People arrive to help Kamala practise her prayers and prepare for her trip to Qatar. She says they will work her hard there: state functions, public speeches, and the appearance at the mosque for which she’s rehearsing her prayers. She has memorized thirty Arabic phrases, but with her Sadiq Ali hopes fading, can’t seem to learn any more.
“I will say the opening prayer, and then I will lift up my eyes.” She lifts her eyes and opens her arms wide in a gesture of exaltation, “I will say, ‘Ya, Allah!’” She is on the settee, eyes beatifically ecstatic, arms to the heavens, framed in dramatic black purdah, the picture of faith intoning the call to God. “That will dazzle them.”
We hug goodbye, each with separate travel plans, knowing we will be together again in a few weeks. Tomorrow Kamala flies to the Gulf, and I leave for a trip north along the Malabar coast to Nalapat, her ancestral home.
My driver, Jacob, and I hit the road with cars, trucks, rickshaws, and cows flying at us like obstacles in a video game. We take the fork to Punnayurkulam, Kamala’s village, and drive along a road buttressed with bushes like English hedgerows. Everyone knows Madhavikutty, Kamala’s Malayalam pen name, and they point us to an ancient wooden house with a red-tiled roof, the last traditional house on the grounds of the old estate. An old woman welcomes us hesitantly and with Jacob translating, describes the four-hundred-year-old Nalapat House that stood nearby, with its gate-house, portico used for classical dance performance, interior temple, outdoor snake shrine, bathhouse, cattle sheds, paddy-husking shed, and building for death rituals.
“You could stand in the middle of the courtyard and see the sky,” the old woman says. “We could hear the air, the cooing of pigeons, see the lightning. The cross-ventilation made it so cool. We could see the stars.”
Looking sad, she points east to remembered paddy fields, south to the familial burial grounds, west to the Arabian Sea. “I am very sorry the house is gone,” she says, asking me to remember her to Kamala.
I photograph the overgrown swimming pond and the two-thousand-year-old snake shrine with its corroded idols of Renuka and her father, Vasuki. Kamala’s poetry breathes life into the ruins, and I envisage myself and Kamala as children playing in the water and drying ourselves in the Nalapat private bower.
O sea, I am happy swimming
Happy, happy, happy …
The only movement I know well
Is certainly the swim.
It comes naturally to me.
I had a house in Malabar
and a pale green pond,
I did all my growing there
In the bright summer months.
I swam about and floated,
And dived into the cold and green
I lay speckled green and gold
In all the hours of the sun …
Images of the Nalapat pond, sweet and full, erase my concerns about Kamala. I feel the presence of young Kamala, adored by her grandmother, carefree, floating, and the water buoys me too. Despite all our differences, I think this water-anointed childhood is an inheritance we share. From it, we have developed our taste for floating and swimming freely in an all-enveloping medium – like love.
Outside it’s a blazing 33 degrees, and the old woman suggests we follow her inside, which has an immediate cooling effect. Jacob admires the squared roof beams, thick wood door jamb, strong bronze bolts, brass-studded door, and carved roof struts. Standing in the only extant Nalapat building, listening to Jacob lament the proliferation of concrete box housing, makes me realize that Kamala can’t go home again. Her few remaining relatives here are angry with her, and the pre-independence village life she lived exists only in her stories. Her celebrated autobiographical trilogy has immortalized a vanished rural world, just as her contemporary stories reflect the tensions and turmoil buffeting southwest Indian Keralites in their transition from the old world to the new.
It is still true that Kerala has the highest literacy rate, highest life expectancy, and lowest maternal mortality in India, and South Asia’s lowest infant mortality and highest women-to-man sex ratio. But the province also has India’s highest unemployment rate, and the ruins of Nalapat reflect the fracturing effect on village life due to the exodus of farmers, craftsmen, and postgrad “remittance men” to the Gulf. Kerala now has India’s largest consumption of liquor, highest suicide rate, and worst crime figures, including a steadily rising rate of crime against women.
As Kamala hurtles forward, the world of the last Nalapat dwellers disintegrates like the landscape around them.
