I don’t know about it when it happens, and can’t imagine why, but suddenly aristocratic, upper-caste Hindu Kamala Das, lover of Krishna, descendant of rajas, decides to embrace Islam. Without any hint or warning to me, she bursts back into the glare of CNN, Asianet, media across Asia, in the biggest scandal of her scandalous career. On 16 December 1999, amidst a storm of controversy, in a one-minute home ceremony, she converts.
I have no idea what’s going on, neither do my informants, and I’m embarrassed Kamala hasn’t told me anything herself. I try to call her, but her phone is disconnected. I reach her son Monu in Delhi, and he says a state restraining order prevents Kamala from speaking to journalists or groups, that she is receiving death threats, she travels with a bodyguard, and there’s a price on her head. He gives me her new number but warns me that the phone is probably bugged.
I contact anybody who can tell me more, and Hari, my scholar friend in Kerala, forwards clippings.
“Islam is the religion of love,” I read Kamala saying. “Hindus have abused and hurt me. They have often tried to scandalize me. I want to love and be loved.”
She tells an interviewer she is taking Krishna from the Guruvayur temple, naming him Mohammed, and making him a prophet. “If you go to Guruvayur, you will not see Krishna there. He is with me.”
“But you’re so fond of Krishna. How could you abandon him?” asks the astonished journalist, aware, as is everyone in Kerala, that Guruvayur is a Krishna temple and also the temple of Kamala’s ancestresses.
“I haven’t abandoned him. He’s still with me, he’s in my house.”
“How can he be in a Muslim house?”
“I’ve just had to rename him Mohammed,” she says, confounding conventional religious logic, or asserting one more ecumenical. “My grandmother told me as a child I was married to Krishna. I have seen Krishna, played with him and eaten with him. I love Krishna, and that love will never die. The essence of Krishna is within me, it’s only that the name has changed.”
I follow up on the Internet and read that Kamala’s life is being threatened, that the leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (a Hindu extremist group) has taken her to court for abusing Hinduism in her remarks about Guruvayur, and that she converted because Muslims promised her a seat in government or an Assembly candidature, or so that Ishmail Merchant would film one of her books.
“I was travelling from Malabar to Kochi,” Kamala responds in the Times of India. “I looked at the rising sun. Surprisingly, it had the colour of a setting sun. It travelled with me and at 7:00 AM it turned white. For years I have been looking for signs telling me when to convert. Finally, I got the message.”
“Kamala has found a new and improved way to shock the fabric of her society,” says a friend.
“May Lord save Islam,” concludes a local intellectual.
A month after her conversion, Kamala’s enlightening letter arrives.
Dearest Merrily,
Life has changed for me since Nov. 14 when a young man named Sadiq Ali walked in to meet me. He is 38 and has a beautiful smile. Afterwards he began to woo me on the phone from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, reciting Urdu couplets and telling me of what he would do to me after our marriage. I took my nurse Mini and went to his place in my car. I stayed with him for three days. There was a sunlit river, some trees, and a lot of laughter. He asked me to become a Muslim which I did on my return home. The Press and other media rushed in. The Hindu fanatics, Shiv Sena and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) pasted posters all over the place, “Madhavikutty is insane. Put her to death.” I refused the eight policemen sent to protect me. There are young men, all Muslims, now occupying the guest flat and keeping vigil twenty-four hours a day. I have received court orders restraining me from going out or addressing more than six people at a time. Among the Muslims I have become a cult figure all dressed in black purdah and learning Arabic.
My Hindu relatives and friends keep a distance from me. They wish to turn me into a social outcast. My sister visited me twice but wept all the time. I cannot visit my old mother. Otherwise life is exciting …
Affectionately,
Kamala Das
(Suraiya)
I get an Indian visa and boosters for inoculations, anguish anew over malaria pills versus mechanical protection, buy long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, and break the plane journey to India with a stopover at my friend Angie’s home in Oxford. Four days later, I find myself scribbling under a mosquito net in the Madras flat of Gita Krishnankutty, Kamala’s Malayalam-to-English translator, wondering what awaits me this time in Cochin.
