I am eating, Kamala nibbling. She has written:
I have been up as usual since 5 AM. I made myself two cups of tea and a sandwich with peanut butter. I ate an apple.
The chair beside the divan is my favourite seat. There is a reading lamp behind it. If one is too tired to read, one can look to the right and see the trees which seem to surprise us each day with changed colours. It is a riot of colours outside. The lakes glimmer silver. I am smitten by the land. It is wreathed in smiles today.
“So, your Arnie didn’t turn up last night,” Kamala says, pouring tea.
“He stayed in town to view film rushes. Are you getting any deeper insight into my life than before?”
“Of course. Coming to think that we are all of one type, the difference only being the opportunities presenting themselves.”
“Were your opportunities constrained by being a woman?”
“My reach was very wide. If you were to liken the marital bed to a cross and I was lying there, suddenly I would leave and fly in all directions. I became not just one but thousands of birds flying together, a multitude taking over the sky. Even while the man used me on the marital bed, I was flying. I only gave the dead body on the cross. The moment he fell asleep, I was resurrected. And I was always on the mount with a sermon ready for my audience.” She laughs at her bravura.
“Did that save you?”
“It saved me that there was an audience to listen. Younger poets like Balan Chullikkad grew up listening to my sermons. And my writing flowered, because when the body lies like a dead heap, the mind sits up like a
“Yesterday I was thinking of Merrily walking down dark paths and then Merrily becoming the path. Sometimes in my youth when I took walks, I would get that exalted feeling. Strong, you know, rising in all directions, flying through the trees, the streets. I became the street so much so that I felt
. . . the street-lamps
Shall glimmer, the cabaret girls cavort, the
Wedding drums resound, the eunuchs swirl coloured
Skirts and sing sad songs of love, the wounded moan . . .
“I became the street, the hot thirsty roads, the heat. Then I became not only road or heat but the whole summer. Sometimes, floating in the sea, I suddenly felt I did not know where the sea stopped and I began. I had turned myself into the sea. That way I became this and that, and in return I had such powers, such strength. So my husband could not destroy me.
“Merrily, you carry weights and your arms become muscular. It’s like my mind carried weights. There was no one to erase the pain, so I knew I couldn’t give up. Every night I thought, ‘My precious mind will have to be saved. Once he touches that, I have lost.’ And my mind is healthy still. It revises and renews its vision.”
“I think you’ve even opened your mind to a western woman’s experience.”
“It seemed very strange at the beginning, but now I think if you are liberal minded and if you are civilized, you accept these things. The person who wrote My Story would not balk at it.”
I tell Kamala that when I was sixteen, my twenty-four-year-old boyfriend wanted to make love and I made two lists: pro and con.
“That was your first sex act?”
“Yes. The ‘cons’ were: my parents wouldn’t like it and I could get pregnant. The ‘pros’ were: I’m curious and unconventional, so why bide by convention?” I admit to her that the imaginings of a young girl were very different from actual sex, and that it was a while before I found sex pleasurable.
“In my case, the stress is always on happiness, not pleasure.” Kamala differentiates, reminding me of Professor Bhatnagar at Concordia who explained that sex in North America has become part of material goods. “North Americans forget it is both a physical and spiritual exercise. They think sex is a route to pleasure. And pleasure is a route to happiness. That there is a one-to-one relationship between pleasure and happiness, and sex is the way to get it.”
I think about what Kamala said about being happy when she was in love, and I review my past relationships. On consideration, happiness was not a major distinguishing characteristic. Kamala’s model of “being near him, touching him, him holding me, and conversations that went on and on like music endlessly” is more tender.
“I am amazed at the sex lives of unmarried girls in this country, because in my country virginity is still the grand thing you save up for the right man,” she says, jolting me back to the present. “I wouldn’t want a man to sleep with my daughter unless there was the legitimacy of marriage, so she wouldn’t be discarded later.”
“Here a non-virgin can marry as easily as any other, if she wants to marry,” I inform her.
