"For Alan - best wishes for a voice he won't lose, Dom," were the words that Dom Moraes inscribed in a copy of his Collected Poems: 1957-1987, which he presented to me over brunch in his Bombay home one morning in November 1988.
That was the last time I met Dom, who has died, aged 66, of cancer. After three weeks of British Council lecturing in India, with one lecture and several meetings still to go, my larynx had given up completely under the Bombay (now Mumbai) pall of pollution. But while I was on my way to Dom's stately, rundown Edwardian suburb, travelling in a taxi with his friend, the writer and editor Adil Jussawala, Dom had actually phoned a doctor and sent his servant out for a strong recommended syrup.
He welcomed me warmly at his door, but with a kind of abstracted courtesy; pleased to be visited, but also shy, with an air of entrenched sadness. My diary records an impression that Dom, then around 50, was not happy with what life had delivered him.
Dom had been born in Bombay; the background was Goan, he was the son of the author Frank Moraes - sometime editor of the Times of India - and his mother was a disturbed Catholic. He received a Jesuit education, but as a child, Frank had taken him to Australasia and south-east Asia. By the age of 12, he was writing poetry, and a book on cricket. Three years later, WH Auden read and liked his work, and, indeed, Stephen Spender - who first met him in Bombay - was publishing him in Encounter magazine.
After two years in Sri Lanka, at the age of 16 Dom arrived in England. In 1956, he began reading English at Jesus College, Oxford. The following year, his first book of poems, A Beginning, was published by David Archer's Parton Press (which had published Dylan Thomas's first) and, in 1958, it won the Hawthornden Prize for "the best work of imagination". Dom, the first non-English person to win the prize, was also the youngest.
In 1960, he published Poems, and the autobiographical Gone Away, about his travels in India. The Brass Serpent - translations from Hebrew poetry - followed in 1964, and John Nobody the year after that. All were received well, Dom becoming a familiar and well-liked figure at poetry readings and in poets' pubs. By 1966, he had published Poems 1955-65. Two years later, settled in Islington, he published more autobiography, My Son's Father.
But then the muse left him. He travelled - he was to say he had visited every country in the world - and wrote journalism, travel books and a biography of Mrs Gandhi (1980). A compelling study of Himachal Pradesh, a region of his own country he had never visited before writing about it, had kept me reading into the small hours a week before I visited him.
In 1968, Dom settled back in India for good, only resuming the writing of verse in the late 1970s. In 1988, he published his Collected Poems, and two years after we met came more poems in Serendip.
A third volume of autobiography, Never At Home (1994), was followed in 2001 by another poetry collection, In Cinnamon Shade. He also contributed to Voices Of The Crossing (2000), edited by Naseem Khan and Ferdinand Dennis, on the impact of England on writers from the subcontinent and the Caribbean. He co-edited The Penguin Book Of Indian Journeys (2001), and last year published The Long Strider. For television, he scripted - and sometimes directed - more than 20 documentaries.
Dom's conversation that November day in 1988 suggested a feeling that his literary career had not worked out well, that it was somehow not suited to the times. English was his only language, so he had no connections with other linguistic communities, not even that of his servant, the gentle old man who now suddenly entered, not with the prescribed throat syrup but with a bottle of orange pills, presenting one to me on a plate. He was sent out again, Adil translating Dom's instructions for him.
Dom's contacts with English friends were, it seemed, few. He kept up with the loyal Peter Levi, but I had to answer questions about others: John Heath-Stubbs, David Gascoyne, Thomas Blackburn - and Eric White, amazing bohemian bureaucrat of the Arts Council.
Dom responded only briefly to my information; there was no flow of reminiscence. Conversation slowed as I whispered hoarse responses about the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, whom Dom had known through David Archer, and Geoffrey Hill, who had succumbed to peritonitis in Bombay after a tour like mine.
He turned monosyllabic; the dog barked, crows squawked on the balcony. Only when I spoke of the poet George Barker did he show more interest, declaring that they had quarrelled and he never wanted to see him again.
Perhaps I seemed like a visitor embarrassingly zealous about reconnecting Dom with a world he had left behind. That impromptu inscription in the book began to seem very clever, combining sympathy with a sore throat with a gracious regard for another writer's productivity, and - I thought - a melancholy hint that the writer himself had all but lost his own voice as a poet.
When the soothing mixture prescribed for me arrived, I swallowed some, while Dom and Adil drank Bloody Marys. It made no difference. Then our muttered, three-cornered conversation was interrrupted by a high-pitched voice in the street outside. The Muslim owner of a house opposite had set up a mosque in his garage, and scores of worshippers assembled at prayer times, blocking the carriageway. Dom suddenly animated again, describing how he had been, one day, shepherding his elderly father-in-law, expressed impatience at the obstruction, and received menacing messages.
The police had supplied three bodyguards, attending in the eight-hour shifts. One had been virtually invisible, covering the night hours. But the second had proved impossibly fastidious about diet, and the third had taken an intrusive interest in Dom's work, looking over his shoulder and making comments as he typed. I had, now, no voice at all with which to respond to these stories. I thought it best to take my leave, and rest it.
