My Story

by Kamala Das

  After my mother recovered and then my father, our house fell apart. My mother went home to Malabar for rest carrying with her the little girl and my brothers. The elder brother went to Madras to study medicine. I was left alone with my father in Calcutta. Except for the two of us there were two servants and my father’s younger brother. It was a period of intense loneliness for me. I had none to turn to for advice. Nobody bothered about me. I was free to do what I liked. All that was expected of me was that I should be home before six to be present when my father returned from his office. After taking a cup of tea, my father went out again for a walk beside the lakes or for a visit to one of his friends. The cook was busy with his friends in his dingy domain or busy making love to the maid-servant. I felt myself to be an intruder in any room other than mine, where on a narrow bed among library books, I slept in uneasy sleep and woke up hearing the clatter of spoons in the tea tray being carried by the cook to my father’s room.

  I lost interest in lessons. Every morning I told myself that I must raise myself from the desolation of my life and escape, escape into another life and into another country. I was too diffident to venture out of my house alone. I stood beside our gate looking out, but the Lake Avenue in Calcutta is a lonely street and very few walk on it. Once or twice I saw a Chinaman on a bike with a large bundle and I called him in to see what he had to sell. I did not have any money to buy the nighties he spread out on the floor.

  One day a seller of georgette sarees came in and talked for an hour about Sind. He said his name was Lokumal. The Sonpapriwala stood at our gates, smiling into my eyes. Don’t you wish to eat sweets, ·he asked me in Bengali. I smiled and walked away. The neighbour’s little daughter bought sheets of the crunchy sweet and ate them, sitting on the wall separating our house.

  I am going to be a film star when I grow up, she told me. Her mother came to our house in the mornings to phone her lover when all of us were away. Our cook pretended not to understand English and stood by listening. He told me that she was an immoral woman. Do not talk to her if you meet her, he said. I have been asked to look after you and to protect you from danger, and I certainly shall not shirk my duty...

  20

  A Brush With Love

  A friend of my family had warned me against associating with an 18year-old girl residing in a College hostel, but when I went there with my mother, visiting her friends, I met her and felt instantly drawn towards her.

  She stood at the doorway smiling at us, revealing a fetching gap between her front teeth and a dimple on her right cheek. She was tall and sturdy with a tense masculine grace. Hello, she said. I wanted to leave my mother and go into the young lady’s room to make friends with her but I did not make any move to get up.

  I did not wish to displease my mother’s professor-friends who had cautioned me against the girl who was different from others. When her eyes held mine captive in a trance for a reason that I could not fathom, then I felt excited. Her skin was bronzed with the sun. She was like an animal that had exposed itself to the magnificent fury of the seasons, the suns, the rains and the harsh dry winds that sweep the sands of deserts...

  When summer arrived a year after my mother had gone away to Malabar, my father decided to send me home for my vacation with a batch of Professors and students in a large compartment which had ten berths. The longest berth was assigned to me probably because I was the youngest and the smallest in stature.

  As luck would have it, the girl I admired was with us, and when the lights were put out and the streaks of moonlight revealed the settled limbs of the sleepers she crept close to me and asked me if she could sleep on the same berth with me; I hate the upper berth, she said. She looked around first to see if any one was awake. Then she lay near me holding my body close to hers. Her fingers traced the outlines of my mouth with a gentleness that I had never dreamt of finding. She kissed my lips then, and whispered, you are so sweet, so very sweet, I have never met anyone so sweet, my darling, my little darling...

  It was the first kiss of its kind in my life. Perhaps my mother may have kissed me while I was an infant but after that none, not even my grandmother had bothered to kiss me. I was unnerved. I could hardly breathe. She kept stroking my hair and kissing my face and my throat all through that night while sleep came to me in snatches and with fever. You are feverish, she said, before dawn, your mouth is hot.