Jet-lagged and tired, I open myself to a laughing, entrancing Kamala in burqua and black. We’ve been talking for hours, between and over the heads of the new cast of Muslim visitors. Lulled by her lilting Malayalam, I follow the bewitching movements of her slender brown arms, elegant fingers curling and extending, palms opening, arms rising, hands circling, punching the air, reaching out. Her hands perform a hand dance, hand mime, hand directions, hand tones, resting just a beat before the next arabesque.
I meet businessmen and scholars who come and go, but as the hours pass, I notice a constant stream of slim young men in western shirts and trousers who glide through the sitting room, answer the phone, and settle familiarly at Kamala’s feet. I begin to recognize four of them, but soon realize I’m not expected to get to know them. When I try to draw them out, Kamala answers with a collective designation. These slim young men are “the commandos,” mysterious members of her new entourage.
I notice too that Kamala’s posture and body language are looser and more relaxed than on my last visit. She says Muslims are friendlier than Hindus, and with them she feels a complicity and trust. There’s more laughter in the house and she looks radiant – dark eyes bright, full lips puckering, gold on neck, diamonds in nose – her face dramatically framed by a regal, high-capped, black chador (Muslim woman’s headdress).
Whatever her new reality, Kamala’s warmth to me is unchanged. She shows me a shiny silver cell phone resting like an idol on a pedestal, and says it is a gift from thirty-eight-year-old Sadiq Ali, Islamic scholar, national Muslim League MP from Malabar, and her absent lover. All day she wears the phone on a gold belt slung rebelliously around the waist of her black dress, keeping the line open and, as he requested, “dedicated to our love.” As her bangles flash and her visitors delight, Kamala listens for the phone strapped to her body. She longs for Sadiq Ali to call. And when the visitors leave, she tells me that after their first meeting, he called for days, at midnight, every night.
“After my husband died, I found myself insecure and totally untethered. I lost my zest for life,” she says, beginning her love story. “Even in this supposedly modern age, Hindu widows are regarded an inauspicious sight. They’re not the right omen at the beginning of any journey. They’re lacklustre, like a mud lark. They can’t fly. They drag their wings in the mud.”
She had spent decades being celibate, extolling its virtues, “carrying my body around like a corpse,” accepting loneliness as the permanent climate of her life. “In a sense I was lying in wait for death. Everything seemed to be dead, or deadened, even poetry. I shrank pitifully, feeling diminished for no fault of my own.”
Then Sadiq Ali asked Kamala’s cousin to arrange a meeting. He said he had admired Kamala for years and wanted to meet her. Kamala gave him a two-hour appointment, and Sadiq Ali drove five hours from his small town to Cochin.
“He sat at my feet laughing the attractive, reckless laugh of a monarch. He was a preacher who delighted large audiences with ballads and narratives lasting five hours. He held his listeners in a spell with his four-octave range and a pure voice that resembled a newborn’s cry.”
Sadiq Ali charmed Kamala with his eloquence, scholarship, rough wavy hair, white teeth, and “smile of wondrous innocence.” He asked if she would permit herself to be photographed with him, and they posed on the cane sofa, nibbling on plum cake, laughing together. “I no longer recollect the topics of our first conversation, but laughter entered our home as spontaneously as sunshine that morning, filling each crevice of emptiness.”
“Feed me,” Sadiq Ali requested playfully, when Kamala allowed the two hours to stretch into lunch.
“But I cannot touch your lips,” Kamala responded. Her grandmother had warned that Muslims ate the corpses of sacred cows, which made their breath stink, and that touching them led to exile. “A staunch vegetarian like me would never touch the mouth of a mlecha [flesh eater],” she said.
“Then I will feed you,” Sadiq Ali offered, breaking food into small pieces.
By the time he left Kamala’s home, his flirtatious play had stirred long-buried feelings and desires. “For many years I had not witnessed the blush spread on the cheek of a young man finding himself embarked on a new love.”
And it had been many decades since she had felt desire, that slow ache in the abdomen, blood surging as on a fast-moving swing.
Minutes after returning home, Sadiq Ali called Kamala to say he had been thinking of her throughout the journey. Breathlessness made his voice even more attractive. “You follow me like a melody,” he said.