“It would worry me, Merrily. I think the body is entitled to certain safety measures, and if there is something which commands the body, that power should be more dutiful and loyal toward the body, should consider the body precious.”
For me, sexual liberation meant hospitalization, fungal infection, and cystitis. For one of my friends, it meant four abortions, one septic and life threatening, and two cryosurgeries. Other women I know suffered pain, disgust, a botched abortion that almost killed, doctor’s words that scarred the soul, infections obstructing fertility. And while Kamala talks, my favourite student lies spread-eagled in a white room while a male doctor shoves a clamp up her vagina and freezes her cervix to minus 70 degrees. Luckily she does not have a sexually transmitted disease, cancer, or AIDS. She has a pre-cancerous lesion, the risk of which is increased in teenagers by prolonged use of birth control pills. The lesion is excised and must be monitored forever.
Kamala makes me recognize the price there is to pay.
“But can a girl in Canada just plan a temporary alliance?” she persists. “Do you choose a partner because of his sexual prowess? Suppose the country goes to war, could you sacrifice sexual activity? Could you live without it?”
Now I balk. Kamala has so misunderstood my sexuality that she wonders if I’m pathological or compulsive. I find it ludicrous until I remember that after My Story she was attacked in shocking, vulgar terms and called a nymphomaniac merely for her writing.
“Just because I have had some sexual experience doesn’t mean I’m a nymphomaniac,” I correct decisively.
“You are not a sex addict?”
“No, I am a fairly normal Canadian woman, and you know I am not trying to change your feelings.”
“You can’t change me anyway. And I won’t be able to change you. We are both set in our ways, but we are free to experiment with thoughts. Even while differing from you in my views, I have a great deal of respect for you, for what you have stood up as. You are standing up straight and looking them in the eye, ‘Yes, I am Merrily Weisbord. I had some affairs. I discarded somebody. And I am living with this man. It is not a legitimate relationship, it is not marriage, yet I hold onto it.’”
I guess from Kamala’s perspective this is a brave way to live. But in Quebec, over half a million couples, or 30 per cent of all couple-families, live together without marriage. Of these, half have children at home.
“Whatever our pasts, we are here now and we know who we are,” I say. “It is interesting that although we are from incredibly different cultures, both of us have survived with some strength.”
“Yes, a young poet quoted me saying, ‘I shall wail in his nerves, as homeless cats wail/From the rubble of a storm.’ ‘Kamala’s like that,’ he said, ‘wailing in the reader’s nerves from the rubble of a storm she herself has created.’ He’s a smart critic. I am like that.”
I don’t get it. Supposedly, Kamala blazed a whole new path for women. And many conservative Malayalis and Indians hurled obscenities at her for rejecting their moral norms.
When she was thirty-one, she published Summer in Calcutta, after which Oxford University Press declared: “The mentors of sham manners and peddlers of decadent morality wound up their shops and ran out by the backdoor.”
At thirty-seven, she wrote My Story, her confessional memoir, which hit like a bolt of lightning, illuminating the instinctive nature of woman’s desire and the longing for communion in love. Not yet forty, she published The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, once again defying taboos with poems about marital discord, sexual ecstasy, loneliness and longing. Critics hailed her for burying nineteenthcentury diction, sentiment, and romanticized love, as no Indian woman had done before.
“Kamala set many women thinking and some feeling bold enough to change the course of their lives,” testified the Indian scientist Shubha Narayanan, whom I met by chance on a bus to Oxford University.
Yet sometimes she sounds like a morality ad for the 1950s.
“Balan Chullikkad told me you always fought hypocrisy,” I try, searching for missing links.
“So that one could face oneself. My mother and my father were supposed to be an ideal couple, but every night they quarrelled. Their generation never looked into the real mirror which showed little people making furtive gestures, covering up their little meanesses, pretending to be what they were not. It ate away at them, disintegrating their core. I wanted people to be what they are.”
