom Moraes who grappled with his mother's importunate demons, who struggled with the formidable shadow cast by his father, the legendary Frank Moraes, who told his wife, Henrietta, that he was just going out to buy cigarettes and walked out of the house and the marriage.

I was a little too young to hear about the Dom Moraes who married Leela Naidu (to say that Naidu is celebrated chiefly for her beauty may seem to be condescending, unless you remember the extraordinary quality of that beauty). The marriage didn't last; Dom's friendships survived better than his relationships.

His appetite for good whiskey almost matched his relish for a good story: he consumed both in generous quantities. E M Forster once asked for "a non-alcoholic edition" of Dom's early memoir-travelogue, Going Away.

In the last few years, Dom had cut back; his cancer had been diagnosed (according to Jeet Thayil, he had nicknamed his tumour "Gorgi"). But there is something essentially wrong, naggingly incomplete, about any memory of Dom that doesn't include the whiskey. In Song, he writes of the "Drunkards and turncoats" he knew in plenty; "Then with the weather worse/ To the cold river/ I came reciting verse/ With a hangover."

On Wednesday night, the phonecalls and the emails came in. One friend wrote: "Dom's dead. I'm off to drink to his shade." I did what I could with plain orange juice, apologetically, but many others must have instinctively done the right thing, raising a glass to is memory.

Any toast to Dom would have to commemorate his great gift, a singular, unmistakable talent that never reached the heights he aspired to, but that never fell below a certain level either. I cannot remember a single poem by Dom that stands out or that would be anthologised repeatedly, which may be just as well.

Too many lay readers remember Nissim Ezekiel only for "The Night of the Scorpion", Gieve Patel only for "On Killing a Tree", whereas with Dom you read on, you never stop discovering lines to fall in love with.

Dom published over 30 books in his lifetime, some in collaboration with his companion, architect and writer Sarayu Srivatsa, who saw him through his twilight years with a marvellous blend of grace, humour, exasperation and affection.

By dying peacefully at 65, he won a kind of victory over cancer: Dom retired for his afternoon nap, had a heart attack, and never woke up. He never had to suffer what he and Sarayu had feared "" the long hospital stay, complicated operations, a slow descent into pain. "He died without indignity," Sarayu said, and she was grateful for that small mercy, of the perfect ordinariness that could make him spend the day before he died choosing aquariums for the house, Japanese fighting fish, turtles.

At one stage, his poetry dried up for 17 years, belying the early promise of the sensitive, frighteningly bright youth who'd precociously won the Hawthornden. In 1982, Dom wrote the first "real" poem after that long gap: it was called "Absences".

Last year, he released Typing With One Finger, a collection of poems; among the plenitude of book projects occupying his time was an idea for a new collection of poems. No writer could find the perfect word better, or faster, than Dom; no one could so accurately capture a moment, whether it concerned Sir Vidia throwing a fit at Neemrana (Dom disapproved, but gleefully captured every unspoken nuance in the situation) or Ginsberg discoursing on his vision of William Blake. "I inquired what Blake had worn to the interview. 'Oh, like a toga, man,' Ginsberg said, 'the kind of clothes all the people wore in those days.'"

Dom was always in place, and always out of place: after so many long years in India and his travels around the world, he never learned to speak any language except English. But India was the country he kept coming back to; England, which sometimes had the greater claim on him, was never home. It didn't seem to bother him; he had the calm assurance of an eternal passenger, the knowledge that he could put his bedroll down anywhere and find a space for himself.

There are as many Dom anecdotes as the man had friends and fellow travellers. One of the best comes from Jeet Thayil, now an immensely talented poet in his own right. He met Dom when he was a young poet, just starting out; Dom was in his late 40s. As he rose to leave, Dom took his hand, and told him about "the handshake".

Jeet recalled Dom saying: "Well, this handshake goes all the way back to Shakespeare, the first poet. You see, just as you're shaking my hand, I shook Eliot's hand, he shook Yeats' hand, Yeats shook Tennyson's hand, Tennyson shook Keats' hand..."

Dom Moraes passed it on, whatever it was that he had: sometimes it was kindness, sometimes stories, sometimes just a drink, sometimes his ability to remember uncomfortable things, sometimes the promise that other poets would come along who would share his gift, and shape it.