My Story

by Kamala Das

  My grandmother had got a local tailor named Kumaran to make for me two long skirts of green and two pale pink blouses.

  I had no jewellery at all. I thought that it was my austere way of dressing that ruined my first love and made it unrequited. Then I tried to wear flowers in my hair. But all he said was that I should, without wasting any more time, begin to read Marx and Engels.

  17

  The Hindu-Moslem Riots

  One morning, only an hour before our lunchtime, the door-bell rang. Our maidservant ushered in a mendicant, gnarled with age and covered with the red dust on the road. Our cook immediately shouted at him. Get out of the house, we do not want sanyasis here, walking into our rooms; if you want alms, stay at the gate and ask for money, whoever heard of beggars and fake sadhus ringing the doorbell and quietly walking in...!

  The old man gave a toothless smile and deposited his bundle on the floor. I am no beggar, he said in Malayalam, I am from a respectable family in North Malabar, I have been a pilgrim for the past forty years and I have seen all the holy places of our country Kasi, Rameshwaram, Haridwar, Puri, Kedarnath, Badrinath...

  We asked the maidservant to bring him a glass of butter-milk immediately. My mother was called downstairs to meet the pilgrim. My name is Pathiyar, said the old guest. The cook stood by, grumbling, but none of us paid him any heed.

  We were fascinated by the slow dialect of the sanyasi. He told my mother that he had been tired of all earthly pleasures while still in comfortable middle age and had walked out like the Buddha, one night, to seek his peace. Now I am eighty-eight, he said and I am weary with travel. If you will allow me to rest here for a day I shall be strong enough to leave this city and go to Puri.

  Yes, you may, I cried, knowing well that my mother was inclined to be hospitable. Don’t tell me later that I did not warn you, muttered the cook. I know these types. They are fakes, the old man smiled at the words. Do not worry my son, he said. I shall never be a burden on any one.

  After getting my father’s permission we moved him into the alcove behind the stairs where he spread out his belongings. A conch, two black saligrams, a bell, an incense burner and a hookah made of a coconut shell. Is this hookah for a pooja, asked our sarcastic cook. The maidservant was annoyed with her husband’s attitude. She was fascinated by the old man’s tales. To find one in Calcutta with whom she could communicate in her native tongue, she thought a blessing.

  Do read my palm, she used to tell him. Sanyasis are supposed to be fortune-tellers. The old man said caressing her plump fingers that she was to exercise greater caution in dealing with someone who was very close to her. He is a serpent in disguise, said the sanyasi. He will one day deceive you. He is only after your gold chain and your earrings... Who is this viper that you are talking of, asked the girl. Need I tell you my child, said the old man with his forgiving grin.

  He used to make her very neurotic with his gloomy predictions. At night in the room above the kitchen, she quarrelled bitterly with her new husband, doubting his love. Won’t this old dog ever leave this house, asked the cook every morning while he served us breakfast.

  A week went by, but the sanyasi was still with us. He was fast regaining strength and was in a happy mood all the time. He used to sing bawdy songs to me in the evenings after my return from school, but I understood little and liked not their meaning but their lilt.

  One morning when my father was coming down the stairs at eight-thirty for his breakfast, the smell of the mendicant’s hookah reached his nostrils. Is the old one still here, asked my father. Yes he is, my mother said weakly. Then ask him to leave today after his lunch. We can’t possibly keep him for ever.

  After father had left, the old man called me aside. Your father wants me to leave. I have grown very fond of this family. He was unashamedly weeping. I too wept with him. The maidservant came on the scene and began to bawl. It was a horrible scene. Then my mother promised to plead with my father for the old man who did not seem to be in a state fit for travelling.

