My Story

by Kamala Das

  None had loved me as deeply as my grandmother. But within a week after her death, I fell in love with an extremely handsome young man who walked with me from the Khar gymkhana where I had gone in the evening to play tennis. The evening’s sun lit up his grey eyes. The gloss of his skin and the beauty of his smile made me feel all of a sudden so awestruck, so humble...

  We moved to a cottage near the sea facing the Cuffe Parade in the gaudy month of June when the trees were all in bloom and the yellow butterflies were all over the tiny lawn. Behind the two cottages which were identical was a six-storeyed building called the Dhunastra which was old and vacant. The whole estate belonged to the Reserve Bank of India who were my husband’s employers. It stretched from the crowded Wodehouse Road to the lonely Cuffe Parade, beyond which in those days lay marshy land and the gurgling sea. There was a dirt road that led up to the sea but we seldom went near its turbulence, fearing the harsh winds that rose from it at high tide.

  Our new home had a porch screened off with creepers, a drawing room full of books, and two bedrooms. From my bedroom I could hear the iron gate open and the gravel grate under the feet of visitors who came to see us. We had few friends. There were camelias growing under my window. From my bed I could watch my children play on the lawn chasing butterflies.

  My days were filled with incredible sweetness. On the porch the Rangoon creepers bloomed, the tender pink looking white in the evening’s shadows. I hung a brass lamp in the porch and lit it every evening.

  One evening when I was seated on the top step of the porch, the grey-eyed friend came to sit at my feet. His lips had a tremor which delighted me. I hope you are not falling in love with me, I said smiling down at him. He hid his face in the folds of my sari. Outside my sons were playing with the neighbour’s children. Inside our drawingroom my husband was working on his files...

  Soon after our house-move, my son Monoo was stricken with polio and had to be taken to Dr Patel’s polyclinic at Vile Parle for treatment. I was tense with anxiety. Hot formentations were given to the child who began to improve gradually, but the shuttling between Colaba and Vile Parle tired me out and ruined my looks. I burst into tears frequently for no reason at all.

  Six-year old Monoo asked me, why do you cry, Amma, am I going to die, and I embraced him shaking my head, vehemently saying no, no, no. One day my handsome friend visited us at the hospital. My son was lying asleep. I could not talk. All I could do was cry, he held me close to his chest and kissed my wet eyes. Amy, I love you, he said, everything will be all right, my darling...

  Who was he to me? During that summer while the Gulmohurs burnt the edges of the sky, he dressed my hair with scented white flowers, plucking them from beneath my window. What did he want from me? Once or twice standing near him with his arms around my shoulders I whispered, I am yours, do with me as you will, make love to me... but he said, no, in my eyes you are a goddess, I shall not dishonour your body...

  Today at Nariman Point the tall buildings crowd one another. But when I was young and in love with a grey-eyed man it was a marshy waste. We used to walk aimlessly along the quiet Panday Road or cross the Cuffe Parade to walk towards the sun. We did not have a place to rest. But in the glow of those evening suns, we felt that we were Gods who had lost their way and had strayed into an unkind planet...

  28

  A Greed for Love

  Pigeons on the ledge

  Of an afternoon dream

  Sit strangely silent

  The hot dust rises

  Falls on sun-peeled beaks

  On a city of fevered

  Lanes.

  The sun swells; then

  Swollen like a fruit

  It runs harsh silver threads

  Lengthwise my afternoon

  Dream.

  The old building that hid the crowded Wodehouse Road from our view was called Dhunastra and was one that was condemned by the Municipality.

  Its walls had deep cracks through which pale shoots of the peepul emerged during the rainy months. Its closed window-panes resembled eyes filmed over by cataract whenever the sun lit them up. On the ledges strutted pigeons who bruised my siesta with their moody whimpers.

  On some afternoons feeling restless I used to walk up to the old house, with the red gravel crunching under my sandals and go up the broken staircase that was the crooked spinal cord of the building. I opened several doors to stare at the darkness within and always, always, there were the invisible rodents scuttling about and the dust rising from the crevices on the floor.