I call Kamala the moment I return to Cochin. It’s impossible to predict what happened in Qatar, and I can’t wait to know how she did. Her report is like a geyser, and I write furiously.
“I had eighteen engagements, feet are swollen, health not good, but so exciting, of course, like a dream. They exalted me to such a position. More than ten thousand people, absolute slaves, bowed heads, a new cult. Now I know how fraudulent religious figures are. I am a remarkably successful fake.
“I was given a beautiful royal suite. Intruders were there, humanity all over. So much of embracing and kissing. Behind the perfume is the overpowering smell of their bodies. I soon learned to keep my legs apart so I didn’t fall over, or else they would knock me over. My eyes are inflamed from constantly being in the light. Now I know how actresses feel. Someone should write about this, what happened to a poet. Now I am inhibited in my writing. I give you absolute liberty to write what you want. Let’s have an interview.”
I take a cab to her apartment as quickly as I can. She is glowing with energy. “I never believed I would become such a symbol, like Joan of Arc. Your friend didn’t disappoint the audience. The women wept out of happiness because they felt I was talking about them. They fawned on me and cried. I did want love all my life, but I never bargained on this much love. I could burst like the dam breaking.”
“Do you like it?” I ask.
“Something in me sure fattens on applause. I like it and I fear it, as if I would get washed away in the ocean. They don’t know who I am. Quite often I think I’m a fraud. I want to tell them, but then they would send me home, game over. I wonder if I’m striking a pose because that’s what they want, an absolutely sinless woman. One thing I am proud of, that I can love them all.”
“What did you talk about?”
“One world. No visas. You are the axis of the world wherever you are. The minister of education asked me to discuss a blueprint for the next century. Imagine me deciding education for the next millennium. He was completely fooled.”
“But in Montreal you spoke about education,” I remind her.
“Then I had just started my career as a fake. I was not completely mature. Now I am a full fake. I think I have moved into the new role of the saint. Otherwise I was so notorious, now I am redeemed. Life has been a game for me. Who is the real me? Maybe I am a saint. So much of love going on within me. When I left Qatar, I was weeping. Great emotional investments were made, so many friends – even the men were weeping.”
And then she says something I will need to transcribe and read over many times before I begin to think I understand. She says, “If I’m really a fake, as I expect I am, always wearing a mask, but never really a mask, it is the real me taking part in a masquerade as the real me. The nudity in the eyes is appalling, not of this mask but of my naked mask, this person with tears in my eyes begging for love, please love me, please love me.”
I’ve heard Kamala compare the world she creates through writing to “shadow” and the external world to “substance,” describing how both worlds can coexist within her. But these poignant identity shifts blur the distinction between “real” and “masquerade.” She seems to be saying that her “naked mask,” her vulnerable openness, is just another mask. Yet when she defines “naked mask,” she says “this person with tears in my eyes.” It seems that for her the real and the masked are indivisible.
But now I am trying to keep pace with the rush of her uncensored report from Qatar.
“What I do is look into a person’s eyes, crawl into the person’s mind, and see misery, darkness, suspicion, doubting, and then I must touch. With women I am permitted to hug, stroke the head, and you have to hold them long enough until they cry. Then they smile, and all is not lost. That is great zakat [compulsory giving of charity to the poor, one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith]. Better than clothes, money, gifts, is the zakat of love.”
“Well, you’ve always been in the limelight,” I say.
“Not this kind of glare. They say, ‘You look like the moon coming out of the clouds. Suraiya came to show us a new way. This star has risen for us.’ I’m taken as an old woman in my wheelchair, then suddenly I feel empowered. I lift my arms up, upturn my eyes and I pray, ‘Brothers in Islam, brothers in Qatar, I have come to talk to you of a subject you probably don’t take very seriously – love. The heart is a harsh terrain containing rough hillocks, the crusty cracked ground of a desert, and sandstones. Love is like the zamzam which Hajura saw after she ran from one hillock to another looking for water. Can’t you hear the plaintive wail of her baby and the hiss of the zamzam?
“‘A hum dullillah, all praise to God,’ they all shouted back to me. It was like casting a spell.
