From 2019 to 2023, as long as Keki Daruwalla could write, I had the privilege of his company over emails. Not in the large, grand way that two literary people might associate with one another for he was a doyen and I, a hapless admirer.

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But it is a statement on Keki Sir's own greatness that he never underestimated or belittled anyone. Even in those early days, he would refer to me as a "colleague" or "fellow writer", and as we gradually matured in affection, I became a "friend". It's a surprise what identities wrapped in simple words like these can do to us. They can make us stretch full-size, and let us know that we deserve to expand rather than shrink.

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Keki Sir and I bonded over domestic things. There was the pandemic at our doors, the dis-ease in our hearts, the housework flowing all around me. My children were very young and there was something each day, either hilarious or heartbreaking. For Keki Sir, there was the agony of the times--the country going to the dogs, the tyrannies of the saffronisation of its spirit and the looming threat of disappearing democracy. His ache was real and if it spilled frequently on paper, it was because there was too much of it to not mark his writing. Every little injustice was a fishbone in his throat he struggled with, paid for in blood, tears, ink. The world was his backyard and each and every happening in it, of personal concern.

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We spoke in these odd voices to each other. I wrote to him of children falling sick, of the fear of loss, of the futility of wielding a pen. He wrote back of memories, particularly of his father and of places he had visited. His memory, as I saw it, was very sharp, and mostly, kind. Of his own life, he remembered or chose to remember only kindness and grace. 

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He was, at the time, working on short stories, poems, and a memoir. For a long while, he called his (last) poetry collection Landfall on Canto X. And then one day, he asked, what I thought of dropping the ‘Canto X’ from the title. “It looks too pompous, doesn't it?” The collection was intended as a visitation of Dante’s work and having read a few poems, I assured him that Landfall did establish its own semantic and symbolic sense and did not need Dante directly to add value. 

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In the last many months of his life, he inhabited a space beyond the ache of expression, his stroke having forced him to retreat from the world of writing forever. But thoughts? In some language his thought-birds surely fluttered?

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Keki Sir taught me that to be an artist is to live with the quiet sincerity of a bird, to be great in the smallest of things, to take note of and mend the familiar, to resuscitate what is dying and to hold what can still be held while there is time.