I call Cochin every month to catch up with Kamala and to hear the bright, sweet music of her voice. When I put down the phone, I feel lighter and stronger, and I think she does too. There is a complicated connection between us now, born of an empathy that Kamala suggests comes from being of the same writer’s tribe, and for me derives from an attachment to a treasured friend whose enigma itches like a word on the tip of the tongue.
My own experience takes me into Kamala’s life, then leaves me in unknown waters. And many of the Kamala scholars I read careen from label to label, mystified by her repeated insistence that sex is distasteful while at the same time maintaining sensuality as her constant theme. Sensuality is a theme vital to Kamala and to me, the emotional DNA of who we are and how we developed. Knowing Kamala’s cruel sexual history, I understand her distaste for genital sex and her staunch celibacy. Yet she is a great love poet. Only she can unravel the apparent conundrum of how, despite her marital history, she retained a passionate, yet unsentimental celebration of sensuality. And this is not something we can discuss on the phone.
I await the opportunity to be with Kamala, and a year and a half after her Canadian visit, my life is calm and undemanding enough for me to return to India.
Monu, Kamala’s eldest son, meets me in Delhi where I stop over en route to Cochin. He welcomes me to India and advises me that Kamala must travel to Madras for emergency cataract surgery soon after I arrive. We will have some time together before the operation and several weeks after she returns. Meanwhile, Monu is on filial duty.
I look out the car window, disappointed by the change in plans, then quickly buoyed by the pleasure and excitement of people and places I’ve never seen before. I try to conjure up Kamala with talk, but Monu, chief of bureau of the Times of India, prefers contemporary Indian real politick. He informs me that likeminded Indian military, journalists, politicians, and young rocket scientists are fed up with western countries telling India what to do about Kashmir, the Tibetan question, its nuclear program.
Then, he tells this story:
“A low caste young man hides in the bushes and watches the king’s master archer teach five young princes. The young man learns the movements and practises on his own until he can outshoot all five princes. He then presents himself to the master archer saying, ‘I have outshot them all. What shall I do?’
“‘Cut off your thumb,’ the master responds.
“This is what Indians feel the West is saying to them,” Monu says. “It makes me uneasy seeing their political interference drive India away from the West.” He says that until there is total disarmament, India has a right to control its own bomb, delivery systems, and satellites and not be under America’s wing. “India must create its own destiny,” he insists.
His intensity reminds me of Kamala’s fierce Indian pride: her rejection of foreign loans, denial of dowry deaths, and dismissal of expatriate Indians who pronounce on Indian literature without knowing any Indian language except English. In Kamala’s “Indianess,” I sense the seeds of Monu’s strategic nationalism. But when I remember Kamala’s candidacy poster for the 1984 state elections, I see the difference between mother and son, and miss her all the more.
Tamil and Malayalam film music fill the car, and its headlights carve space in the Delhi night. We drive thirty-five kilometres from the city centre, through spewing traffic, to Monu’s house in the new city of Gurgaon. Guarded by a ferocious dog, his gated building looks more like a barracks than a housing development, and inside it’s a plaster-filled renovation site. I remind myself, when next I visit Delhi, not to forget Monu’s amazing proclivity for domestic dissociation, and I call Kamala to arrange my arrival. I can hardly wait to see her.
“You can come any time, Merrily, you are my sister.”
I hardly sleep, wake frayed, and leave at 6:45 AM for Cochin.
I place bags of gifts around Kamala’s chair, and she unwraps them with such pleasure and gusto I wish I’d brought more. Then she launches into an attack on the city’s beautification campaign that has displaced the homeless people, and even though she’s moved to a new apartment, I know I’m back. We talk through dinner and I feel like I’ve never left. I follow the maidservant to Kamala’s spacious guest apartment, marvelling at the sense of homecoming I feel so far way from home.
Next morning I return to Kamala’s sitting-room and find her in a flowing burgundy dress, talking politics with the Brahmin attorney who defended her during the Emergency, and discussing logistics with the co-founder of a free legal service for women, many evicted on a husband’s whim.