“‘Love is like the zamzam, that eternal spring which will not dry up.’
“‘A hum dullillah,’ they answered.
“‘The naked face of Islam carries compassion. True power is in giving, not taking.’
“Everything I say, they all shout, ‘All praise to God.’ This community wants to hear. The TV quoted my sayings. They were posted on roadside billboards. I met all the writers. My words were immediately translated. When I was in Qatar, I always wanted to sing, it was bliss, and my prayer became a song. I was so charged with power that visit. Now Sadiq Ali will be sorry. I have more power than he. I was filled with pride and humbled because I didn’t deserve it. But now this God is growing on me. Voices are beginning to speak through the silence.
“I have no regrets. It’s delightful, Merrily, life is truly beautiful, it’s a life in Technicolor, Panavision, Vistavision. Can you imagine the change from my old life to being a cult figure? I make a joke out of it so I can’t be smug. I wished you’d been there, in the tenth row so no one would see you laugh. Merrily would say, ‘Kamala’s new stunt is fascinating. She’s a real show woman.’ I should have joined the circus.”
Flying on the wings of adoration, she calls Sadiq Ali. He answers and immediately passes the phone to his first wife, who responds rudely and hangs up.
Kamala puts the phone back pensively. “A story I wrote came out last week in Malayalam. A sad love story about a love between a Muslim and Hindu. Perhaps they recognized Sadiq Ali, and that’s why they are so unkind.”
I ask her to translate the story so I can see how she managed to be subtle enough to publish a love story in a Muslim magazine and obvious enough to upset Sadiq Ali’s family.
“Salim Ispahani was a guiding light of his community,” she translates, her concentration visible only in the sub-speech movements of her lips.
He would explain the technicalities of language to his followers. He would acquaint them with the commandments of Islam. In a voice as sweet as wild forest honey, he told the people who were guilty that God would forgive them. He was like a messenger from God.
Salim Ispahani had very sturdy corded arms. He wore half-sleeved shirts so it was impossible not to notice that the muscles of his upper arms were as strong as a bison’s shoulders. Probably that was the reason he was so prompt in lifting and carrying the lady poet who had come to inaugurate the conference. He carried her to a stage decorated with garlands and sat her down on the stage with tenderness.
A slightly musky smell of perspiration lingered on her body and haunted her. She kept seeking the right words of thanks, but was silent. He was her son’s age, and when she was free from his clasp, the freedom tasted bitter and she was surprised. For twenty-seven years she had observed celibacy, and persevered to belittle her body’s needs. Now she was a widow, and the slight ecstasy her skin felt at his touch made her blush in shame.
Kamala translates all the repressed ardour of An Incomplete Love Story, which ends, “This is not a revolt against religion, or a plea for any religion. This is only a wailing. This is only a cry.” And when she puts the magazine down, I see that she is actually crying. The phone call to Sadiq Ali has brought her crashing down from the heights of Qatar. She may have the adoration of thousands, but she still cannot have Sadiq Ali. Even though it makes no sense to her at all, she is beginning to realize that he is gone.
“Write my story,” Kamala says the day before I leave. She tells me I am her close friend, one she can talk to without withholding, and she tells journalists that I have come close enough to her and learned enough about her to write a good book. She must also feel that I have grown to love her – her brilliant poetic sensibility, her playfulness, warmth, vulnerability, courage, and physical charisma. I have grown used to her mercurial nature, her need for love and assurance, her contradictions. I enjoy what she calls her “rustic” love of jewellery, and her female vanity. I am captivated, as are many, by her generous and total giving of self – stories, politics, flirtation, conversation, munificence – that metamorphoses her modest Cochin apartment into a grand, other-century salon.