  It was while the sanyasi was staying with us that I first recognized myself to be a Hindu. He was antagonistic towards our driver who was a Moslem. Moslems cannot be trusted, he used to tell me, puffing on his hookah. Why not, I asked him. I had, at that time, several friends who were Moslims. Our eye-specialist was a pleasant doctor named Ahmed who used to joke with me and make me laugh a lot. The driver Morfed was an affectionate man. Mark my words, said the old man, ominously, there will be a war very soon, and the Moslems will molest our Hindu girls and kill all our sons. I was aghast. The maidservant nearly swooned. This old man is a fake, said the cook. He is no saint if he can hate any community so terribly. Besides, he smokes opium...

  One morning before we woke up, the man had gone, taking with him the conch, the incense burner, the bell and the hookah. Only the smell of opium remained under the staircase. He has left slyly like a thief, said the cook. He has left like a God, he has vanished, said the maid. After school, coming home I had no longer anyone to tell me of religion and its base activities.

  It was the year 1947, the early part of it, and rioting had begun in Calcutta. There was a story going round at the school that the Hindus had come to seek out Aulad, the peon, and kill him, but that one of the teachers had hidden him under her bed. I was to go to Dr. Ahmed on a Friday at five-thirty to have my eyes tested, but on Thursday his body was cut up by some Hindus and dumped into a dustbin. Off and on we would hear from the distance religious slogans shouted by the rioters who went about in processions at dusk, holding aloft their sticks and weapons.

  The schools were closed and also the shops. We ate rice and dal at lunch and at supper, for there were no vegetables to be had anywhere, and no meat. It was also impossible to go home to Malabar or even to communicate with my grandmother. The postal system broke down totally. Once we saw a lorry filled with laughing people, mostly Sikhs, carrying aloft the yellow body of an old woman impaled on a spear.

  Instead of Morfed, a driver named Naresh started to drive my father to his office. He was resourceful and clever. He had with him in the glove compartment a Moslem fez cap and a Hindu turban. When he had to go near Park Circus, a Moslim area, he donned the fez cap to fool the people. In the predominantly Hindu areas he walked with his turban. He used to bring for us secret gifts of a small pumpkin or a banana procured from behind the Park Circus Bazaar.

  Then we moved southwards to a smaller house at Lake Avenue. A week after we moved in, there was a loud cry at eight in the evening coming towards our house. The proccessionists were shouting Allahu Akbar in hoarse voices. The landlord, a doctor in his sixties, took out his rifle and alerted his grown-up son to watch at the gate for the rioters. My father, helpless with only a walking stick to protect himself with, walked up to the gate with them. The women huddled in a room upstairs sobbing softly. I was too excited to sob. I sat on the stairs with the landlord’s second son and discussed the Chinese methods of torture.

  It was an anti-climax when the rioters were dispersed before they neared our street and we had to go home and fall asleep thinking of bloodshed and religion...

  18

  15, Lake Avenue

  The Lake Avenue flat in Calcutta was small, with only two bedrooms, a compact sitting room, an open corridor at the back and the dining room, kitchen and pantry on the mezzanine floor.

  On the first floor lived our landlord, his fat wife and two sons. We had at the entrance to our drawing-room four wide steps of imitation marble where we sat with our informal callers in the evening, gazing at the garden. The hedges were well-trimmed and the seasonal flowers were well-tended.

  There was only one large cane chair in the garden which was nearly all the time occupied by the old landlord. He used to be handsome and elegant. He smoked a pipe every morning after his breakfast which he ate alone in his private room on the ground floor, adjacent to our corridor.

  He was a loner. His wife used to get attacks of hysteria almost twice a month, during which she abused him in B
engali and kept asking him where he had hidden his British concubine. The sons used to walk away from the house in embarrassed silence and return hours later, when she had turned quiet. The doctor paid no heed to all her wailing and ranting. He sat on the white cane chair smoking his pipe. On some days when he was away at his dispensary, the wife would accost the driver and coax him to tell her about her husband’s mistress. You take him to her many times every week, you must know her address...

  We did not have many visitors. There were only two couples who visited our house regularly. Mr and Mrs Panicker who were my parents’ friends for several years and a younger couple, Mr and Mrs Kunhappa. Mrs K. was exquisitely lovely and very fashion-conscious. When she appeared at our door one day wearing a charcoal grey sari with large polka dots and a necklace of leopard-claws, I was startled by her beauty.