  In the morning a friend of our family received us at the station and took us to his house which was adjacent to the big mansion owned by the Raja of Kollengode, whose son, a Major in the army, had been a family friend while he was at Calcutta with special orderlies and all. Major Menon was amazed to see me grown up and teased me about the way I wore my sari. I was not accustomed to wearing sarees at that time but to travel south I had to wear clothes that hid my legs fully, for the ladies at Nalapat were conservative, puritanical and orthodox.

  Major Menon invited me and my gang to his place for lunch. My host’s family was also invited. When all had left for the lunch my friend took me to the bathroom and coaxed me to take a bath with her. Then she sprayed my body with the host’s Cuticura and dressed me. Both of us felt rather giddy with joy like honeymooners.

  When we reached Menon’s house, the lunch, a traditional Malayali feast was laid out in all its glory. There were the usual dishes, the Kalan, the Sambar, the Olan, the Aviyal, the Erissery and the condiments of mango and lime. Major Menon charmed the adults with his wit and solicitude. He seemed grateful to me for having brought into his home a bunch of charming ladies, all unmarried. My friend and I ate little, and after the meal while the grown-ups chatted in the dark lunge, the two of us wandered into the garden to walk under the shady woodapples.

  In the evening we boarded the train again to go southwards. My friend forced me to eat the biriyani from her plate. When the professors had settled down for the night she came to me to kiss me goodnight. The berth was narrow this time and so she could not lie with me. But she bent over me kissing me passionately bringing to my nostrils the smell of the engine’s smoke and the strange sulphur of her perspiration. When I walked away from the railway station where a relative had been sent to fetch me home, she waved at me but I did not wave back. I wished to put her out of my life, to bring back the order that I had in my mind before I met her. But at Nalapat, lying in my late grandfather’s room and staring at the tops of the old mango trees, it seemed to me that the older girl was haunting me with her voice and with her smile...

  After a week a relative of mine who used to be a regular contributor to the magazine, jointly edited for years by my brother and myself, arrived on the scene. He was working in the Reserve Bank of India at Bombay. Once he had sent me a poem entitled ‘A Bank Clerk’s Dreams’, which was very moving. Then again a story, slightly satirical, of a young man in Bombay called Prabhakar who did not know which direction to take, but let simple lust lead him.

  He wrote well. When he came on leave and visited us at Nalapat he gazed at me in astonishment. I was in a striped sari. You have become a lovely young woman, he said, I was expecting to see a child. When I was a little child and staying with my grandmother he had many a time lifted me by my shoulders to swing me round and round like a ceiling fan. He made me sit near him and he quoted from Huxley and Bertrand Russell. He was thin, walking with a stoop and had bad teeth. But he looked intellectual.

  My favourite author at that time was Oscar Wilde and my favourite poem the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ He talked about homosexuality with frankness. Many of us pass through that stage, he said. I was afraid that my grandmother might come and hear the uninhibited talk. When the sky darkened, he looked at it and rose to go. Will you walk with me to the hedge, he asked me. At the hedge, beside the Damson tree, he embraced me, and puzzled by his conduct I ran back to my house.

  That very night my grandmother came to my room and told me that I ought to marry him. Das is a very good young man and entirely without vices. Your parents and his mother feel that you two should get married soon
. What is the hurry, I asked her, knowing well that neither she nor anybody else of the older generation would ever speak the truth to a fifteen-year-old child.

  It had been clear to me that my home was broken up for incomprehensible reasons. My mother was living in Malabar while my father stayed on at Calcutta. It was not a complete family like everybody else’s. Whenever all of us got together and I began to feel secure, some cruel illogical destiny always rudely brought the edifice down like a house of cards. It was obvious that my father wished to retire and come away to settle down in Malabar with my mother. I was a burden and a responsibility neither my parents nor my grandmother could put up with for long. Therefore with the blessing of all, our marriage was fixed. Not yet, I said. Let me go back to Calcutta to finish my exam....

  Before I left for Calcutta, my relative pushed me into a dark corner behind a door and kissed me sloppily near my mouth. He crushed my breasts with his thick fingers. Don’t you love me, he asked me, don’t you like my touching you? I felt hurt and humiliated. All I said was “goodbye.”

