I am awakened by the phone. On the line is a Das family confidant, just landed on one of his flying visits to Cochin. He asks if I want a lift to Kamala’s and I say yes, because it’s such an unusual call.
I’m hardly in the car before he begins his rapid-fire patter. Hunched, fidgeting in the far corner, eyes obscured by dark glasses, he gives me the party line on Kamala’s conversion, the one I must follow, clarifying why I’m suddenly on his radar.
“Suraiya cannot leave Islam,” he says categorically. “It would be an insult to the faith. These people believe in blood. They would wipe out not only her but the whole family, the entire brood. If they kill her, it will be all right, she’s had a good life. She can even get out of it by committing suicide. But we are worried about her children’s children, the little ones.”
The briefing seems impersonal, something he’s done before.
“Suraiya has become a cult figure. In mosques around the world, they say a prayer to her. She must be careful what she says. These ‘boys’ who come to her house have AK 47s and bombs. I know them.”
He stops to see that I understand, and in that brief hiatus, his extremities do a jerky hand-feet jive of which he is seemingly unaware. And of course I understand what he wants. Like everyone close to Kamala, I am expected to stop her from speaking her mind.
“Sadiq Ali has been interrogated and has confessed to receiving one million dollars from Saudi Arabia to convince Kamala Das to convert, money he says he’s given to charity.”
“He never meant to marry her?” I ask incredulously.
“Never.”
“But he was so clever about it.”
“Not so clever. He is like a young boy who takes a girl from a good Hindu family and makes her pregnant, and then there are consequences.”
“But he was clever about how he went about it.”
“Yes,” the friend agrees regretfully, “that he was.”
I remind him that Kamala’s eldest son supported Kamala’s conversion, stood next to her during the conversion ceremony and on CNN.
“Publicly, he had to be wildly enthusiastic,” the friend explains. “The other sons were not so enthusiastic, but now they are too. It’s a question of survival.”
The driver pulls into the driveway of Kamala’s building. “The lawyer there is a Muslim League plant,” cautions the friend. “They’re all watching to see she behaves herself.”
The friend greets Sulaiman, the lawyer, warmly, and so do I. During dinner Sulaiman worries that if Kamala admits she converted for love, it will insult the faith. “You cannot do just as you wish,” he says to her, as if speaking to a child.
“You had a vision,” the friend reminds Kamala, “a sign from God.”
John, the driver, is summoned as witness to the vision of the red rolling sun. He testifies in the dining-room, holding the edge of his mundu, buck teeth protruding. “Bugs Bunny,” Kamala calls him.
“Why would he lie?” Sulaiman asks rhetorically. “He is not of the faith.”
“But isn’t love one of the highest of human emotions?” I venture.
“Love of who? Not love of man, but love of God. All other loves are subservient to that,” Sulaiman says, pointing and jabbing with a jolly giggle. “It is like a child who has faith in his parents and feels at peace. Or a woman knowing her husband will protect her, she is at peace.”
“Yes, yes, well said,” the friend exhorts.
“Islam means submission to God. Only then can you have peace,” Sulaiman says.
“God showed her a vision, and that man is taking all the credit,” the friend fumes. “It’s like I fly to New York for business and make a deal, and my pilot takes all the credit. Someone should do something about him.”
“No, no,” Kamala pleads softly.
“He talked to her of Islam, taught her the prayers. That is his contribution,” Sulaiman says. Then he leans toward me in a professorial manner and tells me what all good Muslims must do: “Believe in God. In the Prophet. In the Book. In prayer, fasting, pilgrimage to Mecca. Believe the Prophet is the last great Prophet.” Sulaiman’s exposition takes a long time. He makes very sure I understand that submission brings peace.
“Yes, yes, quite right,” the friend choruses like a hallelujah.
Satisfied with his contribution, Sulaiman begins a six-minute fable. It is about the Prophet and his angel – only Sulaiman pronounces “angel” as “angle.”
“The Prophet’s angle was dying, and the Prophet wanted him to embrace Islam, not to make him a convert but so they could meet in heaven, not hell. But the angle was stubborn and didn’t want to convert. The Prophet spoke and spoke, but only God could reveal the light, and God did not. So the angle died out of Islam.”