I forget what I wrote to thank him for brunch, but I hope it covered my pleasure in meeting him properly at last - at his Indian home indeed, though in strange and unfavourable circumstances -and my gratitude for his work, for Dom had great talent, charm, grace and decency.
His first marriage, to Henrietta Moraes (obituary, January 8 1999), and his third marriage were dissolved. His second wife, Judy, predeceased him. He is survived by his partner Sarayu Srivatsa and Francis, the son of his second marriage.
Bernard Kops writes: I first met Dom Moraes in the mid-1950s. He walked into the French caff in Soho's Old Compton Street, our main artery, lighting up the den and the denizens with his light brown beauty. He had an aura of obvious innocence. Soho was sanctuary for all those who could not fit into the dark cold war world outside. The end of the world was nigh, and everyone was broke, but then, in the 1950s, everyone was broke, and those days were poverty-stricken bliss.
But Dom, gentle and quiet, and not yet out of boyhood, had a different aura, with his white suit and touch of eastern promise. He had a little money and was extremely generous, which immediately endeared him to all the citizens of Soho. He joined the tribe, and the word soon got around that his father was the famous Frank Moraes. He boasted about this, but we indulged in his largesse and forgave him.
He looked you straight in the face, and spoke with a soft, slight sing-song. He had dreamy doe eyes and long lashes. Before gay, I first thought he was queer; it was generally believed he would not last long. He was too ardent, too honest. He also bought me and Erica, my new-found love, coffee and croissants. That could not be bad. We all fell in love with Dom immediately.
"You've written a play, I hear. But is it a masterpiece?" were his first words to me. "I do hope it's a masterpiece." Me, in my green arrogant years replied, "Yes. It probably is a masterpiece." "Actually, I am a poet," he said, earnestly.
Surely, he could not be as awful as that. All poets were shits; the higher the art the greater the shit. But in a world where everyone was self-absorbed, Dom actually listened.
That morning, he took me around the corner to Greek Street, where David Archer had opened a brilliant and pristine bookshop; needless to say, it did not last long. David owned a third of Wiltshire, and could not wait to give it away. Dom introduced me to David and sang my genius, although he had not read a word of mine. I was not embarrassed, and did not contradict him. I asked David about his ability to recognise talent. "Dear boy, I know absolutely nothing about poetry. I just have a certain instinct for certain people."
So Dom took me to David, and David pointed me in the right direction. There and then, he commanded me to ring an American producer, and my writing life and career was born. I owe both of them a song.
Later, Dom drifted away to study at Oxford. Then he got involved with the upper demi-monde, the hard drinkers of the French Pub, the environs of Hades - the vicious, lost, successful souls like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and the Henrietta, a beautiful, sexy, booming Junoesque empress, whom he married.
Empress Henrietta departed for a sad and quite early death, and now Dom has gone, perhaps to battle on with her in God knows where. And so he disappeared forever from our lives.
Dom was an apparition from another age, another time, another class. Whenever he entered the caff, the whole place burst into light. You could not take your eyes off him. But soon Soho died. Everyone scattered, became respectable, and were swallowed up by this age of hype.
Someone later uttered, "But he was a fantasist, not to be believed or trusted." If this is the real world, long live fantasy. Forty years on, his face still floats back to me, young, innocent, beautiful, alight; seeking some sort of Parnassus.
Naseem Khan writes: Dom Moraes's return to India in 1968 - leaving behind fame in England, as well as a wife and son - marked the beginning of a long, slow and painful rapprochement with both his country of origin and himself. The last 13 years, in which he collaborated with his new partner, Sarayu Srivatsa, brought that process to fruition.
The partnership allowed a defended, intensely shy man to loosen up. His natural sociability was released and his meticulous wit flowered. The speed of his writing - always fluid - escalated, and, of course, he had started writing poetry again. His collected poems are published this month by Penguin India, and will be launched on his birthday in July. But the speed was also caused by the diagnosis of cancer. Moraes turned down radiation therapy, and was determined that he should let his body follow its natural course. Time was running out, he knew, and he was brimful of things he still wanted to write about.
His insistence on doing it his way was part of a nature with an implacable streak. It had him holding to his own views even when - as often happened - they led him into controversy, when his critical irony was taken by chauvinists as "anti-Indian". It also drew him into dangerous areas.
When the Gujarat riots erupted in 2002, with their heavy toll of Muslim dead, Moraes left for Ahmedabad the minute the news came through, claiming that since he was a Catholic, Muslims would not see him as an enemy. Even though he was physically in considerable pain by then, he was one of the first on the scene - a move that his upright father, would have applauded.
But he paid a price. The stories he encountered - particularly of the eight-year-old girl who had been buggered by policemen - horrified him. "He was shattered when he came back," recalled Sarayu. "He was drinking a lot and crying in his sleep. He couldn't handle it."
Dom's reaction was to turn the experience into a poem. He was writing poetry till the day of his death, calling Saryu to tell her he was at work on something that would be ready for her to see in a couple of days' time. But that time never came. His last lines are buried, somewhere in his computer.
· Dominic 'Dom' Frank Moraes, poet, author and columnist, born July 19 1938; died June 2 2004