“Is that why Balan gives you so much credit?”
“Balan’s generation grew up listening to me and adopting my totally different code of morality. ‘Don’t think you can ride the cart of tradition into a future that is going to suit you,’ I told them. I didn’t want them carrying the myths and prejudices of generations.”
“What were they carrying?”
“Superstition, belief in religious rites, and belief in the myth of religious difference. I also said it is immoral to go on living as an ideal couple, quarrelling, disgusted with each other, using a woman for sex when you hate her and she hates you, just because it has been legitimized by society. One is married to one’s man if there is love. The feeling you belong to each other is enough. I removed the hypocrisy of ideal marriages, and that is what they celebrate now.”
This makes me laugh. “It’s interesting that in Canada when you see the actual result of what you advocated, it freaks you out.”
“The fulfillment of my dreams I see here, and I’m worried.”
“If you talked in India like you do here, they would love you. All you talk about here is marriage.”
“I won’t show that face to India. This is the true face of the one who is trying to study. I am grateful to you, Merrily, for letting me see all of this, the difference in our lifestyles, everything. Even if we quarrel, we quarrel in such a friendly way. And we are analyzing ourselves. And something good will come out of it, I am positive. I can almost see it arriving like a cyclone, but the only thing is that it’s a merry cyclone. The cyclone won’t affect us, only others.”
Today, Kamala and I are equally nervous. Tomorrow is her big public lecture, and I hope I have filled the hall.
“It is difficult to perform to empty seats,” she warns, putting me on notice.
Arnie returns from Montreal with a headache, says hello to Kamala, and goes to bed. Kamala and I search through her poetry looking for a poem to end her lecture.
“The lesbians hiss their love at me,” she suggests from “Composition.” She adds, “They looked like men and wanted to pinch my breasts,” describing poets she met at a Commonwealth Writer’s Conference in London.
“That’s a very politically incorrect thing to say here,” I advise. “People here will think you are closed minded. Let’s find another poem.”
“Yes, we’d better stick to love. A little bit of adultery on the side,” she laughs, “a side dish. With that you’re okay.” And she wanders away to switch on The Bold and the Beautiful. “Lovely, here they all are. I was missing them.”
We lie on the couch vegetating, “like rag dolls,” she says, “limp, at rest, so nice.”
At 8:30 PM. she drags herself to her quarters and sequesters herself, and I go downstairs to write the introduction to her talk.
“Kamala swam naked in the ponds of Malabar, and I in Laurentian lakes. Her joint family home was called Nalapat House, mine was called The Acres . . .”
Next morning Arnie wakes me, snuggles, kisses my nose, says, “I have to go,” takes a shower, no breakfast, carries Kamala’s heavy bags to my car, and leaves on a business trip to Paris. He’ll be gone eleven days. I arrest the sinking feeling. Kamala is here and there’s lots to do.
Kamala writes to her sister,
My main appearance is to be at the Concordia University. I pray God that I prove myself to be adequate. My theme is the Writer as an Emotional Revolutionary. I shall wear a green silk sari and the black coat which I shall remove while speaking. I am going bravely on keeping the Nalapat flag flying but my heart palpates with anxiety.
Remind Amma of the eldest daughter now globe-trotting on feeble legs.
with love
Amioppu
Not a seat is empty. People crane around in their seats, taking in the mix of young, old, women, men, Indian, black, Japanese, Middle Eastern, Arabic, Dad, Phyllis, students, brother, writers, kids, professors, the overflow on the steps and standing at the back of the hall. The theatre buzzes as the audience identifies Kamala Das on stage in sea-green Kanjeevaran silk. On her lap she holds a handbag containing her passport, without which she fears she can’t return home. She appears perfectly composed.
The co-organizer, Riva Heft, thanks our sponsors. The dean thanks Kamala and introduces Concordia’s current writer-in-residence – me. I clomp in high heels to the microphone and introduce Kamala.