  She talked to me of the cucumber juice that she mixed with cream to apply over her face each afternoon to retain her porcelain-smooth complexion. She was frank with me and to my frank questions she gave frank answers although at that time I did not even believe all that I heard. I could not for a moment believe that all the dignified couples coming to my house to discuss politics and literature with my parents could in the dark perform sexual acrobatics to get what my dear friend called the great orgasm. She made me laugh in disbelief. Was every married adult a clown in bed, a circus-performer? I hate marriage, I told her. I hate to show myself naked to anyone...

  During that period when I was fourteen my father arranged for me to have an art-tutor. He was twenty-nine, pale-complexioned and tall. He wore the loose clinging dress of the rich Bengalee. He taught me on the first day to draw Kala Lakshmi and he pronounced the Goddess’s name as Kola Lokhi. You have a good hand, he said appreciatively. He came to teach me every Wednesday in the evening, and instead of asking the cook to serve him tea I brought the tray down to him laden with tea, idlis, vadas and steamed banana. He spoke with respect and it seemed to me that in his eyes I was an adult. While he touched up what I drew, I watched with fascination his pink earlobes and his serene mouth.

  I bought a white sari with a red border, the type the Bengali peasants wore, and draped myself in it to conceal my boyish body. I was in such a hurry to grow up that it began to show in the way I brushed my hair whipping it as one would whip a snake to kill it and in the way I stared at myself in the mirror for long lost moments. My parents began to notice the change in me. I was dressing for the tuition, I was wearing a sari for him and I was nearly tripping, coming down the stairs carrying the heavy tea tray. So one day the tuition was discontinued, my father telling my tutor that I needed all the time available to do well in the school-exams. He went away nodding in agreement.

  After he left saying goodbye, I realised that I loved him. Lying on my narrow bed at night all I could think of was his face and his earlobes. What a fool I had been to have resisted my temptation to kiss his mouth. I wanted to go to Mrs Kunhappa and seek her advice. But I was afraid that she might only laugh at my infatuation. I talked to a much younger friend, a school-mate, and without hesitation she put me on a bus that took me as far as the place where he worked. You must tell him what you feel for him, my friend had said, helping me to climb into the bus.

  I was nervous and my blue school-tunic was clinging to my back soaked in perspiration. After I had got on to the bus I discovered that I had not enough money to return home. Fighting back my tears, I waited for the bus to stop and then jumped down. There was a courtyard which I had to cross before I could reach his room. A large square with one pockmarked statue of a God at its centre. By the time I reached the statue the rain began.

  In Bengal the rain falls suddenly with no warning like the hysterical tears of a woman who herself does not know why she must suddenly burst into tears. I was totally drenched in a minute. I tried unsuccessfully to bend my head beneath the God’s face to protect it from the lash of the rain. I did not know the name of the God. His face was pitted with the rains of centuries but his mouth was startlingly beautiful, an unformed smile softening the outlines. For a moment or two I stood there hugging him and then I remembered the other mouth, the pink earlobes and all the hours of hungering, and ran into his room, throwing open the door noisily, rudely.

  He was seated at his table with some yellowing files in front of him. He raised his eyes. Thumi? He asked me in Bengali.You? The rain swept the dust of the courtyard into his room. He rose from his chair and shut the door.

  I clung to his shirt-front sobbing uncontrollably. You are wet, you must change your clothes, he mumbled. He pulled my tunic over my head and wrung the water out through the window. His fingers were warm on my skin. Then with a handtowel he dried my hair and put the tunic on my body again. And, without another word he took me by taxi to my house and shook my hand at the gate.

  Aren’t you coming in, I asked him. No, not today, he said. That was the last time 1 saw him. But off and on I remembered the tenderness with which he pulled aside my dress and dried my body.

