This is a very unusual book. But then, a novel written by a poet needs to be so. At one level, it is undoubtedly ‘Letters to Mama’… as the title says. The voice is that of Seema Thakur Singh, a journalist and an idealist speaking through a series of letters to her much loved but long-lost mother about the travails of living through the Emergency and the dismay of her bureaucrat husband. And a bit later, of her dismay over the excesses of the post-Emergency days and the implications of his progression into the higher echelons, and of moving away from ‘injustices and omissions’ … towards solitude. Interlaid is the story of her mother, Shail Rathore, posthumously told through journals and letters, of a life that progressed from dreaming of ‘Inquilab’ to ‘Communism’and then going beyond idealism to find solace in her young daughter.
Keki N Daruwalla is a highly regarded Indian poet, short story writer and novelist in English. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984 for his poetry collection, The Keeper of the Dead and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987. He was conferred the Padma Shri in 2014. In his spare moments, he was a police officer. As his last assignments were Chairman (JIC) followed by membership of the National Commission for Minorities, it can safely be presumed that he was highly regarded whilst in service. Apparently in his post-retirement days he is struggling to decide between continuing to remain a poet or convert himself into being a novelist. The book’s structure seems to display this indecision swinging as it does, from dreamlike haziness in its treatment of geography or of time but sharply etched portrayals of the pathos of Komagata Maru or the despair of MN Roy. For the record, he has so far written twelve volumes of poetry but only five of short stories apart from two novels, For Pepper and Christ and Ancestral Affairs, both of which to great literary acclaim.
The principal settings of the book representing Seema’s journey through the fraught political landscape of India during the seventies and the early eighties are Lucknow and New Delhi. A masterly recreation of the atmosphere of those days is presented through vignettes. Illustratively, the Emergency.