  I liked to imagine that Dhunastra was a demon’s palace and that at night-time the residents emerged into familiar dimension to sing and dance. I used to tell such stories to my children and half believe in the imaginary beings myself.

  Had I not heard often on moonlit nights the jingle of anklets and the silvery laughter of celestial revellers rising out of the old Dhunastra, whenever the street outside was silent and no car moved or honked nearing the petrol station nearby...

  I yearned for adventure. I wanted to fling myself into danger. Once standing in the darkened doorway of a room I heard male voices speaking Konkani and saw the blurred outlines of a cauldron and some metal pipes and heard the hiss of steam.

  One of the men, a gold-toothed one, turned round and caught sight of me. Delicious moment of uncertainty! Were they going to kill me? In another moment I was gone running down the stairs with my heart thumping loudly in my chest.

  Later, our milkman told me that the bootleggers were making use of the deserted house for their activities and that I ought not to go there at all. They are killers, he said.

  My friend sent me from Delhi a letter that was so silly that it nearly disgusted me. It had fallen into the hands of my husband who read it out aloud to watch my reaction. If you wish to know how much I love you, the young man had written, count the stars in the sky. I blushed with embarassment for him.

  My husband was irked. Amy, I thought you were an intelligent girl. What on earth could have made you encourage such a stupid fellow? I could not tell him of the other’s grey eyes where on afternoons I had seen the sun fall like honey or of his pretty smile or of his dimpled cheeks. My husband removed his glasses to spare the further embarassment.

  Behind that one question of his lurked all the unasked ones like invisible arrows waiting to wound me. Don’t I feed you, clothe you and provide warm shelter? Don’t I discharge the connubial responsibilities competently whether you ask for love or not?

  My friend, when told of this incident, took leave of me with alacrity. I was a vessel overflowing with emotions. Therefore at that moment watching his back and his brisk walk I could only regard him as a coward. The only truth that mattered was that I had all that love to be given away.

  Like alms looking for a begging bowl was my love which only sought for it a receptacle. At the hour of worship even a stone becomes an idol. I was perhaps seeking a familiar face that blossomed like a blue lotus in the waters of my dreams. It was to get closer to that bodiless one that I approached other forms and lost my way. I may have gone astray, but not once did I forget my destination...

  Recently our family friend Ram Deshmukh told me of a tree in the university garden, which one morning sprouted blossoms heavy with scent. He had gone there for his morning walk and had stood still for a long while watching the bees crowding the flowers listening to their hum. He said that it was so much like a carnival. But spring’s festivals are so brief.

  When he returned to the spot the next morning there were neither the flowers nor the eager bees. The tree stood lonely as before and underneath, on the ground, lay the dead flowers. Deshmukh had felt distressed.

  When he told me this story I felt that I was going to burst into tears as beauty seemed to be only a brief season. Yes, I felt that I was that tree for a short while and that on the porch of our cottage facing the Cuffe Parade I had once shone briefly with the bloom of spring. But too soon the autumn had arrived. Too soon the bees had moved away.


  One day when I opened the door, there stood like a short-statured God a stranger dressed in off-white linen and wearing a flat Italian collar. I am Carlo he said. I am your pen-friend...

  I had stopped writing to all my friends after marriage and so felt greatly surprised to see him. He had glossy straight hair and thick red lips. His hooded eyes gave him enormous sex appeal but I did not feel attracted to him physically. He kissed my right cheek, holding with one hand my loose hair.

  Tidy up your curly hair, he cried, let me see your face clearly. When we went inside, hand in hand, my maidservant gave us a haughty glance. She distrusted all foreigners. Once when she had watched Nikita Khrushchev drive past our gate, she had nodded her head amiably and remarked, he does not a look like a foreigner, he looks very elegant. Who will say by looking at him that he is not a Nair?