  21

  An Arranged Marriage

  Returning to Calcutta after my engagement I became moody and my mind clouded over with doubts. Had I been reckless in accepting the proposal? He did not look healthy. Quoting effortlessly from Aldous Huxley was not a major accomplishment. Would he be a kind father to my children? Would he be considerate?

  My friends in Calcutta were shocked to hear of the engagement. You are only a child, they said. You should complete your education before thinking of marriage. It is all fixed, I told them, so let us not waste time discussing it.

  My father invited my fiance to Calcutta for a week’s stay, and when he came from Bombay and got off the plane wearing a woollen suit and his face unshaven, I watched him with distaste, leaning against the railings at Dum Dum. In the car on our way home, he pressed my fingers amorously and asked me if I had changed. The driver was watching us in the rear-view mirror with amusement.

  My father had bought tickets for us for every afternoon show and had booked tables at the best hotels for our meals. We were left alone and probably my father thought that I would enjoy being alone with the young man. Wherever he found me alone in a room, he began to plead with me to bare my breasts and if I did not, he turned brutal and crude. His hands bruised my body and left blue and red marks on the skin. He told me of the sexual exploits he had shared with some of the maidservants in his house in Malabar. The poor women born of a peasant stock were accustomed to a clumsy rapid mating like that of the birds, for their men had very little time to spare for niceties of any kind since all the incomplete chores waited for them, the hoeing the ploughing, the chopping of firewood and the feeding of livestock.

  My cousin asked me why I was cold and frigid. I did not know what sexual desire meant, not having experienced it even once. Don’t you feel any passion for me, he asked me. I don’t know, I said simply and honestly. It was a disappointing week for him and for me. I had expected him to take me in his arms and stroke my face, my hair, my hands and whisper loving words. I had expected him to be all that I wanted my father to be, and my mother. I wanted conversation, companionship and warmth. Sex was far from my thoughts. I had hoped that he would remove with one sweep of his benign arms the loneliness of my life...

  When he went back to Bombay, my father told me that he was happy to see that I had found my mate. The word mate with its earthy connotations made me uneasy. I felt lost and unhappy. I could not tell my father that I had hoped for a more tranquil relationship with a hand on my hair and a voice in my ear, telling me that everything was going to be all right for me. I had no need at all for rough hands riding up my skirts or tearing up my brassiere.

  I did not know whom to turn to for consolation. On a sudden impulse I phoned my girl-friend at the hostel. She was surprised to hear my voice. I thought you had forgotten me, she said. I invited her to my house. She came to spend a Sunday with me and together we cleaned out our bookcases and dusted the books. Only once she kissed me. Our eyes were watering and the dust had swollen our lips. Can’t you take me away from here, I asked her. Not for another four years, she said. I must complete my studies, she said. Then holding me close to her she rubbed her cheek against mine.

  When I put her out of my mind I put aside my self-pity too. It would not do to dream of a different kind of life. My life had been planned and its course charted by my parents and relatives. I was to be the victim of a young man’s carnal hunger and perhaps, out of our union, there would be born a few children. I would be a middle-class housewife, and walk along the vegetable shop carrying a string bag and wearing faded chappals on my feet. I would beat my thin children when they asked for expensive toys, and make them scream out for mercy. I would wash my husband’s cheap underwear and hang it out to dry in the balcony like some kind of a national flag, with wifely pride...

  During that morose month a family friend arrived with her little daughter and her 18 year-old son to stay as house guests for a month. The lady had several friends in the city and visiting them kept her busy. The son was with me all the time taking my photographs with a camera that his uncle, an ambassador, had brought for him from China, and singing Hindi film songs. He took me to the Victoria Memorial and posed me against trees and against the flowing water.

