Kamala Das aka Kamala Surayya aka Madhavikutty was a poet who was called many things other than the three names already mentioned. In order to write about her, I wished to know her beyond the only poem of hers that I had read in my English textbook which was about her grandmother, I believe. ‘My story’ – her semi-autobiographical book was what I chose for this purpose and the writing blew me away. I wanted to read the novel in Malayalam because this particular work of hers had drawn a lot of flak from the Kerala readers and wanted to know, in all its glory, what the big deal was. But my laziness to go in search of the original version and the thought of reading it in English which seemed easier to me even though I’m very comfortable reading my mother-tongue, got the better of me and so I kept aside ‘Ente Katha’. As I discovered that she belonged to my hometown and also my community, I should have felt a better connection with her words but fortunately, for me, I was born long after the British era in India and the customs that I had only heard of being described by my parents as having occurred in my grandparents’ times and their agreement to some atrocities shown in old movies as having occurred in ancestral homes of the landlords, could be seen from a different perspective through the writer’s words. Her autobiography was very lyrical and her desire to be loved is emphasised everywhere in it. After having read the whole book and even some other articles on her (the curiosity stemming from the fact that Kamala Das is still regarded as one of those bold writers with a scandalous life), I’m unsure of whether that desire attained fruition. The description of her marital relation was very weird in the book, among other things. She was called an attention seeker (but who isn’t?) and a controversy queen not just because of her detailed, possibly fictitious, accounts of her interactions with people related and unrelated to her and I do not necessarily agree to most of her viewpoints but I must comment about the fact that the attention that her private life and its affairs garnered, overshadowed her literary prowess and that’s a shame! I saw her works being compared to Plath’s (minus the suicidal tendency), which makes sense because like most writers (unfortunately), she also had a predominant disposition to sadness which is reflected in her writing. Even with all the fuss about the level of honesty in her book ‘My Story’, I get the need of writing a semi autobiography (something even Ruskin Bond uses to tell some of his stories) – because writers believe in half truths when narrating their often bitter, probably quite-good-when-observed-from-a-different-perspective lives. To me, the highlight of the book was the poetry I found in it as anything other than literature, does not seek much importance and hence, I’ve chosen my favorites out of the works I had the right mind to finally find and read of this amazing writer:
He talks turning a sun-stained
Cheek to me, his mouth a dark
Cavern where stalactites of
Uneven teeth gleam, his right
Hand on my knee, while our minds
Are willed to race towards love;
But they only wander, tripping
Idly over puddles of
Desires… Can this man with
Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin’s lazy hungers? Who can
Help us who have lived so long
And have failed in love? The heart,
An empty cistern, waiting
Through long hours, fills itself
With coiling snakes of silence.
I am a freak. It’s only
To save my face I flaunt, at
Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.-Kamala Das
Towards the Slaughter-yard by Kamala Das:
The Intensive Cardiac Care Unit
Is where the lidless fish-eyes of bulbs burn on,
Blind to the night’s thinning out into light beyond the wall
And the day spilling itself out on crowding streets
The intensive cardiac care unit
Is where the weary travellers pause to pitch a tent, the oasis
For a night’s rest before the long crossing
On camel-back through hot sand;
The intensive cardiac care unit
Is where each lies in his own white tent
Under harsh desert moons,
Buried only neck deep in sleep, so that with unhooded head
He awaits his execution,
And half-grown nightmares crouch under beds,
And moody as distant drums sound the heart beat;
The intensive cardiac care unit
Is where the tall dark doctor comes at midnight, visiting,
Called up from the depths of dreams, out of breath,
The bulbs blurring in his eyes, the ageing faces blurring
On their pillows, while sleep gazes at his brow,
His great shoulders,
His knees, and like a vagrant cow nods its head and moves on…
When I
Sleep, the outside
World crumbles, all contacts
Broken. So in that longer sleep
Only
The world
Shall die, and I
Remain, just being
Also being a remaining…
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