My Story

by Kamala Das

  I took off my sari which was of heavy gold tissue and sat on the bed. Then without warning he fell on me, surprising me by the extreme brutality of the attack. I tried unsuccessfully to climb out of his embrace. Then bathed in perspiration and with my heart palpitating wildly, I begged him to think of God. This is our wedding night, we should first pray to Krishna I said. He stared at me in disbelief. Was I mad?

  The rape was unsuccessful but he comforted me when I expressed my fear that I was perhaps not equipped for sexual congress. Perhaps I am not normal, perhaps I am only a hermaphrodite, I said, and in pity he held me close to him and said, even if that is so, we shall be happy living together... Again and again throughout that unhappy night he hurt me and all the while the Kathakali drums throbbed dully against our window and the singers sang of Damayanti’s plight in the jungle.

  By morning I could hardly move my limbs but when my mother woke me up at six to meet the guests who were going away I slid down the stairs and saw my friend with the camera slung over his shoulder looking up at me. My eyes filled with tears but I could not speak. He looked at me for a minute or two and without a word went his way.

  We did not get away for a honeymoon. My husband came from a joint family and had several young cousins who liked to flock around him admiringly. He wanted to bask in their love and remain where he was. I was to become just another of his admirers, one more relative to submit to his clumsy fondling. I remained a virgin for nearly a fortnight after my marriage. He grew tired of the physical resistance which had nothing to do with my inclinations.

  I was at that time deeply in love with him and would have undergone any torture to be able to please him, but my body was immature and not ready for lovemaking. For him such a body was an embarrassment, veteran that he was in the rowdy ways of sex which he had practised with the maids who worked for his family.

  I thought then that love was flowers in the hair, it was the yellow moon lighting up a familiar face and soft words whispered in the ear... At the end of the month, experiencing rejection, jealousy and bitterness I grew old suddenly, my face changed from a child’s to a woman’s and my limbs were sore and fatigued. Then we went to Bombay to stay with his friends who were unmarried, in a little flat called ‘Deepak’ at Santa Cruz, where we were given permission to sleep in the sitting room at midnight after card-playing visitors had left. Before dawn I rose to wash my face and to fold up my mattress before the others came into the room to read the newspaper which was thrown at five from the road beyond the iron gate.

  The men ate their breakfast of rice and hot curry at nine, calling it lunch and afterwards went to work, leaving me alone with the cook who wandered around until five when he returned to receive his masters and give them tea. I was hungry and miserable during those days, and when I became pregnant, the continual vomiting made me worse.

  One day I fainted in the bathroom and lay there on the damp floor for a while, becoming conscious much later feeling the water flowing beneath my head, and hearing its swishing sounds. I lost weight rapidly. I did not get enough sleep at night for my husband took me several times with a vengeance and in the day there was no food for twelve hours after that chilli-laden meal of rice and curry.

  One day my father arrived from Calcutta on some official work and came from Taj Mahal Hotel where he was staying to see me. He took me out to the Victoria Garden Zoo for he knew that I was fond of seeing animals, and together we sat on the circular wall of the pond where the alligators resided and he asked me why I looked so thin. I thought you would put on some weight after marriage, he said. I wished then to cry and to tell him that he had miscalculated and that I ought not to have married the one I did, but I could not bring myself to hurt him.

  My father was an autocrat and if he went wrong in his decisions he did not want ever to hear about it. I was mature enough then to want to protect this faith in himself. After an hour he took me to a shop and bought me a Singer Sewing Machine.

  In the evenings my husband took me for walks but my legs used to hurt, hungry that I was and weak with vomitings. I was not much of a companion for him. Any sign of kindness from people made me weep like a child. He grew weary of my temperament very soon and one day suggested that I go home to my grandmother for rest. I disliked the idea, for seeing him and sleeping near him had become precious to me. I cannot get on without you, I said. But his friends who felt pity for my condition persuaded him to send me home.

  Tearing myself away from the man who did not ever learn to love me, I went back to Malabar with an uncle who had been sent to take me home. My grandmother wept when she saw me. She called an Ayurvedic physician to get me examined for illnesses which may have seized me in Bombay. Under his treatment and in the care of my grandmother, I forgot my miserable honeymoon days and became healthy once more.

  In the mornings I went into the prayer room with my grandmother and sat for an hour listening to her read the Bhagavatham and the Gita. One day I felt a quickening in my womb and knew that my child had become a live being. My son is moving, I whispered to my grandmother. How do you know it is a son, asked my grandmother, smiling at me. It will be a son and he will look like Krishna, I told her.

  Through the smoke of the incense I saw the beauteous smile of my Krishna. Always, always, I shall love you I told him, not speaking aloud but willing Him to hear me, only you will be my husband, only your horoscope will match with mine...

  23

  Like a Toy, a Son

  The best toy that can be given to a teenaged girl is a live baby, a soft, smooth-skinned doll that she can bathe, powder and suckle to sleep.

  When the labour began, I put old records on the gramophone and chatted courageously with my cousins who had come to watch me have the baby. All of them sat outside my door, leaning against the verandah wall. The most excited of all was my younger brother who kept asking me every minute or so if the baby was coming out.