Then, every night for eight nights, whether from Abu Dhabi or Dubai, he called Kamala to sing Urdu poetry and speak passionately of love.
“Such sweet talk. It was a new experience for me because I had imagined love affairs but I never had what I imagined before. This boy made me feel like a woman for the first time, his voice resonating like a temple bell. You could hear it ringing after he was gone.”
Sadiq Ali had two wives, but as a Muslim he was allowed four. He invited Kamala to stay in his rural villa, and she accepted because after a month of intense courtship, she had fallen “irrevocably” in love with him. The lovers dined leisurely and talked, served by Kamala’s maid, Mini, and by Sadiq Ali’s second wife, who respected Kamala as a scholar. Kamala reciprocated by sending Sadiq Ali and his family to their village feast with her driver and her car. She watched them disappear, then lay down to rest.
“I was almost asleep when Sadiq Ali climbed in beside me, holding me, breathing softly, whispering endearments, kissing my face, breasts. It hurt when he kissed my toes, they’re delicate from diabetes, so he moved up my leg, licking me where I had never been licked before.
“‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
“‘Just kissing you.’
“And when he entered me, it was the first time I had ever experienced what it was like to feel a man from the inside. Not with my hands, or face, but with my insides.”
Afterwards, Sadiq Ali suckled like a baby and Kamala didn’t know what to do. She held him tightly as she could. “I feel like I have made love to a virgin,” he said.
He pulled her down to the river in her nightie and she bathed.
When he dried her, she said, “I was thinking of your fingers looking for treasure.”
“My fingers were pilgrims on a pilgrimage,” he murmured.
Kamala tells me she had never before imagined that a man could be such a pleasurable playmate.
The next day, she had other thoughts. “I feel sullied,” she told Sadiq Ali, feeling dishonoured by the illicit nature of the relationship.
“But we will get married,” he promised, “twelve days from now. You will live in my Delhi home and be my Delhi wife. If I marry you, the others fade.”
She dressed in a clean silk sari, preparing to leave, and he sat on the windowsill sobbing until she consented to remain one more day. That day he named her Suraiya, “the morning star,” and said she would have to become a Muslim before they could marry. When she finally left, he cried like a child, “You can’t go. I won’t be able to enter this room again.”
Filled with love, not wanting to waste precious time, Kamala stopped halfway home to announce her imminent conversion to the press. Newsmen and television reporters were on her doorstep when she arrived. She avowed her long-time interest in Islam and described the vision that convinced her to convert.
The reaction was immediate and extreme. Within the week, Hindu extremists had put up posters offering 50 lakhs for her murder. Obscene postcards taunted, “You like it circumcised don’t you?” And fanatics threatened to burn down the cinema in her ancestral village if it showed a documentary on her life. As writer Paul Zacharia explained, for the Sangh Parivar (a family of Hindu organizations built around volunteer associations called the RSS, which promote Hindu nationalism), “the cruellest blow of the conversion was that Kamala belonged to the Nalapat tarawad, the crème de la crème of Kerala’s Nayar Hindu elite,” and her conversion desecrated this honour.
When the tabloids named Sadiq Ali as Kamala’s lover, the threats intensified. Callers shouted that her high-caste Hindu birth was a stroke of good fortune, and she had betrayed them. An anonymous man threatened to kill her in twenty-four hours. Another warned that when the milkman arrives, “there will be a surprise. Along with the bag of milk will be Sadiq Ali’s intestines.”
Sadiq Ali went into hiding. The wedding room reserved at the South Park Hotel in Trivandrum was cancelled. Kamala was left alone with the press, and the mess.
“Certainly her action has electrified Kerala’s somewhat moribund social scene,” wrote Leela Menon in the New Indian Express. “The state, many feel, is evolving into a land of widows, with women outliving men and depression stalking the land. In such a scenario, Kamala may even appear to provide an alternative.”
“When I was a Hindu widow, no one would pay any attention to me,” Kamala says, handing me her conversion scrapbook to photocopy. “Now, one of the greatest Muslim scholars proclaimed on stage before thousands that Suraiya is the star that will lead Muslims into the twenty-first century.” She says that pilgrims stream to her home, young people seek her endorsement, she was the only female speaker addressing three thousand men in Bombay, she will be Haji’s guest at the Sheraton in Qatar, and a twenty-five-year-old suitor may show up in Calicut.