A hysterical giggle froths in my chest. I suppress it because I know how serious this is. Which oddly, makes it funnier. First, the list of five things a good Muslim must do, now the dying angle, the point being the authenticity of Kamala’s conversion. I do my best not to catch Kamala’s eye. There’s a dangerous twinkle there too.
“That man taught Suraiya about Islam, he showed her the prayers, but only God could show her the light,” Sulaiman concludes.
“Yes, he did,” says Kamala, “how to pray. The prayers.”
“The proof is, the man is gone but her faith is strong, strong,” says Sulaiman, punching the air.
“Right, right,” the friend exhorts.
Sulaiman expounds for another ten minutes, during which Kamala and the friend leave the room and return. Now Sulaiman pauses, his eyes soften, and disarmingly, in his friendly old Sulaiman voice, he says to me, “Suppose my words mean something to you. If so, maybe you will love God because of them.”
I remember Hanifa saying how good I’d look in purdah, and feel open arms beckoning me into the fold.
“Sulaiman is a real moderate, a real moderate,” the friend emphasizes, so I know where we all stand.
Kamala starts talking about her speeches. About how she begins with praise to Allah. “I feel the light in my eyes, the limelight shining down, I fix them with my stare.”
“But you can’t see,” I say.
“I can’t see, but they see my eyes.”
Sulaiman congratulates her on her anti-dowry speech published in Chandrika, and I report that it made the women behind me laugh, which makes Kamala more cheerful. Perhaps without me as mirror and interrogator, buoyed by honours, trips, hosannas, and her own imaginative powers, she will find ways to weather the storm.
“You see what we have to do,” the family friend says as he drives me back to the hotel. “Not the man. God. A vision.”
“She watched herself at dinner,” I say defending Kamala.
“She better watch her mouth, or she’ll get another one, six inches down. Any moment she could blow the whole thing apart.”
“I think she knows what’s going on. She’s not stupid.”
“No, she’s not. She knows,” he says angrily. “And if you write anything about this, no one will believe you. They’ll say it’s a Zionist plot. Zionists disparage Muslim leaders all the time.”
I thought I knew what this self-appointed family protector wanted when we drove to Kamala’s, but I don’t know what he wants now.
Night washes over me, bestowing a solid, pill-free sleep. I shower while the downstairs restaurant prepares a package of veggie cutlets, yellow tadka dhal, roti, and masala fried fish to bring to Kamala’s. The desk clerk orders a cab, and we drive across the canals to Kamala’s apartment in Gandhi Nagar. This is the first day in weeks that I have felt physically normal. I am restricting my “prepared tea” intake, that addictive zap of “dust” tea cooked with milk and sugar, the Indian espresso. I have a space of my own and an escape route – auto to Ernakulam boat jetty, ferry to Willingdon Island, and the walk under the glorious mayflower trees along Malabar Road to the Taj pool. I spend part of each day swimming, writing poolside, eating light food, and shooing away the cheeky, persistent crows.
But I am discombobulated by colliding fact and fiction, by all there is to see that I don’t see and don’t understand. It’s like getting older and slowly realizing how much there is to know that you don’t know. Except this realization is happening too fast.
It is Friday, and Sulaiman calls Kamala to pray at the mosque. She considers accepting as a rehearsal for Qatar, but she has been avoiding praying in public for decades, “They’ll all stare at me.” She tells Sulaiman she is going to the doctor, and instead accompanies me to a jewellery store to buy sapphire and diamond earrings for my eldest daughter.
On this rare, unscheduled outing, she is like a schoolgirl. “What fun to be with you,” she says in the back seat of the Ambassador. “I am free, more than free.” She mentions another writer researching her biography with a more bibliographic approach than mine, and says she prefers that I write about her.
“What would like me to write?” I respond.
“Write about all of it, the conversion. Write the truth. What I did for love. I don’t care about religion. Religion is like a garb, like this Muslim costume.”
“But they may hurt you.”
“I don’t mind dying. Sadiq Ali has already killed me.” She is talking through tears. “Warn your aunties I’m coming. Tell them my love story.”
“You can tell them,” I say, hoping she’ll return to Canada.
“A sad story,” she says. Then perks up. “Or a happy story. I can make it sad or happy, depending on the audience.”
