Daruwalla, Keki

English

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Kunapipi Volume 9 Issue 3 Article 16 1987 Poems Keki Daruwalla Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi  Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Daruwalla, Keki, Poems, Kunapipi, 9(3), 1987. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol9/iss3/16 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: research-pubs@uow.edu.au Poems Abstract THE LAST WHALE, OF MOHOMMAD ALI PASHA, This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol9/iss3/16 Gunfire from that quaking horizon, It is the laughter-cratered talk Of children with thin arms Small desires, huge hope. And this is you, following Your own spoor across a desert, Dragging your feet across sand To the sulphuric aridity at The boulder's heart beating In your own chest. But the children will begin counting In moon language and your years Will leak into warm stains from Which footsteps will quicken, And you will be running towards yourself, And you wiU be laughing. Keki Daruwalla T H E LAST WHALE When the last whale passes into our Lord's keeping how will the funeral go? Will the last post ring out, will there be muffled drums? A dead Viking, we are told, was laid out in all his regalia — the mail-shirt unflapping, his painted shield hanging along the bulwarks, his drinking horn to remind us of his revels, sword and battle-axe in memory of his rages. And they hoisted a square sail handing boat and body to the wind. 102 But this is not how it will go at all. For as the last whale is pulled in from blood darkened seas, speared by a harpoon stuffed with explosive, he will be sliced up with power-saws and the deck will be slick with blood and blubber. Whale-meat, after all, is big business in Japan; and they are murdering them by the shoal about nine hundred a year for research. For fifty million years the whales cruised the oceans without being 'researched', as much a part of the sea as the tide as reefs, as molluscs, as sea-anemones. Now of a sudden we want to kill them to discover how they survived that long! When the last whale moves into our Lord's keeping the wake abuzz with flies and a procession of gulls as there never was before — and the seas turn the colour of red wine they'll wonder if this is omen or miracle. Neither! Just the gashed side of a harpooned whale. The sea-god, his eyes red with salt-burn, his beard turned to coral, extends his palm to ask what's in store for him. It's going to be tough but he better hear the truth: As many stars as there were before to brood over tides and chart the course for ships. The same number of icebergs, more or less; more oil slicks certainly and tanker fleets, more aircraft-carriers and submarines. No whales. 103 O F M O H O M M A D ALI PASHA We had been into the El Gabal citadel and the Military Museum housed inside; walked past prints that showed Thutmose and Ramses crushing their foemen under chariot wheels. The medieval contraptions of war were there from sword and catapult to fireball and matchlock and a battering ram known as 'A1 Kabash ' . After walking past history, at least the official version, from thrashed crusaders and Louis IX led captive before Saiadin to the modern campaigns, Yemen in the fifties and the Yom Kippur war (with nary a word about 1967) we came to the Mohommad Ali Pasha mosque and the guide took us over to the great man ' s house. 'Welcome to Mohommad Ali Pasha house! He himself live here in nineteenth century and rule Egypt in same century. These walls strong, but the Pasha even stronger; hard with Egyptians and hard with Mamelukes. Hard with wife also, but that only presumption. Come, embroidery class held in inner room. See how fast their hands work — like pickpocket! Pickpocket take away what Allah give; Allah not give back what pickpocket take away. These embroideries we send to Saudi Arabia. In the past we sent them because Saudia very poor. Now we send them because Saudia very rich! Now you must see dining room. Those days no eating and sitting room separate; where you eat you sit and where you sit you eat. There were Mamelukes those days, very headstrong, who listen nobody, not Sultan in Istanbul, not Mohommad Ali Pasha in Cairo! You know what they kept? Bad faith and concubine; 104 bad faith with people, bad faith with Ottoman empire bad faith with Mohommad AH Pasha. So Pasha invite Mamelukes in dinner. This wooden couch where you sit, see how it open? Inside he place musket, many musket. Then lid closed; no one know where muskets sleep. He called Baltagis to serve meats and viands. You know Baltagis? Axe-men; people who were paid to wield axes once. Pasha start paying them now to wield guns. When Mamelukes take dinner and finish coffee Axe-men take muskets and finish Mamelukes. Only one Bey escaped, all others killed. Mohommad Ali Pasha, very clever man! Lauris Edmond RHINELAND I walked in the early morning down the path by the water, and there I could smell the old river smell of the brimming Rhine, hear its purposeful lapping, see the long barges linked together GEFO TANK2GEFO R O T T E R D A M out already, stooging steadily, and brown-stained, long abused as it is, the capable waterway taking on yet another 105 

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