“You never know what Kamala Das is going to say,” I hedge.
Kamala removes her glasses and walks gracefully to the lectern, black hair cascading over an iridescent gold palu.
“Dear friends, let me express my gratitude to all those who made it possible for me to come to Canada,” she begins. “These past weeks I have been staying in Merrily’s home in a true forest with birch, oak, poplars, maples, and I have smelt their leaves. When Merrily collected the pine and the spruce, I thought I must write about the forest. I had stopped writing poetry. There was a block. And here poetry has come back to me.”
She fixes the audience with the intimate regard of the visually challenged, and in a dreamlike voice, without notes, addresses each individual facing her.
“I grew as a child with the British ruling my country, and therefore it wasn’t possible for me to think of English as not my mother tongue. English was the language of my awareness.”
Sentences trip off her tongue like the confidences of a friend or the telling of a bed-time story. The audience laughs at the payoffs and stays with Kamala through readings, digressions, and confessions so seemingly frank that only because we’ve gone further do I know she’s holding back.
And then she stops, extends her hand to me dramatically, and I remember her saying, “I make my recitals seem like pure theatre.” On cue, I bring her The Best of Kamala Das, a poetry collection that includes the ten “Anamalai Poems,” first published by India’s national literary council, the Central Sahitya Akademi. To provide context, Kamala describes the 1984 elections when she ran as an independent candidate on the platform of “A House for Every Woman.”
“I was drunk with the attention, the absolute silence of those listening to me, loving the heady experience. But after losing the election, the deposit money, the support of my family, and my voice, I became utterly lonely and physically disabled. To save me from dying, my sister took me to Anamalai, a high peak in Tamil Nadu, and gave me a tape recorder. ‘If you feel very sad, speak into this at night. You will be less lonely,’ she said.
“I spoke out of loneliness and despair, and she collected all that into the ‘Anamalai Poems.’” She rifles through the pages and then reads:
. . . If only the
human eye could look beyond the
chilling flesh, the funeral pyre’s
rapid repast and then beyond
the mourner’s vanquished stance, where would
death be then, that meaningless word
when life is all that there is, that
raging continuity that
often the wise ones recognize as God?
She hands the book back to me, rearranges her palu, draws the loosened hair from her face. Her diamonds sparkle.
“I didn’t even think of God in the days when I was producing children, looking after them, falling in love. Because all these things were good enough for me. It was only in the wake of the election campaign that I began to think there was some all-pervasive power. I was born a Hindu, and I used to go to temples because the relatives went and it was considered decent to go and worship. And then I realized that if there really was a God, he would not allow himself to be housed in temples, chapels, shrines, mosques, to be a prisoner. No building can contain God, he’s all-pervasive like ether. And God probably has no name despite all the names we give him. No name, no face, no postal address, you can’t address a letter to him. You can reach him only by becoming fully aware of him, or her, or it. It’s creative energy only.”
She stops abruptly, searching for me. “Have I taken up too much time, Merrily?”
Has she? An hour has flown by. She’s made people comfortable, uncomfortable, empathetic, incredulous, made them laugh, made poetry live, cast a spell of contradictions that she dares not to package, and she’s used me as a straight man.
Satisfied, high, sensing she’s captivated the audience, she’s winding down.
“The whole world is full of my friends, an ocean of friendly faces,” she says, including the audience. “Merrily called me only eight months ago. She came to Cochin and I got to know her, but not so well. After coming here, I have made friends with her family, and what a family, almost like the Nalapat family. The only thing is, they don’t all live together. There are houses for each of them – Merrily, Uncle Joe and Aunt Sue, Merrily’s Auntie Katie . . .”
And then, just as I am swelling with embarrassment and pride, and just as the audience is chuckling at Kamala’s enthusiastic embrace of all things Weisbord, she says, “And I saw a documentary on dowry deaths, bride burning. Let me tell you, it doesn’t happen. Horrible film made by an Indian educated at Oxford, nothing Indian about him. If women die, saris getting caught on the electric cooking range or gas stoves, men die too. You hear of several deaths taking place in hotels where the chef died. I don’t think mothers-in-law try to kill the young girls. India does not kill brides.