  Why did he not kiss me? Why didn’t he make love to me? I asked my friend in school why my first adult meeting with him gave me only disappointment. You never told him you loved him, she said. It is only when a man knows that a girl loves him that he kisses her. You got such a golden chance to have a love affair and all you did was cry and make a fool of yourself...

  19

  Mother’s Long Illness

  One of my teachers invited me once for lunch to her little flat at Harish Mukherji Road. I was fond of her and could not refuse, although my father was not too pleased about sending me alone to a stranger’s house.

  When I reached the place, my teacher held my hands in her own large ones and said that her husband had taken ill suddenly in the morning and that there was no time to inform me of a change in the programme. But my son will take you out for lunch, she said.

  Her son was eighteen and during other visits to their house, he had played on the piano for me. He was of medium height and had an aged lace with deep lines on his forehead and a wide mouth.

  I went with him to a place called Paletti’s and sat down on the balcony at a wrought-iron table. The waiters who had seen me there several times lunching with my father and his friends hovered around anxious to serve us. The lunch hour was yet to begin and the place was nearly empty. Beneath us a man wearing dark clothes strummed a guitar glancing at us now and then. My companion covered my hand with his. Do you recognise the tune, he asked. I felt all of a sudden poor. The cultural poverty of my home was appalling. Although my mother was a well-known poetess, there were few visitors who could talk earnestly about art or literature. My parents did not care for music either.

  I was an awkward savage. It is Bach, he said. Then hiding my face with my hands, I burst into tears. What is wrong, he asked me. The guitarist stopped his song. Did I say something to upset you, Kamala, my escort asked me. I shook my head. Take your soup, he said, it is turning cold.

  And, while eating our lunch, I told him that I lacked music in my life, and grace. l couldn’t live without music, he said. He lent me his checked handkerchief to wipe my face. You are red with crying, I don’t know what my mother would think, seeing you like this, he said.

  When I returned home I did not tell my mother what had happened. She never asked any questions. My father too was entirely without curiosity. They took us for granted and considered us mere puppets, moving our limbs according to the tugs they gave us. They did not stop for a moment to think that we had personalities that were developing independently like sturdy shoots of the banyan grow out of crevices in the walls of ancient fortresses.

  When my Austrian teacher returned home with her family, a Bengali Lady came to teach us English. She had a long face and nervous hands that kept running up her shoulder to pat the folds of her sari while she taught us Dickens. Her voice was strange, fractured in the middle and I thought it beautiful. It was easy for me to fall in love with her, for I had at that time a need to squander, but there were no takers. I
wrote a poem addressed to my teacher in which I likened her to a rose. I was a flower too and this odd attachment of a flower to another was tragic. When I went to her room for tea one afternoon, she told me that she had liked the poem. I felt myself blushing. I am going home to Malabar for a month, I told her. May I write you a letter?

  Then my mother fell ill with typhoid. For a month her homeopath treated her and finally, when she became unconscious, Dr. Denham White was called to save her life. She was in a coma for a month. After school I used to go into the room to see her lie there emaciated and still as a corpse. My father could not stand the mental strain and he fell ill too. We had to put him in the drawing room as the third bedroom was to be for the little child, my young sister. There was no Chloromycetine at that time to mitigate the harm typhoid did. All we could do was pray.

  A friend of my parents, Janaki Amma, came one day with a suitcase and said that she was going to look after us until our parents recovered. She was a professor at the Brabourne College and was the most vivacious lady I had ever met. She had a tinkling laugh that attracted people. She was a magnetic person. What I recollect now of that period in our life more than even the sight of my mother lying in a coma or my father weeping like a child in sheer helplessness, is the smell of the Cuticura ointment that Miss Janaki used to rub into her hair before going to bed, pacing up and down in our room like a vibrant tigress. At times I used to rest my head on her bosom while she lay reading a book. Then she would begin to tease me about my English teacher. I want to see this grand lady, Janaki Amma said. I want to see this person who has cast such a spell on you. If you promise not to laugh I shall introduce her to you one day, I said. I cannot bear it if you laugh at her...