As soon as they leave, Kamala retreats to her AC bedroom with round-faced Mrs Rajasekharan, “a good girl, clean, but her mother-in-law’s always picking fault with her,” and forty-seven-year-old Aparna, whose husband hasn’t made love to her for fifteen years. The women sit beside the bed and lean forward to talk. Kamala rests on her back, squirms, stretches her arms, finally settles on her side, her housedress draped over the womanly arc of her hip. She wears no makeup and says she learned from me to have a fresh, open face. She also says that like me she has stopped dyeing her hair, but of this I am not sure.
“I have no money of my own,” Aparna confides. “Sometimes I feel like a beggar. I tell my husband, ‘I need money,’ and he snaps, ‘How much do you need?’ and I shrug, ‘Whatever you like.’” She says she thinks of suicide and at the same time dreams of travel, or of an intellectual, non-physical love affair. She says her daughter is about to have a baby, which makes her realize how soon she’ll be a grandmother and how much of life she’s missed. “It makes me sick.”
Kamala listens as if she’s heard this before, and I listen amazed by Aparna’s public confidences. I’m used to people “putting a good face on things” and confiding only in trusted confidants. I feel I should acknowledge Aparna’s trust in some way, but Kamala is already up and moving toward new visitors in the sitting room. She is greeted by Surendran, a journalist who has been doggedly waiting all afternoon.
“He is stationary,” Kamala whispers dryly.
But, possibly, visions of Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, the popular Hindu swami dubbed “the hugging god woman,” have alleviated his ennui.
“She receives with a big smile and embrace,” Surendran volunteers when her name comes up. “People say there will be a peculiar pleasure, an ecstasy that is sexual. She gives lots of kisses on the neck and rubs your body. For a male it’s a rare chance to embrace a fatty woman. She has big breasts. She embraces very closely. That is the chance Amma is giving to everybody.”
He smiles broadly, realizes what he’s said, and frowns censoriously.
“Mothering,” Kamala says, reinterpreting the God-woman’s embrace. “The body has some resilience,” she admonishes Surendran. “It has something of the spirit and of the mind.”
I long to talk to Kamala alone, but more visitors arrive and her drawing-room duties take over the day. I make my excuses and leave to prepare for the trip I will take while she is away, hoping we will have plentiful time together when her operation is done.
Next morning I awake in time to see Kamala in white khadi wafting out of her apartment on her sister Sulu’s arm. Family ranks have closed around her, and everything – the wheelchair, car, sister beside her, youngest son at the car door, first-class plane reservation, Monu in Madras, post-op hotel suite – has been planned with protective, private perfection.
“Hi, beautiful,” I holler, so incongruously it makes Sulu laugh.
Then as completely as she was here, Kamala is gone.
To distract myself from missing Kamala, I board the Parasuram Express heading south to the seaside tourist attractions of Kerala. The train picks up speed at an alarmingly slow rate and arrives late in the state capital of Trivandrum. I hire a cab, and eight hours after leaving Cochin I’m in the breeze, ease, and relative privacy of Lighthouse Beach, Kovalam.
To keep busy, I decide to see and do everything – tourist beaches, rock swimming pool, ayurvedic spa, rebuilt traditional Kerala houses, Kashmiri shops, the pool at the Ashok hotel.
To experience ayurveda, I meet Deepa, my masseuse, in a palm-thatched cabana with pale-blue cement walls the colour of her sari. Deepa mimes undressing and points to a chair between a large wooden oil-bath and a massage table. I strip and sit. Deepa vigorously slathers my head, arms, hands with medicated oil and leaves me sitting naked in it. When she motions to the mat on the floor, I lie down gratefully on my back. She hitches up her sari, stands astride me, grips the thick rope hanging from the struts above, and hoists herself up. She touches her toe to the centre of my body and her finger to the centre of her own. Then, with expertly controlled force, her long, narrow foot and supple, splayed toes come to life. Toe, heel, full foot, up, down, around, and into the crevices of my body. Sweeping across me like an exercise at the barre, her muscular leg gathers speed, kneading diagonally from right foot, across stomach, skirting nipple, along my arm to my left hand, the oil granular as pumice, her prehensile caress like the coarse tongue of a primeval beast.
I open my eyes and look up to see a long, brown leg, the frill of a white petticoat, a blue sari, and Deepa’s calm Malayali face.