“Are there any questions?” she asks. “I love questions.”
There is a surge, quick as an involuntary gasp, toward the microphones on the floor. A determined line forms.
“I am puzzled and perplexed,” a young woman kicks off. “No brides burned? I wish you were not lying. I suspect you find the truth too hard to face.”
“I am disappointed about bride burning,” an older woman follows angrily. “I came far to hear you. Parking is difficult and I don’t like to pay for parking. You have had an upper-class, privileged life. Not all Indian women can choose to marry. Most are sold.”
Kamala purses her lips, waits a beat. “I’m very sorry about the parking. Perhaps I could pay.”
The hall rumbles uneasily. Many feel betrayed.
“I see violent movies coming from the US,” Kamala reacts. “People killing without hate like spilling tomato sauce over your cutlets. Should I think everyday in the US someone gets shot down? I used to think the US was a wicked place with everybody either having sex or killing people. I thought Canada was almost as bad, and I come and find a marvellous family. Don’t go by the films you see.”
Anger simmers as more-forgiving fans line up to praise Kamala’s writing, courage, and activism. She holds her head high, cheeks dimpling, lips puckering, her smile tilted to me.
Next she will be live on Canadian public radio, saying whatever she wants. I have recommended she stay away from lesbians, the pernicious nature of four-letter words, and dowry deaths. When I tell her a respected professor just reported that two Punjabi families in his immediate circle lost daughters to kitchen fires, she says, “South India is a totally different country.” She doesn’t want westerners to think that Indian men, her sons, for example, burn their wives. Or that mothers-in-law, her, for example, egg them on.
“I’m against negative stereotypes,” she tells an irate Indian student who calls later to berate her. “I speak of Kerala. I haven’t been to all these North Indian places. This comes from my own little orbit. Until sixty years ago a Nayar woman could be polyandrous if she could afford it. I don’t want to tell all those gloomy foreign tales. We expect a permissive free sex society in the West, but conservative people also live here, just as gentle husbands live in India. They don’t all set fire to their wives. In Kerala, women are cherished.”
She protests to me, “I am a real Indian.” “Perhaps that is the problem. Here people are used to half-westernized Indians. I am a real Indian.”
We retreat to the country and burrow back into our peaceful routine. If I were Kamala, I’d be gnawing on the public confrontation, but veteran Kamala has moved on. Conscious that our time together is running out, I raise the ethical question of how and what to write about living people, and quote Elias Canetti: “The story of my life is not really about me./But who will believe that?”
“Yes, there is the ethical question. How much can you publish?” Kamala responds. “But there is no ethical question involved about writing. Write it down. And you have to be faithful. I don’t know why I romanticize the whole thing, but I think it is a great responsibility being a writer because you are a chronicler and what you write should be very truthful.”
“What are your thoughts about the ethical question of publishing the diary you wrote when your husband was alive?”
“The diary is lying there unpublished, yes, because of how perverse he was in many ways. If my son were to read that, he will hate me.” Her voice drops to a whisper.
“He will not believe those things of his father, and he’ll say, ‘What a wretched mother I have.’ I don’t want to risk that because I value my son’s friendship and affection, and if I lose that too, I have nothing, no.” Her words break.
“What a thing. What a dilemma,” I commiserate.
“I have no moorings without them.”
“I know. I understand.”
We sound like a hopeless chorus.
“Kamala, are you sorry you can’t publish your diary?”
“I’m sorry, because it would be a powerful book. But I don’t want to lose everybody. I hold onto this relationship that I still have with my sons, I clutch it. So that role should not be taken away from me.”
“I know, it’s just–”
“Don’t take a chance, don’t hurt your children.”
“Or Arnie. I could lose Arnie.”