  I felt beautiful when he was with me, arranging my limbs shyly with a blush pinking his cheeks. He was stocky and fair-skinned. He had taken part in revolutionary activities and was a student-leader. What are you planning to be, I asked him. I shall graduate and then get out of the damn country, he said. He was unhappy at home. He found in me a kindred soul. You are getting married, he said one day; I wonder why you are in such a hurry. I want to escape too, I said. He nodded. We sat for hours on the grass chewing the wheat grass and sharing a silence that was as gentle as the winter’s sun. My cook told me that together we made an excellent couple. Marry this young man, he told me. He is young and healthy. But he has no job. How will he maintain me, I asked him. All girls are the same, said the cook. They only think of money.

  When the young man reached his home town, he wrote that he would come to attend my wedding. I did not reply to his letter.

  I got married in the month of February. The mango trees were in brown bloom and the blue bees flew about humming in the sun. All the flowering trees were in bloom including the ancient Nirmatala which perfumed even the inner rooms with its spring.

  For days before the wedding the servants and field-hands dug up the clumps of grass and smoothed down the yards filling the gorges and taming boundaries. They constructed a shamiana with thatched palm leaves and decorated it with garlands of white paper flowers. They spread unbleached linen on the reed mats and wrapped the pillars with coloured paper. Beyond that in the garden they made a small pond and filled it with lotuses that looked wilted on the wedding day. All the guests commented on the magnificence of the garden where little mango trees with ripe fruits had been uprooted and planted in a row. My father beamed with pleasure. Everyone talked of it as the most expensive wedding of the year. Behind the house in the open yard the cooks from Calicut had set up their own tents and were busy making sweets and the traditional dishes of a Nair wedding. One of the rooms contained nothing but laddoos. Another contained fruits.

  All this glut made me feel cheap and uncomfortable. Marriage meant nothing more than a show of wealth to families like ours. It was enough to proclaim to the friends that the father had spent half a lakh on its preparations. The bride was unimportant and her happiness a minor issue. There was nothing remotely Gandhian about my wedding. On the night after the wedding there was to be a Kathakali show for which the best players had been brought from Kalamandalam. When I remarked cynically on the extravagance, my grandmother scolded me. You ought to feel grateful to your father for arranging such a lavish wedding for you, she said. Go up to your room and rest there. I do not want our relatives to think that the bride is a tomboy.

  I was too excited by the noise and the
bustle to hide in my room looking demure and shy. I hid myself in the servents' quarters. It was obvious to me that I did not at all match the grandeur of the marquee and the garden. The backdrop deserved a more elegant bride, one who was glamorous and beautiful. A dynamo lit up all the coloured bulbs hanging from the trees and on the eve of the wedding I ran with other children all over the garden playing hide and seek noisily while our older relatives slept out their fatigue lying on the new mats spread out on the cool floor of the hall.

  When I finally went up to sleep, the clock in the hall chimed four times and my mother rose from her bed for the morning prayer. Two hours later my grandmother woke me up and sent me for a bath. You are the bride, she said, people should not see you before your bath. Wear a good saree and go to the temple for your prayers, she said and when I opened my eyes wide and gazed at her, her eyes slowly filled up with tears. Are you crying, I asked her. Why should I cry, child, she said, today is a happy day for all of us.

  I pushed my way through strangers and went in to bathe. My maidservant had placed in the bathroom two pots of oil, some lentil paste and the shampoo made of the leaves of the hibiscus. I merely washed myself with a soap in a hurry and dressed myself in a white sari.

  The young relatives cried out in disappointment; you don’t look a bride, you are too plain to be a bride, they exclaimed.

  22

  The Brutality of Sex

  What I remember most of my marriage day was that I let down my eighteen-year-old friend who had made promise to sit near him during the evening’s Kathakali show. The Kathakali started after everyone had had dinner and the moon was right above our house, circular and blazing.

  My house emptied itself of people and I found myself alone with my husband who told me that it was not his intention to see the Kathakali. Let us stay at home, he said pulling me to the bedroom where the gifts we had received lay scattered on the floor and the bedsheet was crumpled and untidy. The servants had forgotten to arrange the room before leaving for the show.