Yet I am not really here. Through the hotel’s open shutters, beyond the coconut trees, I see the sea. It’s quiet except for the waves and crows, and despite the activities, I ache for home. I returned to India to be with Kamala, and without her I cannot “work,” or learn what to write on my return. Alone with the prospect of “the book,” I realize how woefully inadequate I am to write about the world I’m in.
I return to Trivandrum and am considering the cultural complexity of the Kamala-and-me project when Surendran, last seen stationary in Kamala’s sitting-room, joins me for lunch. He has retrieved Madhava Das’s personal archives, stolen from the Das Trivandrum home, and says he’s keeping them so that Kamala doesn’t “just give them to the first person who asks.”
Expecting rare Kamala memorabilia, I follow him to a room full of newspapers and magazines, and he urges me to read his scrapbook of “nasty, abusive” English and Malayalam letters. At first I think the letters are awkward attempts at love poetry, and realize later that even exposing kissing fantasies to a South Indian matron of Kamala’s generation is improper, obscene. Then, the letters begin to sound like dirty phone calls with lists of specific sexual demands. Surendran watches me like a voyeur, and it makes me uncomfortable. I reject the letters in disgust, but he insists on quoting even more abusive Malayalam letters attacking Kamala for speaking improperly, for her prurient, lustful, vulgar, sex-obsessed, moral aberrations, and “calling Amma to sexual intercourse.” So frightening is this personal assault on Kamala that I am relieved when he closes the scrapbook and I am done with this small dose of what Monu laconically called the postmemoir “difficult times.”
As soon as Kamala is back in Cochin, I rush to the train station for my longawaited return, then stand there totally lost. I know the time the train leaves for Ernakulam, I know my platform number, but I have no idea where to go. “Ernakulam? Where, where?” I call, my meaningless cry escalating raucously, my head whipping around for help. Finally, I give up and drop my bags. When I look up, I see a wiry old man in a dhoti and orange top. He circles, points at the clock, says things in Malayalam, strides away, returns. Fed up, he hoists my suitcase onto the coil on his head and takes off. I scoot after him, about to yell, but he stops, asks “Ernakulam?” and when I nod, goes directly to the First Class AC ticket booth. Holding my pull-case close, he indicates the fare, pays, hands me the ticket, pockets the tip, and, fulfilling his unsung hero’s role as an Indian porter, sees me safely installed in my proper compartment.
He says good-bye and leaves us, three men and a woman with a severe fright/flight response, avoiding touching. The top bunks are taken by two semiclad men with mustaches. I am calmed by the swami on the bottom bunk, nodding and waving to his followers through the window. Draped in white, slender with long wavy hair, he sits prim and graceful as a girl.
The train chugs out of Trivandrum, and another semi-clad man appears in the door of the compartment. He spreads a starched white sheet over the swami’s berth and fades from first class back to third. I lean forward on the edge of my bunk to hear the swami talk.
He tells me he’s been helping people be the best they can, and assures me there is good and light in everybody – “even you.” “Guru means light. Swami means God,” he says, referring to himself. He susses my interests and directs the talk to writing. He looks deep into my eyes. In a divine, abstract way, fleshed out by flashes of a slim, brown torso glimpsed under arms raised in exhortation, he seems to care. “I am a psychologist of the spirit,” he says.
I contemplate giving up my lonely existential search and letting the swami solve it all.
“Open your hand,” Swami commands and I instantly open and proffer my palm. Into it he drops a small gold Christian cross.
“Sound has a great power,” he calls toward the bunk where I’ve retreated. “GUN, for example.” He points to the middle of the top of his head where sound resonates. “GUN,” he chants, drawing out the NNNNNNNnnnnnnnnn.
Then it’s my turn.
“GUNNNnnnnnnnnnn,” I echo.
“GUNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnn,” he develops further.
“GUNNNNnnnnnnnnnnn,” I try again. It feels good.
“Is your head vibrating?”
“Yes,” I assure him.
He nods, pleased. “Anyone can do GUN. But only your guru can give you a mantra.”
Swami rests soundly on his crisp sheets, plumb as a perfectly straight tree. I wrap myself in my newly bought hand-loomed bedsheet, glad to finally be returning to Kamala.