  I was not prepared for the great pain that finally brought the baby sliding along my left thigh, and I could not smother my scream. But the doctor who was my friend Raji’s father patted me on my cheek and said, “Well done Joe, you have a lovely little son.”

  Everybody flocked in then to admire the little one who had a high forehead and a milky skin. I shrieked with delight when I saw him for the first time. I shall call him Monoo, I said. He looks so much like Lord Byron... In those days I had on my dressing table a photo of the dead poet. I had wanted my son to look like him. There was something wrong with Monoo’s foot when he was born. It used to fold up like an unused wing against his leg. Even the flaw delighted me. Did not Byron have a defective foot too?

  My grandmother repaired the foot with daily massage. My grandmother and my mother-in-law sat for hours on the southern portico fondling the child and admiring his charms. Now and then I would pause in my games to rush to my son and feed him at my breast. I did not wish to give him anything other than the nourishment that I held in my body. He thrived on it and grew plump and lovely.

  Having him at my side during the night reminded me of my husband and I wrote asking him to come home on leave. When he arrived, he grew disgusted with the child who woke up several times during the night to take his feed. Take him away to your grandmother’s room, he cried angrily. I cannot sleep with all this noise and fussing. The baby clung to me and I sensed that he too felt the humiliation of our position.

  I took him to my grandmother and the three of us slept soundly on her single mattress laid out on the floor. Before I fell asleep I told my grandmother that I should have done better at Arithmetic in school. Why do you say this now, asked my grandmother. Then I wouldn’t have been married off so soon, I said. She laughed covering me and my son with a shawl gently.

  During his stay in Malabar, he spent most of his time with his cousins and his sister-in-law, paying me little attention and never bothering to converse with me. At night he was like a chieftain who collected the taxes due to him from his vassal, simply and without exhilaration. All the Parija
ta that I wove in my curly hair was wasted. The taking was brutal and brief. The only topic of conversation that delighted him was sex and I was ignorant in the study of it. I did not have any sex-appeal either. I was thin and my swollen breasts resembled a papaya tree. How much more voluptuous were my maidservants who took for my husband his bath-water and his change of clothes while he waited impatiently in the dark bathroom at Nalapat!

  I yearned for a kind word, a glance in my direction. It became obvious to me that my husband had wished to marry me only because of my social status and the possibility of financial gain. A coldness took hold of my heart then. I knew then that if love was what I had looked for in marriage I would have to look for it outside its legal orbit. I wanted to be given an identity that was lovable.

  When he returned to Bombay the first letter that he wrote was not to me but to a girl-cousin who had allowed him to hug her while he walked towards my home in the evenings. I made up my mind to be unfaithful to him, at least physically.

  My father was at that time getting built a modern house only a few yards away from the old Nalapat House, for he was a non-vegetarian and wanted such fare that could never be allowed in the Nalapat kitchen. Among the workers there was a young bricklayer who had come from another village on contract. He was extremely handsome. My cousins and I kept visiting the site to watch him at work. He used to make indecent suggestions to my maidservant which she confided in me. I thought it a good idea to have him as a pet.

  When the work was nearly over I sent my maidservant to the place where he was staying, with a gold coin as my gift and an invitation to meet me near the shrine of the Bhagavati in the evening after moonrise. But my maid came back to tell me that he had already left for his village. I did not know his address. Find out where he lives and get him back to this village, I told her. I shall give you my gold chain if you get him this week...

  I was ready for love. Ripe for a sexual banquet. It showed in the way I walked and in my voice that had gradually ceased resembling a boy’s. A cousin of ours one day grabbed me when I was climbing the stairs whispering, “You are so beautiful” and although I did not believe him, in sheer gratitude I let him hold me in his arms for a couple of minutes. He panted with his emotion. When he kissed me on my mouth, I disliked the smell of his stale mouth.

  That was probably the most bewitching spring of my life. The Bhajans of Meera on my gramophone, amorous cousins and the clusters of Nirmatala at the snakeshrine. And, in the night the moon grazing at the outlines of my baby-son’s face and his fingers at my breast. My husband faded into an unreal figure, became a blush on the horizon after the sun had set. I had stopped loving him. When his letters came, I put them away in a drawer. He wrote mostly about a friend of his who stayed at the Y.M.C.A. with him and was his constant companion. You will like him very much when you meet him, he wrote.

  Ultimately it was decided that I must join my husband and resume my marital life. My cousins were heartbroken. No more singing and no more walking in the evenings. My mother-in-law and two servants accompanied me to Bombay where a small flat had been bought at Hari Nivas near Dadar for all of us to stay in. It had a common verandah where the neighbour’s servants stood peering into our rooms to see if we were modestly dressed while relaxing at home. This irked my mother-in-law.

  She was a member of one of the wealthiest joint families in Malabar and was also its eldest lady. The city’s shabby methods of collecting substandard grains from the ration shops and living shut up in little nests of concrete in the air seemed to her revolting. She was used to hordes of servants obeying her slightest whim.

