Today I leave Merrily’s home …
Here I was the owner of my time
each tranquil hour my own
The Aunties and Joe arrive bearing pre-parting gifts, and I snap the photos everyone wants to have.
“Sit on Joe’s lap,” Kamala urges Auntie Sue. “It will make a good picture.”
To my surprise, eighty-three-year-old Auntie Sue hops up, plunks herself on Joe’s thigh, slings an arm around his neck, and smiles like she belongs there. Joe looks bemused but willing. It’s a great picture.
Auntie Katie holds Kamala’s hands. “I hope I’ll be able to see you next year,” she says.
“You and I are riding the tightrope, we are on the trapeze,” Kamala smiles.
“Take better care of yourself and have a good love life,” Auntie Katie urges. “I feel so sad because I don’t know when I’ll see her again,” she whispers to me. “I approve that she’s in love, but I don’t approve how he acts toward her. He snuggles her but doesn’t have sex with her. I’m ninety-one, but if I have a man holding me and making love to me, I want him to go the limit. Still, he makes her feel loved.”
“You’ll be taking the plane soon,” Auntie Sue says to Kamala.
“It is called the plane to loneliness.”
Auntie Sue hugs her. “Don’t do anything harsh. Do it slow and sweet.”
Kamala walks her “Canadian family” to the door. When we’re alone, I raise her feet to the stool of her favourite chair, where she can look out at the trees.
“Merrily, you have such an effect on my life,” she says, in a remarkable echo of what I have been thinking about her. Without Kamala I would never have had the confidence to press for an agreement formalizing my arrangement with Arnie. Or have appreciated Auntie Katie’s sublimated artistry or Dad’s spiritual world, or questioned whether there is a price to pay for sexual liberty. I wouldn’t know the beauty of hennaed hands in motion, or have read Karma Cola, Gita Mehta’s sharp, absurdist satire about Westerners and spiritualism in India, or Ginu Kumani’s Junglee Girl, R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days, or Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, which I didn’t want to end. Knowing Kamala makes me care about her poetry, its roots, and its rebellion. Which involves her mother’s poetry. Which makes me interested in Balamani Amma’s spiritual, scholarly poems. Which necessitated Sulu’s introduction to puja (Hindu devotional practices). Which requires books to understand what Sulu began. Which reminds me of Kamala’s love for Krishna. Which leads to David L. Haberman’s anthropological pilgrimage, Journey through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna, and meanders into the gloriously erotic lyric cantos of The Gitagovinda of Jayadeva: Love Song of the Dark Lord.
Bits of the world Kamala has opened to me flash through my mind as I wait, wondering what she is going to say next. I know she has reassessed the stereotypes she had about western families after meeting ours. But how have I affected her life?
“Even the fact that Sadiq Ali touched me and I didn’t feel so outraged that I committed suicide,” she says in answer to my questioning expression. “The part that occurred to me after knowing you is that the life choices I would have considered a sin, you are draping yourself in as a mantle. I even felt so superior. I think truth is so startling.
“Sadiq Ali said, ‘We are two rivers flowing side by side. Can you feel the rush?’ Sex was so powerful but tender, not like my husband. It’s an art, like a concert, the beginning, crescendo, diminuendo, the loud roar of a padlocked door being opened, you feel you’re being adored – the hands, the mouth – it’s a worship rite, such ecstasy. I’m glad I had it once in my life. I liked it.”
“An orthodox Hindu woman with a Muslim man,” I tease about her double transgression.
“I lost caste immediately. I allowed it. I even loved the experience. Each cell in me trying out, celebrating the body. I thought, I must tell Merrily the change that has been wrought within me – internally, not externally. Externally I don’t even lift my hem. I’m not even assessing the pros and cons of this new attitude. I think God is saying, ‘Be happy in your body too’ – that must come from being here.”
Arnie and I push Kamala’s wheelchair to the departure area and join the line of passengers requiring assistance. We wait for the stewardess, as people on our left line up, press forward, show papers, and stride through the embarkation gate. Other passengers wheel past us, pushed by their children.
“Reading Isadora Duncan at thirteen and Oscar Wilde at fourteen can mess you up,” Kamala says out of the blue, thinking perhaps of the constraints awaiting her at home. Then she withdraws into silence, head and body covered in black, conserving the energy she will need for the long return journey, a small, contained figure indistinguishable from the other Muslim ladies waiting to board the flight. No stranger could imagine the person underneath that purdah. Or how this frail, nondescript person could inspire sensible Phyllis, my dad’s wife, to say, “She’s so powerful she wraps herself around your heart and sucks you into her aura.”
Kamala says the permission to be happy in her body must have come from knowing me, but she was comfortable in her body and her psyche for the fifteen years she lived with her grandmother in Nalapat. She has always been less prudish about body parts and functions than most Westerners, and when accused of obscenity for painting nudes, she asked how something totally natural could be obscene. Long before she knew me, she wrote of the hypocrisy of sex without love and the propriety of sex when there is love. I don’t think she ever completely bought the de facto “sin” of non-marital sex – her Nayar matrilineal culture sanctioned non-legal sexual arrangements for women, and her new morality condemned sex in a loveless marriage. It’s just that with me, in Quebec, she experiences a culture in which women’s sexual desire is acceptable and normal.
I think Isadora Duncan and Oscar Wilde messed Kamala up because she took them to heart in a powerfully inhibited society with such a repressed culture of concealment that the poet Vijay Lakshmi thought Kamala would have been much happier living somewhere else. And recently, when an interviewer asked Kamala what she would change if she could relive her life, she said, “I would not like to be born in Kerala. Kerala gives me a feeling of claustrophobia.” I think knowing me reinforced her impulse to act on what she already believed, because she saw me living with a man outside of marriage and the sky wasn’t falling in.
I hug Kamala one last time before the steward turns her wheelchair toward the embarkation door. Supposedly she cut this visit short to prepare her fledgling political party for the elections, but I now suspect she’s returning to celebrate her body. I watch her go, and when I imagine her flying from Montreal, to Europe, to Delhi, to Cochin, I worry about sending her off alone. I hope she’ll feel secure, and that she’ll be well received when she returns. I watch intently as she’s wheeled past the gaggle crowding the gate, past the airport guard, the mouth of the hallway, and I leap about frantically when she turns once, softly, to wave.