I know this is true, I’ve seen her do it. I try to distract her with talk of Shyamprasad’s feature film Agnisakshi (Fire as witness), which Gita Krishnankutty screened for me at her house in Madras. One of Shyamprasad’s first TV films was based on Kamala’s story “A Summer Vacation,” and she likes his work. But she finds this film, about a modern Brahmin woman alienated from her traditional family, too grim.
“I told him, ‘Make a woman laugh, then make her cry, that is the secret of a good film. Not make her cry, cry, cry. What message is that for women today?’” She sketches a possible premise for a film she’d prefer – about a woman who plays games, makes mischief, and play-acts all her life, until one day the play-acting becomes too real.
I feel caught out. This was the very thought I had about Kamala. I can see the beginning of the film.
“And what is the ending?” I ask.
“There is no ending as yet. What is the ending, indeed?”
John negotiates the narrow streets, the Ambassador climbing sidewalks and honking past carts, autos, people, trucks, to the jeweller’s gilt door where we enter a showroom ringed with counters of glittering gold and walls draped with brilliant 24-carat displays. A salesman massages his colleague’s back. Another polishes a tray of hand-crafted bangles, fondling, almost caressing each piece.
Kamala, in gold-embroidered burqua and heavy gold and coral necklace, heads familiarly up the staircase to the counters of precious stones. Diamonds wink at us as we settle into upholstered chairs, and tailored salesmen swoop to serve us. I hesitantly choose earrings with dark Ceylonese sapphires and diamonds, almost within my daughter’s budget. The staff humours me, waiting for Kamala, the real buyer. When I’m done, the owner’s nephew smooths a fine white cloth in front of her, and attendants hand him an array of choice diamond nose rings to display. Kamala picks three, looks in the mirror, places each singly against her nose, inserts her favourite, and with a rapidity that astounds me, buys it.
“Now I won’t appear a pauper in front of the Amir’s wife. I’ll sparkle on stage in Qatar.”
Mustache bristling, the owner’s nephew angles forward interrupting. “Madam, why did you convert? We feel betrayed” – followed by further bombast in Malayalam.
All business stops. Salesmen line up to stare at Kamala. Customers gawk from their plush chairs. Kamala responds, and the nephew thrusts his face closer, his staccato words like darts. “‘Come back to Hinduism,’” she translates.
“Is he bothering you?” I ask. He seems so aggrieved.
“I am feeling sad. I’m a stupid fool,” she says. “It’s not his fault.”
A jewel box with Kamala’s purchase is placed on the counter. The nephew persists, everyone watching. I want to leave.
“They’re not being nice to you,” I say.
“They’re being nice,” she answers.
“How?” I wonder.
“They have ordered coffee for me.”
She smiles her bright, charming smile, the one that signals a resolve to forget problems, insults, sadness.
I ask the nephew to please not push Kamala anymore, and tell him he’s making her sad. Reluctantly, he desists. When I mention that she will soon be visiting me, he offers to be her secretary so he can get a US visa, and to pay his ticket and hers.
“Certainly I would like a secretary to carry my bags,” Kamala says, accepting his mobile number. He follows us down the marble steps, miming carrying bags, Kamala holding my arm and the golden banister, murmuring, “Lovely, lovely, my own secretary to carry my bags.”
We wait inside the ornate doors for the car.
“Normally I am scared to go into a Hindu shop,” Kamala says. “I did it only because you asked.”
“Were you angry at him for pressuring you?” I ask.
“Not angry. He said, ‘Come back to Hinduism. We are all so sad.’”
“What did you say?”
“‘Won’t the Muslims kill me like the Hindu fanatics? I am caught between the two.’ ‘We’ll send our people to protect you,’ he said. I told him I couldn’t afford to feed them. He said, ‘We’ll pay.’”
“Great,” I laugh, “Hindu guards and Muslim commandos can party at your house.”
As we wait downstairs for the car, a first-floor salesman hails Kamala from the other end of the room. Other salesmen line up behind him, and business stops downstairs too. He raises his voice, “But madam, why did you leave your religion?”
Our car is idling on the curb outside, but they won’t let Kamala go.
She responds in a full-bodied voice that carries throughout the glittering store. Only to herself does she say softly, “Sometimes I still say Krishna’s name. Krishna is still with me.”