  In Bombay at Hari Nivas near the Citylight cinema on a street smelling of buffalo urine she was merely an old woman, a Madrasi lady whose skin was fair as a Kashmiri’s, someone the children and the servants could stare at when there was nothing better to do and the evenings were long.

  24

  Mental Depression

  My mother-in-law grew visibly upset whenever anyone looked in through our windows. She grumbled about the inconveniences of our flat which included the elderly maidservant who had turned disobedient, the cook who cheated at accounts and the proximity of girls who lured me out of my home to play a version of hopscotch with them on the terrace.

  Our next-door neighbours were the Marathes whose second daughter at that time was a popular film actress with a busy schedule. Her name was Usha Kiran. Her two younger sisters became my dear friends, and during the four weeks preceding the Ganesh festival, we rehearsed on the terrace for hours every evening, the many items of entertainment such as the Gujarati Garba, the Punjabi Bhangra and the Hindi play.

  The youngest girl, Pushpa, was gifted with a rich, vibrant voice. She taught me the Marathi filmsong, “Nachatho Varuni Anand... Vachavi Pava Govind...” In their company I forgot the bitterness of life and became for a few short hours the carefree person that I was before I came to Bombay.

  My mother-in-law sulked, for she felt that I was spending too much time away from my child and my domestic responsibilities. Whenever she said disgruntled things, my husband grew angry, and his anger was directed against me and the baby. The servants could not get on with my mother-in-law. We are going back to Malabar, they said everyday, we cannot bear such nagging. My husband was also missing his evenings with the young man at the Y.M.C.A., and with me he was terse and impatient.

  One day, being able to bear it no longer, I sent the cook to a chemist’s shop for a dozen tablets of barbiturates. No chemist would give them without a doctor’s prescription. The cook, on his return, empty-handed, told me with tears in his eyes that he too would take some tablets if I decided to kill myself. Then the maidservant came up to me and said that she was planning to get run over by a bus. I cannot live on like this, she said. All three of us were miserable. My husband stopped me from going up to the terrace for the rehearsals in the evening. You must remember you are a wife and mother, he said. My friends passing our window glanced at me with pity in their eyes.

  Then I settled down to housekeeping and sewed the buttons on and darned our old garments all through the hot afternoons. In the evening I brought for my husband his tea and a plate of snacks. I kept myself busy with dreary housework while my spirit protested and cried, get out of this trap, escape... In the mornings when my husband left for work, I ran behind him and stood near the corner of the road where the cows were loitering and the crows pulled out fishbones from the open garbage boxes. Then I watched him walk away with his briefcase towards the railway station to catch the first train to Churchgate. It was only after my return that I bathed or changed my dress.

  Often, from behind the house and from the dirty seashore, the smell of rotting fish would enter our back verandah, from which I watched a municipal school’s children parade in the morning singing a patriotic song and the huts of the bootleggers who buried their wares in tins at night and slept on charpoys in the day, while the sun climbing over them, burnt their skin black. The bootleggers were full of distrust for strangers and once or twice when I went strolling past their colony, they turned their hostile eyes towards me.

  Of the many huts one was bigger and its occupants were better dressed. The man was short and handsome with a yellow skin. His dress was a white singlet and a pair of khaki shorts but they were washed every day by his wife who seemed to love working for him. She used to bring for him glasses of milk while he lay on a charpoy under a tree dozing. She fed him well and although from my height I could not hear what she was telling him, by the look on her face, I could make out that they were lovewords. He was silent and sullen as all men are when they are being loved too deeply by a woman. He used to gaze at her indifferently while she turned her back on him and walked back to their hut.

  Everybody in that colony showed him respect, even the police constables who used to come in trucks off and on to poke the ground with long iron rods to see if anything had been buried there. He would laugh aloud, seeing them at it. On some days when he was not very sleepy, he would pl
ay with his little sons throwing them in the air and catching them while they chortled with joy. He liked to watch his wife washing their rounded bodies near the hydrant soaping them and rubbing hard until they turned a burnished copper. He was obviously proud of his progeny.

  One day while I stood leaning over the railings of my verandah watching him sleep, he opened his eyes all of a sudden and looked at me. They were eyes reddened with sleep and desire. I felt uneasy while they grazed my limbs and withdrew to my room in a hurry. One morning we woke up hearing a commotion in the backyard and saw the police take him away in their truck. They had at last found the liquor which he had made at night in his hut and stored in two wooden barrels. His wife ran behind the truck with· the end of her pink sari flying for a few yards, but he did not once look at her. He sat on one of the barrels looking like a king, his handsome face impassive and cold.

  When my mother-in-law’s dissatisfaction increased and the servant became constant grumblers, my husband decided to send us all back to Malabar. The decision was welcomed by all. One of his uncles came to Bombay to take us home. He was to stay for three days only but, being a dandy, had got made two suits of sharkskin for the Bombay trip. He was a great one for girls, a man with a reputation and so the first thing he wanted to know from me was the address of a nurse named Meenakshi who had come to Bombay from our village to take up a job in one of the city hospitals.

  I did not know such a person. He was very disappointed, but with determination went out each morning to enquire at every hospital for Meenakshi, for whom he ·had made such delicious plans and also the pink sharkskin suits.