“Don’t hurt him. Yet. You might begin to want to hurt, and that will be the final revenge. But your position should be made more secure before you take the attacking position. It is like battle. Before you become the aggressor, see that you are the strongest and nobody can slide you off the chess board. Nobody. You should become that strong. It is for us women to be strong, Merrily.”
Kamala finishes reading “Blood Notes,” my abandoned memoir, and calls me over.
“I shouldn’t say this. You are in love with Arnie, but how would you like to marry a nice man about fifty-four, a planter living in Munnar, greying at the temples? His wife just died and he told my sister he wanted a cultured woman he could show off. He comes from an ancient family, a Muslim. He told my sister that colour and class do not matter. He wants a cultured woman, and you surely fit the bill.”
“But I couldn’t wear my T-shirt. I wouldn’t have my land.”
“This chap was educated as a Britisher.”
“In my life now, I’m not obligated to entertain or do small talk.”
“Forget that.”
“I would have to do that, wouldn’t I?
“I should not even talk about marriage to you. How can you understand it?”
Yet Kamala has given me permission to think of marriage in a positive light – to have done with de Beauvoir and Sartre. I’m becoming attached to concepts like belonging to, being protected by. “Now I do want to get married to Arnie,” I say. “We’ve been together so long, I don’t think we would revert to traditional roles. You’ve influenced me after all.”
“If I didn’t love you, I could say, ‘Oh, let it be. I can write a book which is miserable and sell your grief.’ But I think you love this man. So instead of looking for somebody else, let’s see that you marry this one.”
“Still, it is amazing to think there is somebody like this Munnar planter who is actively looking for a wife.”
“Who is civilized, who is brilliant, who is good-looking, moves in high circles. But how could you leave all this?” She gestures to the lake, the trees. “And he will not want to leave India.” Then she solves it. “Three months here and three months there.”
We wrap ourselves in shawls and stand on the porch facing the photographer’s Haselbad for a portrait to commemorate Kamala’s first visit to Canada. She assumes a regal stance and looks so directly into the lens that the photographer jerks the camera from his eye. I stand to the side, bemused. I am hoping for more intimate photos than the distinctly separate ones we took on our first meeting in Cochin.
I position myself beside Kamala in front of a tree with yellow leaves and the grey granite boulder that reminds her of an elephant’s back. “Kamala,” I say distractedly, “you’re not even looking at me. Don’t you think we could put our arms around each other?”
“Merrily,” she answers, ramrod straight and addressing the lens, “what if I am the prime minister of India and you are the prime minister of Canada?”
She allows five minutes for the photo session and moves unsmilingly off the porch.
A heavy rain falls and I have to rest. My throat is sore and I am tired, drained. Now Kamala will see Merrily-the-machine slow to a healing pace, recharging for our trip to New York and Kamala’s talk at Columbia University.
Rain pounds the roof and through the venetian slats I see the familiar slick, dark trunks of maple, minus their burnished, pointillist haze. In a month Kamala has watched gaudy trees strip to naked stalks. She has become part of my family, and of a season’s change.
I have seen the maples turn yellow and later burgundy red. I have smelled the forests and clear waters of the lakes in Quebec. I have watched the wild geese flying away yodeling. The hourglass will soon be empty of sand. But one of the best things that happened to me is Merrily. The book has not progressed at all. But the friendship has.
Gathered together at Columbia is an intimate group including poet Meena Alexander, writer Amitav Ghosh, our friend Ellen Coon, and Kamala’s host, Ted Riccardi, chairman of Columbia’s Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture Department. We sit in a semi-circle listening to Kamala’s perfectly pitched tremolo as she reads us famous poems such as “Composition,” “Blood,” and “An Introduction,” interspersed with commentary.
“I am a writer, that’s true,” she tells us. “By the time I was six, I started filling a notebook with verses. Yet even today, learned professors in India say, ‘This is not English, she has forgotten the word the. We should have each note rising out of the sea, out of the wind.’ But it doesn’t agree with my ears.