Kamala receives me lying in bed at her sister’s house, her hair loose and flowing, as close-cropped doctor Sulu pulls up her older sister’s satin sleeve, plumps up a vein, and injects a shot of insulin. Kamala is recovering from post-op high blood sugar under her sister’s supervision, but when Sulu leaves, Kamala says she feels “caged,” wants her freedom, wants to go home.
We talk as if we have never been separated, and it feels like our work is beginning again, although it’s increasingly difficult to think of it as work. It is a growing friendship, and this meeting feels like a deepening of sorts. Less predatory – a deepening of acceptance, appreciation. We discuss our work process, and Kamala says her eyes will hold her back. Before this recent operation, the cataract in the centre of her pupil let in light only from the side, and her vision was vague. She scanned text with her head tilted sideways and pushed herself to write four weekly columns so she would be “a good worker and have my dignity.” She says she would like to work with me, “But what shall we write about?”
Once more I list the material I’ve collected, including our conversations, my journals, her poems. She offers me her English and Malayalam columns, and repeats again that her paid columns deplete her energy and visual capacity. She insists she has nothing left over. For now, she suggests that I ask questions and record.
While she rests, I float on the living-room swing, avoiding the ramifications of what she has said about my writing on my own. I am losing myself in an oblivion of heat when Kamala and Sulu return to the room. From inside my haze I hear Sulu extol her in-laws’ inclusive behaviour.
“You must have earned it,” I murmur. “You seem to do the right thing.”
“But what is the right thing?” Sulu counters philosophically. “When I lived at the tea plantation in Munnar, the managers and their wives were always kissing hello and dancing with each other. That was right for the plantation, but not for my conservative home.”
“I guess I mean a more profound right,” I suggest, “like not hurting anyone, doing what’s morally right, even if it’s not conventional. Kamala doesn’t hurt people, but she’s not conventional.”
“I’m sure I hurt my family by publishing My Story,” Kamala interrupts sharply. “My father thought I was so cheap.”
This snaps me out of my haze.
“Irshad came to see me,” Kamala says when Sulu has gone.
Irshad Gulam Ahmed is the younger of two partially sighted Muslim brothers. Kamala housed and educated him at her home in Calcutta from the time he was seventeen until he was twenty-two. She read to him, encouraged his poetry, and included him in her monthly salon. Irshad became a professor of literature and the author of the critical study Kamala Das: The Poetic Pilgrimage.
She says he came to ask permission to publish disturbing information about Madhava Das. “He said people vilified me for how I treated my husband, and he wanted to set the record straight. He said I was a saint and he knew my husband was not.”
Kamala says Irshad wanted to tell the world what he knew, but she begged him not to. Her youngest son admired his father’s honesty, and Das was honest, she assures me again. She says although she has hinted at her husband’s sexuality in her writing, “I always kept my husband’s reputation.”
I nod at this, not knowing what to say because I don’t know what the disclosure she describes means to her. Irshad’s information seems to be new, but not as surprising or devastating as I might have expected. She obviously wanted to tell me about it, but I feel it was a prelude to or part of something left unsaid. I am unsure how to respond until I know what’s really being broached.
I am saved by Balamani Amma, who wanders out of her room shadowed by a maidservant. Her ethereal figure stops in front of the television, where she watches the pregnant young wife of a rich old man huddling in a locked hut. A tribunal of overfed Brahmin men waits impatiently for the woman to name her lover so they can punish her. Outside the tribunal, young girls giggle as they practise faking fits to make them themselves unmarriageable. Balamani Amma responds to their giggles with sweet, soft laughter.
“Aren’t you lucky, Merrily,” Kamala says. “You won’t have to be married off to an old man.”
Finally the TV husband dies, and his widows keen and howl as they renounce their status and their ornaments. Balamani Amma emits sympathetic sounds and shuffles off on Sulu’s gleaming rosewood floors.
Later I will meet Irshad, and he will speak bitterly about the unfairness of Kamala’s disreputable reputation. He will tell me she was so puritan that when Das was in Sri Lanka and she wanted to see War and Peace, she bought three tickets so no man could sit in the adjoining seats. He will describe Das chasing away a BBC journalist and sending Kamala to lie down. “And she went quietly.” And he will report that in 1986 Kamala stopped writing poetry because Das discouraged it, saying, “Poetry brings only mental satisfaction. Prose brings ready cash.” Irshad repaired Kamala’s typewriter and bought her paper, and for twenty days Kamala wrote a poem a day, many of them collected in The Best of Kamala Das.