  When Carlo came into my life all the flowers of the university garden had fallen. I was not a misty-eyed girl in love with love.

  29

  Woodhouse Road

  It was July, a July full of rain, and darkness

  Trapped like smoke in the hollows of the sky, and

  That lewd, steamy smell of rot rising out of earth.

  He walked one step ahead of me, the west wind leafing

  Through his hair, and I thought, if I could only want,

  Really, really want his love, I shall ride happiness,

  Great white steed, trampler of unsacred laws,

  If I could only dislodge the inherited

  Memory of a touch, I shall serve myself in

  Bedroom mirrors, dark fruit on silver platter,

  While he lies watching, fair conqueror of another’s

  Country. I shall polish the panes of his moody eyes,

  And in jealous moods, after bitter words and rage

  I shall wail in his nerves, as homeless cats wail

  From the rubble of a storm...

  Carlo was the only son of wealthy parents but I was the wife of a Government employee who struggled with the unpaid bills at the beginning of every month.

  He was urbane and sophisticated. The little village called Punnayurkulam which I had left behind clung to me like dirt under my finger nails. I was steeped in folklore and superstition. I wore around my neck a black thread strung through a talisman made for propitiating the angry Gods. I had four sarees in all and a couple of cotton blouses which I prettied up with embroidery.

  At the big hotels where Carlo took me for lunch, I had trouble handling the cutlery. There was nothing that I could do without a measure of awkwardness, but Carlo said, holding my hand tightly in his, please don’t change, please don’t change into a Bombay-bitch.

  One day while we were walking towards the Strand Book Shop he told me that we had common foster parents. Had we got grown up listening to the firm voices of Chekov, Flaubert, Maeterlink, Mansfield and Virginia Woolf ? The sounds that our real parents made in our presence had been so indistinct while the dead ones filled our ears with their philosophy. Isabella Duncan told us that love was best when free. We looked at each other in nervousness. Could we follow her example? Then I blushed purple. You can marry me, said Carlo. You can forget your grey-eyed friend, leave your indifferent husband and come with me to my country.

  We can probably have a love affair, I said remembering the peace of my nights and the faces of my little sons closed in sleep. I am not the divorcing kind... And I am not Vronsky, said Carlo laughing.

  I used to enjoy crossing the Woodhouse Road to walk past the shops and, seeing me always in my brown khaddar saree, the shop-men and the drivers loitering around mistook me for a comely ‘ayah’ and whistled at me. My children looked too fine to be mine whenever they walked with me, holding my hand with their podgy fingers.

  Beginning from the left there was the shop called the Pierottis where John sold us eclairs and watched us eat them, leaning against the counter. Then there was Mr Shroff ’s Radio shop where we stepped in just for a minute to say hello and then there was our dear Doctor’s dispensary with the young compounder perched on a high stool looking out, and after that there was for us a place to pause, the studio owned by handsome Zafar who photographed us often and talked about the girl Naseera with whom he was in love.

  Outside his studio were the couple who had married for love out of caste and had become pavement dwellers, a thin young man who made his living cleaning cars was from Madras and his fat Maharastrian bride. Diagonally across was the children’s school where my sons went to pick up their education most reluctantly every morning.

  Near it was the building where my father’s friend Varma lived. When my father was visiting us, Varma called us for tea to his flat which was on the sixth floor and had a terrace with granite ledges from which we admired the date-palms and the blue strip of sea that enclosed the Colaba point.

  Varma’s wife was handsome with long plaited hair and dark eyes. It was an old and dingy-looking flat but her beauty compensated for its drabness. She seemed to be in a bad temper on the day of the tea-party. Obviously, she thought us boorish and not quite her type.

  In those days the fair-complexioned folks had some kind of a superiority complex. The British had instilled in us certain mistaken notions of beauty and refinement. It was considered improper to wear colourful clothes for formal functions. The accent was always on mousiness. Ladies of high society preferred to wear clothes of light-grey or off-white, colours favoured by the British. Flamboyance in apparel was regarded as being crude.