“The Muslims are pampering me. Everyone who comes loves me.”
She says she is learning a religion filled with song. She would like to dance.
I am moved by her infectious hope. Her dance card is full and her world ripe with piquant possibility. She has thrown away caution, duty, and propriety, providing a grand alternative to austere widowhood. She has renewed herself in the face of sickness and aging and leapt, full of life, to the edge. For other widows, such as journalist Leela Menon, her electrifying decision “injects not only optimism, but euphoria.”
Yet Kamala aches for Sadiq Ali in her bed again. After decades of callous sex and defensive celibacy, a master lover, “my only love like I read about in books,” playfully, tenderly, poetically aroused a lifetime of dormant erotic desire. Sadiq Ali lives in Kamala’s nerve endings, and every moment they shared plays like a film loop in her head. She longs to repeat the night they had together, a night that came only once in her lifetime, and that when she was sixty-seven.
“Would you have moved to Delhi to live with Sadiq Ali?” I ask.
“I would have done anything.”
“Did you consider the reaction of your family?
“I didn’t think of anything, losing the family or friends. I thought he would be my family. He would be everything to me.”
Next morning we breakfast with Kabir, a reserved, thirty-three-year-old writer on comparative religion and Islam, one of Kamala’s new regulars. Kamala beguiles, entertains, and toys with him. She quotes a poem about a love paler than the morning moon, a fading love that the desperate poet renounces, knowing she will be poorer for losing it, “because love is so wonderful.”
Kabir tilts his head, acknowledging the Sadiq Ali subtext. His reaction is so controlled that Kamala can’t help teasing him. She says he has a man’s body but a child’s face, even with his beard. “A puritan with a child’s face,” she laughs, “isn’t it so, Merrily?” – trying to draw me in. Then, because Sadiq Ali is always near the surface if not bubbling over, she complains that he just told the press his relationship to her was a sacred one, like mother to child, and that she is going to marry Ishmail Merchant, whom she has never met.
Kabir is more concerned about Kamala’s upcoming speech in Calicut than about Sadiq Ali. Drawing on his knowledge of Islamic texts, he suggests that for the upcoming anniversary of a Muslim woman’s magazine, Kamala could quote the phrase “Heaven is at the feet of the mother.”
“The last prophet said this,” he tells her. “The mothers will like it.”
As soon as he leaves, three middle-aged editors arrive from the Malayalam Daily Chandrika, the Muslim League’s popular mouthpiece, to arrange Kamala’s trip to Calicut. Chief editor C.K. Hanifa sits across from me, a well-dressed man with steel-grey hair, electric energy, and interested, intelligent eyes. Much to Kamala’s surprise, I find him charming, and since he and I have no common language, she translates and I learn: the Muslim League is a small political party in coalition with the ruling Congress-led United Democratic Front; the commandos, sent by a friend of Kamala’s as an alternative to police protection, are members of another group called the NDF (National Democratic Front), a fundamentalist Muslim network that emerged to defend Muslims after the recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism; the more moderate Muslim League works within the secular constitution of India, and the NDF divides society on communal (communities defined by their religion) lines. Eventually the exchange bores Kamala, and she tells a story instead.
I almost sleep during the following long, animated travel arrangements. I live down the hall in an apartment normally used for public audiences and guests, but until I came, the commandos were sleeping, eating, and camping there. My bed has no top sheet, so I contort to keep myself covered with my mundu and my shawl. More distressing, I can’t get the mosquito protection under control. When I make the AC cold enough to render mosquitoes inactive, it’s too cold for comfort. And although I’ve gerrymandered a single-bed mosquito net over the venetian blinds and mirror with wires and hooks, it barely covers the twin bed. I spend nights debating whether to wiggle to stay covered or stay still to keep the net in place.