“What did you say?” I ask as I help her down the steps. If it were me, I would not like others presuming they could control my life, nor would I tolerate their intrusive, incessant questioning.
“They said, ‘Madam, why did you convert? We feel so betrayed.’ I was just teasing them. I asked, ‘Don’t you know me? Don’t you know my writings? Why would I do it except for love?’ They said they guessed, but they weren’t sure. ‘Don’t you love me?’ I asked. ‘Yes, we do,’ they told me. I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I would have gone with you.’”
On the way home Kamala tells me a caste law story her great-grandmother told her, about Ammu, a sixteen-year-old Nalapat girl, touched by a piece of material thrown by an untouchable:
And because Nayars were defiled by contact with untouchables, she was cast out. She hid in a field, and a Muslim found her there. He promised to look after her, took her home, and married her. Five years passed and her brother, learning of her fate, went in a palanquin to carry her off. He found his sister at the back of the house nursing a robust baby.
“Come with me now, the palanquin is waiting,” he said.
“My husband is the life of my life, and I am his. I cannot leave him,” Ammu answered.
“If you don’t come, you will destroy the family honour,” said her brother, unsheathing his dagger. And when he returned to Nalapat, the blade was dripping with blood.
“The Nalapat brother has killed his sister,” said the villagers.
“See how I have avenged the family honour,” boasted the brother. And then he buried his knife. But my great-grandmother told me that no Nalapat brother would kill his sister, and he must have plunged that dagger into a goat.
“The Nalapats were angry at me for telling the secret,” Kamala tells me. “They want me to forget. But I find this story so moving. When I joined in my conversion, I said, ‘As a Nalapat, I owe something to the Muslims.’ Now I am making amends.”
Kamala’s elderly ex-neighbour from the Ambady Apartments, accompanied by the Ambady’s sweeper lady, is waiting when we return. The old lady seats herself at Kamala’s feet and holds her hand.
I sit on the settee, writing in my notebook. When I look up, I see Kamala crying. I leave the writing and perch on the table beside her chair. Kamala wipes her face with her chador. “She is the only one of her generation who comes to see me,” she whispers. “The community has chucked me out. She is eighty years old, a Nayar woman like me.”
Hunched in white khadi, the frail old widow murmurs like a stream over round stones, gently stroking Kamala’s hand. Kamala cries silently, head framed in black against the chair back, face set in sadness, eyes closed. I hold her other hand. Her maidservant, Ammu, stands at the side, patting her shoulder. Kamala opens her eyes and I see our tableau of grief, the tragedy of her ostracization, and my place in the iconic frieze.
“Even her relatives would throw her out if she came to see me. It touches me, a beautiful gesture,” Kamala says.
The gesture makes her remember all she’s lost, and as her face becomes sadder, the old woman strokes, burbles, talks, until Kamala smiles, dimpling her tragic mask.
“She says she always remembers me wearing the amulet, a Hindu thing. She is looking for it now. She is saying that when her children see me on TV, they say how beautiful I look, how young.”
“She’s trying to cheer you up.”
“Yes, she loves me,” Kamala says, trying to regain her strength. “So many people love me.”
Inching her stool closer, the old lady buries her head in Kamala’s lap. She lies there, her neat, tight bun unmoving, until Kamala raises the silvery head between her hands. The old lady reaches forward too, cradling Kamala’s face in her outstretched hands. Now they are looking directly into each other’s eyes. As one, they lean forward, pulling closer to each other. The old lady’s delicate skin touches the crown of Kamala’s chador. Their foreheads meet.
“You are sweating,” the old lady says when they draw back. “Because of this,” she says, pointing to the chador.
Film producer Prakash and his young colleague, Winnie, the final visitors of the day, are a relief and are thus invited to dinner. Kamala does a riff on the proper male guardian to take to Qatar, “a very orthodox society with Friday executions.” Kabir wants to go, but she has invited her son Chinnen so that she will feel comfortable uncovering her hair at night. Again I suggest a woman, saying I’ve discovered how much fun it is to travel with my women friends.
“Better to take a monkey,” she responds, lifting her arms in leaping motions. “It will jump, and its long tail,” she traces the tail in the air, “will be lovely.”
Prakash, Winnie, and I crack up. The monkey’s absurdist antics are a perfect ending to the day.