The language I speak
. . . voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is as useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not here, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware . . .
She continues: “‘You write the way you like it,’ I told Professor Ezekiel. ‘My gait is different. I danced all that, professor. I want rhythm in my writing. When I write a poem, I am speaking, moving, my mind is dancing. Notes come and go, the rhythms like Sanskrit stanzas I know. With this language, which may seem distorted to you, I will bring out my emotions. I will lay them out as wares in a sweetmeat shop. If you don’t like it, don’t come as a buyer for my sweets. You go where English is “spake”! Go there, what is it to me?’”
And after my talk, my friend Andrew Arkin invited me to the Lotus Club. Invited all my friends too. Riccardi of the Columbia University, Ellen Coon, Meena Alexander, David, Merrily, and the alluring Rebecca. Andrew had invited three wealthy widows whose capped teeth were gorgeous. In America the rich people can never look old. At the Lotus Club I drank mimosa. Toasts were made and everyone laughed for the sheer pleasure of being alive. I posed for photographs standing beside the picture of Mark Twain.
In the taxi after dinner, tired, knowing we are going to part, Kamala lets her head rest on my shoulder like a child. We hug on the curb outside Ellen’s apartment, and I watch her walk away wrapped in her black shawl, a small, dignified figure swaying slightly on heavy legs, looking back, so I run to her and we hug again.
“Oh, Merrily, Merrily.”
“Till we meet again,” I promise, surprised by the love I feel for her – love, not respect or admiration but love, and fear for her fragility, her naked spirit, and the suffocating effect of communal expectations. And now I am leaving her after a month of caring for her better than I have cared for anyone else, with more warmth, generosity, intelligence, and pleasure, because she has let me, has put herself in my hands. Now she is leaning on Pushpa’s arm (does Pushpa know to warn her of a step?), not turning back as I watch her enter the building and pass the first-floor window. For three weeks I was devoted to her and learned the happiness of caring for someone you love.
I miss you, my elder sister.
I call Kamala at the home of her son’s friend in New Jersey. She is happily ensconced in a comfortable chair, absolutely alone, TV on, kitchen stocked with food, fruit bowl overflowing.
I tell her that Arnie and I have signed a notarized domestic agreement and she doesn’t have to worry about me being destitute anymore.
She says she’s happy.
She says, “Merrily, one thing I want to tell you, the bathroom of the Lotus Club has scented toilet paper coloured like heliotrope. I have never seen such luxury.”
She says, “Merrily, without you as an escort, I feel like a peeled banana.”
I lie on the turquoise bedspread in my daughter Anna’s Hampshire College dorm, looking at photographs of Kamala and my daughters, Kamala and Auntie Sue and Uncle Joe, Kamala and Dad smiling.
I have decided to remove the bangles Kamala gave me. They no longer chime like Kamala getting up, or tinkle like a Kamala-stream flowing from room to room. Now the bangles sound like money and scratch when Arnie comes close. I don’t need them to prove how much Kamala likes me or to show her gratitude. It’s ten days since we parted, and I think of her, her words, our friendship, every day. I talk about her. She is part of my discourse, part of my life.
I will have to lather my hand and ask for Arnie and Anna’s help. The bangles have my hammy hand to traverse. Not Kamala’s long, supple palm, but one that chops wood and carries bags, attached to a muscled arm that dismayed Kamala when first displayed. Arnie can fold in thumb and pinky while Anna manœuvres the bangles over the ridges. Or I could cut them off. I will miss their glow, like sun on the Arabian Sea, moonlight on the Malabar Coast. But they are choking me.
We stand in Anna’s bathroom, at a sink facing a mirror. Anna squeezes my hand and Arnie yanks until it hurts too much.
“You’ll have to do it yourself,” Anna says, folding my palm in two.
I soap and pull them off. And the ghosts of Kamala’s bangles flap uncertainly around my arm.