  But the lower middle classes had a whale of a time dressing up their women in dark reds and dark greens so that they sparkled like gems in the afternoon sun. The women-labourers too wore dark colours and when they carried fat basins of clay or cement, they swung their hips with pride and sang in Telugu. Behind my cottage the old house was being taken down and a new one was being made on its site.

  For nearly a year our backyard was filled with wire nets and gravel and the two machines from Millars which made a loud crushing sound from ten to six. I enjoyed watching the building up of that new Dhunastra, making friends with the labourers and the overseers who came to us for a drink of water or for a betel leaf from the ayah’s box.

  The builders were from the villages of Andhra Pradesh. After six they were paid their wages by the overseer. Then the ladies crowded round the hydrant to take their bath, laughing loudly while their men watched them from a distance. Then the women kneaded the dough and made thick chapatis which everybody ate with crushed chillies and onions.

  The children who were in the day so covered with dust that they resembled dolls made out of straw and mud glistened like blue beetles after their evening baths. They climbed into their mothers’ laps and sucked at the teats although some of them were as old as five or six. They slept on charpoys in makeshift huts made of corrugated iron.

  On Sundays the men drank country liquor and returned to pick loud quarrels with their wives. Then we heard the sounds of weeping and closed our windows to spare them any embarrassment.

  July slid by and August arrived, but I still yearned for my grey-eyed friend. Am I ugly, I asked Carlo. No you are a pretty girl but the fellow is a cad, he said. We walked along the narrow dirt road leading to the sea and Carlo held me close to him with an arm around my waist. What is my future, he asked me. Have I a future at all?

  30

  A Misalliance

  Of late I have begun to feel a hunger

  To take in with greed, like a forest fire that

  Consumes and with each killing gains a wilder

  Brighter charm, all that comes my way. Bald child in

  Open pram, you think I only look, and you

  Too, slim lovers behind the tree and you, old

  Man with paper in your hand and sunlight in

  Your hair. My eyes lick at you like flames, my nerves

  Consume; and when I finish with you, in the

  Pram, near the tree, and on the park bench, I spit

  Out small heaps of ash, nothing else.
But in me

  The sights and smells and sounds shall thrive and go on

  And on and on In me shall sleep the baby

  That sat in prams, and sleep and wake and smile its

  Toothless smile. In me shall walk the lovers hand

  In hand and in me, whereelse, the old shall sit

  And feel the touch of sun. In me the street lamps

  Shall glimmer, the cabaret girls cavort, the

  Wedding drums resound, the eunuchs swirl coloured

  Skirts and sing sad songs of love, the wounded moan,

  And in me the dying mother with hopeful

  Eye shall gaze around seeking her child, now grown

  And gone away to other towns, other arms...

  In the year 1957, Cuffe Parade was a secluded street and all its houses, the two-storeyed mellow ones with handsome columns, Gothic arches and bay-windows, faced the sea and its marshy border.

  On the iron benches of the esplanade the aged inmates of the Parsi sanatorium used to sit still as statues, absorbing the sun. The sanatorium was a charitable institution where the poor could get a room for as little as five rupees per month. The majority of its inhabitants were old pensioners whose children, now grown up, did not want them in their modern flats. Every old face looked lonely to me. Often I sat near them hoping that they would begin to talk to me out of sheer loneliness, but none spoke.

  From its verandah the children quarrelled with their mothers and asked for money to buy the cotton candy and the balloons which the peddlers brought to the gate. Quite often there would be loud outbursts from the harried mothers and a few slaps for the children who set up a loud wail. The women wore white frocks with tiny floral prints when they went out and carried large string bags to bring back the groceries. All of them looked anaemic and there was in their limbs a limpness that reminded one of salamanders. I wrote several stories in Malayalam about them, following each of them in my imagination to their rooms hung with net curtains and old sepia-tinted photographs.