Three Doors

About the Book

Dion D’Souza’s Three Doors measures the metropolis through the interplay of precise details and sweeping panoramas, within which the poet-persona appears as a war correspondent reporting not from battlefields or barricades but from the commuter train, the flyover, the domestic interior. D’Souza’s empathetic eye settles on mottled stray dogs and kittens, beggars and maids, exhausted teachers and anxious students, on newly painted walls and doors that lead into parallel realities. To the beat of the slow train lurching across the tracks, D’Souza tweaks common-sense platitudes into ironic prayers: ‘Work is worship, ‘the commute is workshop. Make your peace: ‘Pick up your pieces.’ The irony is an antidote to the fragmentation that metropolitan experience can impose; the prayer is a wager on transcendence. The quotidian gives way to the epiphanic in these poems, as when the municipal pest-control agent, a familiar sight in mosquito-ridden Bombay, is transformed before our eyes into a figure of augury and portent, the priest of a mysterious cult, a Pied Piper ?moving as if through a monotonous dream, fumigating equipment in hand, the smoke/ rising heavenward behind him?. Three Doors announces a poet who is not afraid to commit himself to acts of intense testimony focused on all that is ‘shipwrecked on the shores of our everyday lives’; a poet whose ambition is to refine his sonar techniques, to be ‘bat-like’ … guided by the echoes’. – Ranjit Hoskote