Memories well up and act like triggers; one leads to another. Thomas Duddy’s poems are woven from his memories, his heart-rending feelings for his parents, especially his mother, and loss of his stepbrothers which linger in many of his poems. For Thomas, 79, from New York, Fort Kochi is his home for the last four years. His love for Kerala is so deep that he wants to spend the rest of his life here. He gives you the reasons: “There is something about the mornings here. Back in New York I long to go to sleep. You live without the recognition of time in New York. But here, the moments linger for long and I see the lights forming. Time has this quality here which you won’t find anywhere.”He says people often ask him what he does here and Thomas says what is important is the sense of belonging.As we meet him in his rented house tucked away in Bishop’s Garden Lane, Fort Kochi, he tells us that he suffers from muscular impairment which affects the centre of the retina. “So impairment is a recurring theme in my poetry. It is something that I try to define through my writings. As the Greeks say, the purpose of life is to know thyself. And this is quite a project which takes a whole lifetime,” says Thomas whose memory even at this age is so sharp that he can recite all the sonnets of Shakespeare. As the poet admits, some memories are just figments of his overpowering imagination. His collection of poems titled ‘On Boca Ciega Bay’ and ‘Regarding the Snow’ are partly biographical in nature. Now he is busy completing his third poetry collection, ‘Wedding Song,’ the inspiration for which is a black and white wedding photograph of his parents - Thomas and Mary.“Unfortunately, this is the only photograph of my parents together. It was a short marriage. They separated when I was four and I have no memory of them together. All I can remember is they had a separate existence. My father had Irish descendents and mother, Italian. They came from different cultures and they were never united for me,” he says.Thomas recollects that though he lived with his mother, he travelled 16 hours on a train to be with his father during the vacation. “I loved my mother but I always wanted to be like my father. He was never there for me in person. But my mother was very protective. She was a strong woman and I admired her.”His father married again and had two children in the marriage. His mother too remarried, but at 50. Pointing at the photograph which was taken at a studio with painted backdrops resembling a house, Thomas says, “Many people have asked me whether I lived in this house. In fact, this is just an illusion. Their marriage too was part of an illusion. Reality and illusion co-exist fluidly in the photograph which makes it difficult to distinguish which is which,” says Thomas.He has been working on the book for the past three years. But he says he does not know why he is taking so long to complete it. “Hopefully I will publish it in September this year,” says the poet who has degrees in English from Columbia University, University of California at Berkeley, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Thomas loves cooking and watching BBC News, which according to him are highly relaxing. “I’m not a great cook. I cook for myself,” says this bachelor who loves Western classical music too. Listening to Mozart and Haydn is his favourite pastime.An authority on English classical music, Thomas has written extensively on opera and poetry and had even debuted as an actor/ dancer in the small role of a Brahmin in the Mahabharata tale, ‘The Death of Baka,’ for the Kerala Kathakali Centre in Kochi. Despite his physical challenges he has a positive approach to life which is indeed infectious. He says he would love to help budding poets. He has another pet project in mind - a poetry collection based on Kerala.
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