He urges me to project Kamala’s “true image.” He tells me that the image of the Das marriage in the public mind was “‘Her husband was so kind. He tolerated her. He was a saint, she was a stain.’ The opposite is true. He was hopeless.”
That night I wonder anew how Kamala survived her marriage, and I remember a scene she once described. She was nineteen, and Das, home late from work as usual, sat drinking beer and nagging her about her reputation. “The neighbour said you’re seen out walking with boys,” he complained. “She said I can’t control my wife.”
Kamala reminded him that he didn’t like to walk or play, and only the gawky boys next door would escort her anywhere. But he persisted. “Why are you playing chess with boys? Why do you go with them?” Now he was shouting.
So Kamala raised an unopened beer bottle and said she couldn’t stand it any more. “I don’t care if you are my senior. I will smash your head with this bottle, your brains will spill out, and you will die. I am not a great quarreller, but I can act.”
She said she was scared and knew she wouldn’t do such a thing, “but I could always threaten.”
She was influenced by one of her grandmother’s stories about a bruised, beaten snake that had sought guidance from a sage. The sage counselled the snake to change his nature, believe in non-violence, and then he would go to heaven where things would be lovely for him. So the snake followed his advice, and six months later returned to the holy man with terrible sores, crushed here and there, its beauty gone. “You look so different,” the holy man said. “Yes, I followed your advice and people have been stepping on me, throwing stones at me, and I never bite them,” answered the snake. “Yes,” said the sage, “but I never asked you not to hiss.”
Kamala said she had to frighten her husband because he was a big man and she was a little girl. “I didn’t want to be pushed down like other women, to become so colourless. I had to.”
The story helps me imagine nineteen-year-old Kamala, still full of the pride, almost a familial ego of an aristocratic Nayar South Indian family. I think of the creative life she had enjoyed at Nalapat and the confidence instilled in her by her grand-uncle Nalapat Narayana Menon, a brilliant writer and renowned literary patron who translated Victor Hugo into Malayalam and wrote a six-hundredpage encyclopedia on sex. He gave Kamala a taste for salons and wit, and free reign of his eclectic library, from ancient palm-leaf manuscripts to Oscar Wilde. Kamala galloped through Maeterlinck, Turgenev, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hugo, Dickens, Mansfield, Chekhov, Whitman, Wilde, Fitzgerald, Colette, Woolf, and Isadora Duncan.
“Ask the books that I read why I changed,” she says. “Ask the authors dead and alive who communicated with me and gave me the courage to be myself.”
But Kamala’s grand-uncle told her it was not enough to read; she also had to think. “It was he who first made me conscious of the importance of nurturing my individuality.”
I sat on the swing suspended from the ilanji tree, moved up and down slowly and taught myself to think. While I thought, I saw the trees on the edge of our pond, the bushes of yellow arali and henna, the coconut palms in the burning ground in the southern compound, the fields on the north and the neemathalam tree in the snake shrine. I heard the mantras chanted by the water flowing through the canal from the pond to the field and the messages the south-west wind wafted through the branches of the kanhira, ilanji and mango trees. I almost felt I could hear the sound of the waves on the distant stretch of the Arabian Sea.
By age fourteen, a year before her marriage, Kamala had read the British, European, Malayalam, and Sanskrit classics, and she had published her first poem in P.E.N. India.
“In front of my grand-uncle, I never had to despise myself or feel inferior. With profound kindness, this philosopher encouraged me to develop a sense of superiority that might have been illusory but that nourished my spirit.”
I lie awake thinking of this spirit as an inheritance that helped Kamala survive and transcend her marriage. She says that being a Nayar was helpful to her as a young woman because without it she couldn’t have shown such courage “in the face of the patriarchy.”
But even this courage couldn’t extricate her from a marriage I can’t yet fathom, a marriage she presents mostly through the prisms of poetry, mythology, duty, and pride.
Unless she tells me, I will never know what she was trying to broach with the Irshad revelation, or what she means when her face darkens and she says, but doesn’t explain, “how perverse he was.”
I fall asleep thinking that only Das knew how discreet the “confessional” Kamala Das could be. How much she didn’t tell.