I manage to stay awake through the three hours Kamala entertains the gentlemen from Chandrika. When they leave, I see that she too is totally done in. Now, a younger, scruffier group of Muslim men from the NDF storms in, insisting it is Suraiya’s duty to speak in their “program” before the Muslim League event. Kamala responds politely in Malayalam, smiles, and demurs. To accommodate these men, she would have to leave tomorrow, drive nine hours in the opposite direction from Calicut, sleep over, drive nine hours home and another five hours to Calicut. The young men persist doggedly. They declaim, repeat, and unrelentingly press their case.
When they finally leave, I look with complete empathy at Kamala’s exhausted face. I have been here less than two days, and I don’t know how she does it.
“As a good Muslim woman I am forbidden to write poems having to do with love, or sex,” she says, returning to her eternal theme. “So, to test them I wrote a poem about how Allah should punish me because I loved someone more than I loved him.”
This is the best news I’ve had since I arrived. I expected love to inspire Kamala’s poetry but thought she would be censored. I’m excited to hear she is still writing.
“Your poems will reveal more than all those newspaper clippings,” I say, knowing poetry is the truest mirror of her self. “I would very much like to hear the poem.”
“Later,” she says, and waves the topic away.
This unexpected withdrawal unsettles me. Why would she mention and then dismiss a poem she knows I want to hear? Perhaps my interest set off alarms for unknown dangers.
“What would happen if you left Islam?” I venture.
“They would kill me,” she says matter of factly. “I am an icon for them.”
It’s 8 PM and we still haven’t eaten when a new team of NDF men – “boys,” Kamala calls them – takes over the mission of pressuring her to drive eighteen extra hours to their meeting. Calmly, then with increasing unease, excusing herself much longer than a person with a survival instinct would ever do, she explains that she’s a heart patient, under doctors orders, too frail. She collapsed after her Bombay speech, surely they saw the newspaper photos of her on the ground. Unmoved, the disgruntled crew persists in arguing, beseeching, complaining, until they finally back out of the room, still pleading.
The maids are setting the table when a burly, older commando strides into the sitting-room, his three “brothers” waiting in the hall outside. He pushes a stool close to Kamala’s chair, plunks himself down, spreads his legs, proffers a program, and stabs at Suraiya’s name. Kamala shrinks back in her armchair. He harangues angrily. Kamala fiddles with her headdress to keep it straight. The man jabs at her, repeating that Suraiya must come, his group will lose face if she attends the Muslim League program in Calicut and not theirs, talking louder and faster when she tries to protest.
This exchange is translated for me later. Now all I hear is his threatening voice and her few, meek responses. All I see is her growing agitation, hands flying at her headdress, words tumbling out in abject apology, him leaning closer, intimidating, tormenting. She seems so helpless, he so overbearing, it’s outrageous. Who is he to treat Kamala this way? Why does she stand for it? No matter how distressed she seems, he won’t leave her alone.
I get up from the settee and place myself in the small space between him and her. I help Kamala to her feet and support her arm.
“Let’s go, Kamala,” I say. “Come lie down in your room.”
I turn her toward her room merely fifteen paces away, and he stands to head us off. I pull at the wooden sitting room screen, attempting to make a barrier to halt his approach. She is facing him, making feeble protests, him more vehement, aggressive, staring her down. I turn her forcefully around, ushering her to her room.
“She can’t,” I say in English, almost crying. “She’s sick, she can’t.”
He doesn’t move and our eyes lock. In his I see a look I decipher immediately although I have never seen it before – blinding hate and rage.
I turn away quickly and find Kamala leaning crumpled against the wall of her room. “I feel I’m being bullied,” she whispers. “So much pressure. I want to die.”
“Who are they?”
“Terrorists.” Her words are a sigh. “They kill.”
She decides to go only to Calicut. She calls the police to report her travel plans, we finally sit to eat, and the phone rings. I answer and pass the Malayalam speaker to the new maid, Mini. Mini holds the phone to her ear, nodding yes, yes, face crunched with anxiety, moaning assent, crouched near the phone table for what seems like a very long time. She straightens up, shaking, crying, and Kamala tries to question her. It sounded like a Hindu voice, Mini says, someone who threatened before, but she’s not sure. Neither Mini nor I remember the caller’s telltale choice of appellation: Kamala or Suraiya. What Mini does remember, very clearly, is the caller’s warning: “She must not speak at either program. She must not go to Calicut, or she will never reach there alive.”