She must sense that I secretly applaud her bold bid for love and her union with a potent soulmate – not fantasy or the blue god, but a flesh-and-blood lover who sang through her armoured resolve into her heart. Like Krishna in the Gitagovinda who worshipped every inch of Radha’s body, even her feet, Sadiq Ali named and embraced all of Kamala, as her self. I know what it must mean to her. For decades her body was used by a husband who pretended she was someone else, and she felt “not there at all.” Finally, someone thought only of her, and for the first time she could feel “this is my body. I am mating with somebody and he is mating with me. There was no shadow between us.” With Sadiq Ali, as never before, she experienced “an identity that was lovable,” the union she had longed for all her life. “Finally,” she laughed, “I realized there is something like manna from heaven.”
Kamala’s consuming passion doesn’t surprise me as much as it seems to surprise so many of her compatriots. Writer Jeanette Winterson in her beautiful book The Passion compared passion that comes late in life for the first time to the feeling of having a leopard in the house. It is wrought with devilish choices and hard to bear. Kamala told scholar J. Devika, “Physical love is intensely beautiful. It is not a gentle breeze; it is a veritable typhoon.” She said that such passion requires a spiritual and emotional maturity “acquired slowly, after much effort.”
And yet Kamala’s love for Sadiq Ali is a potent mixture of many stages of love: the mature spirituality she describes; the haunting power of first love found late in life; and the thrilling excitement of fresh young love which I understood when she asked me to call Sadiq Ali and tell him she’d take him to Canada for treatment.
“I have some money in the bank. I’d pauperize myself to make him better.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I want to be with him, to see him naked again.”
I asked her why it was such a great thing to see Sadiq Ali naked, and she said she’d never seen a man naked before. I said she’d obviously seen her husband, and she said he disgusted her and she didn’t care to look.
“But what is so special about seeing this man naked?” I persisted.
“I am an artist,” she answered. “Before, I fantasized what they are like. To see the hair on his chest, the line of hair on his belly. So beautiful. I was bowled over – so that’s how they are.”
I tried to get my mind around the momentous effect of a naked man and understood more when I read Marguerite Duras’s story about a young woman trapped in a monotonous country life. Inside the young woman’s body is an amorphous hollow from which comes “an empty cry that was calling no one.” When a young man enters her bereft life, the woman feels “a force has been growing I am powerless to resist, a thought has taken root there, in me, against me.” With inexhaustible pleasure, like Kamala with Sadiq Ali, she thinks only of the young man’s naked body.
But even understanding the cataclysmic effect on a great love poet of finally finding the love she longed for all her life, I can’t predict the outcome of Kamala’s sexual awakening and conversion, nor the ending of her story. Now that she is a Muslim, she has begun creating a role for herself in Islam, which she says “probably suits me.” And if it doesn’t now, I hope it ultimately will. She has formed a new political party based on love and preaches her own ecumenical brand of charity. Some visitors come to fête, admire, and adore her, others to use her. Today another delegation of mundu-clad, middle-aged men arrived from a Muslim orphanage/school/benefit society, flattering and entreating her to speak at an evening function three hours away. She declined because of ill health, but they persisted. She will probably go, since “this is what I have. I might as well give to this religion.”
And, of course, Sadiq Ali is still not buried. An amusing young mimic appeared to say he had been to Sadiq Ali’s home, and Sadiq Ali said he would come to Kamala and marry her secretly. I called the opportunistic kid a budding Rasputin for manipulating her aching need.
“I gave him two hundred rupees,” Kamala said.
“Why?”
“Maybe it is true. I haven’t given up hope.” She smiles, shrugs.
I have known Kamala for five years now. Lived close to her in Canada and Cochin. I have a thousand typescript pages of our conversations, meetings, my journal, her books, columns, stories, and poems. “Write my story, because I no longer can,” she repeats.
The task seems overwhelming. Yet I must see where this conversion leads her, see what I can through the smoke and the mirrors.
I swim for the last time in the Taj pool, run along Marine Drive to beat the fast-moving barge to the jetty, hop onto the ledge on the side of the boat, scramble into the hold, and head for the covered front, away from the noisy central engine. I find a lady to sit beside and look at the colourful saris, tired faces, animated conversations, the life flowing on the water to the next stop. On the horizon the sun hangs suspended in the sky, a gigantic fuchsia orb shot through with light. The boat pivots toward Ernakulam, and I twist to keep the glorious sight in view.