“You’ve just had a death threat,” I say, amazed.
“Yes,” Kamala agrees. “You should have been here when there were real death threats. This is a cup of tea.”
She calls the police again, and they dispatch a guard to the house. She assures me the guards are “gunned,” but I’m scared. First I provoke the head NDF commando into a murderous rage, and now someone else, from some other murky depths, threatens to off my hostess. All too soon I will have to go down the hall to my apartment, to a bedroom with easily broached windows, alone.
“Before, a big poster offered fifty lakhs (US $100,000) to kill me,” Kamala says to reassure me. “Then the price went up to one crore (US $200,000), and Monu sent his congratulations. They threatened to cut out my and Sadiq Ali’s intestines, wrap them around each other, and float our corpses down the river.”
“Come to Canada,” I suggest.
“Temporary relief,” she demurs. “This will never end until I am dead.”
The phone rings and she snatches it before Mini reaches it. She listens, making quick, animal-like sounds – “chee, chee, chee” – like a forest bird with people close to its nest. Mini sits on the floor, cradling her head. Within the Malayalam words, I hear Kamala say, “death threats,” but mostly she makes those strange sounds while Sadiq Ali’s wife berates her for stories published in a recent scandal sheet and for the resulting ridicule her children endured at school.
“I am actually sick of his wife shouting at me, crude girl,” Kamala says afterward. “The first wife has eczema, some disease, he can’t touch her. The second wife is thin as a stick. He’s irresponsible. Sometimes he leaves them without money. I sent 25,000 rupees for his boy’s treatment. I’m willing to take responsibility for the whole wretched family. But she shouldn’t harangue me on the phone.”
My face is interviewer-proof unflappable, but inside is a high-decibel “Whaaat!” Reflexively, I feel sorry for the wife and disapprove of the husband-stealer. On the other hand, it’s wives, not wife, and the husband is allowed two more. I can’t imagine what the wives are feeling. They seem upset, yet they accept Kamala’s money.
The phone rings with Monu’s return call about the trip to Calicut. “These threats are normal for you. Just go.”
Finally, the night cops arrive, dark-skinned, resplendent in starched mustard uniforms, beautifully hatted, belted, gunned. I have never ever been so happy to see policemen. One, I swear, is as handsome as Krishna.
“We will definitely protect you,” he says, twinkling wildly.
The phone rings with final arrangements for Kamala’s trip to Calicut.
“Maybe I won’t go,” I tell her, exhausted beyond belief.
“You’re scared, Merrily?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll put you at Sulu’s.”
“But you’re going?”
“I get these death threats three times a week. Only this time Mini picked up. Usually, it’s me. I say, ‘Yes, yes, we’ll see.’ I’ll go with the policemen, that’s all. I’ve always been brave.”
She begins rummaging in the cupboard, pulling out camp cots, while I lug mattresses into the corridor for the policemen. I help make the beds and all of us, Kamala, cook, maid, policemen, are chatting in the makeshift, low-watt hallway dorm when I hear Kamala say, “After the nuclear blast, we can stand tall. When I get up to make a speech now, I say, ‘I’m not a Gandhian. I believe in violence when necessary.’” I lean against the wall. I’m so tired and her comment seems so incongruous, I start to laugh. In the afternoon, when she despaired of losing the kind of love she’d had with Sadiq Ali, I reminded her she’s only been interested in men for three months.
“Yes,” she admitted. “I’m interested in death too.”
Yet I want to see Kamala in action, feted, being the star she enjoys so much. I wave good night, noting uncharitably that her black purdah now seems less glamorous than my first impression, and open the door to the heat wave in my room. I fumble with the mobile phone Kamala left me and connect to Canada Direct. First I reach my youngest daughter, Anna, then Arnie. Anna takes the longdistance pulse, assessing the gravity of the situation, not sure what I should do. Arnie says, “Come home.”
I hold the dead receiver in my sweaty hands. The AC is broken and the windows must stay shut in case the mosquito net doesn’t hold. Should I go to Calicut. Or not?