My Story

by Kamala Das

  When the Mathrubhumi published my stories, I began to get letters from my readers in Bombay who expressed their admiration. Each letter gave me such a thrill. I had then evolved a technique of following each of my characters for the duration of an hour and writing down his or her thoughts. I liked to study people, for I loved them tremendously.

  Often my husband would tell our doctor who was a Parsi that I was writing too many stories about his community, and laughing, Dr Masani would warn me that the Parsi Panchayat would soon hear of it and take to task. How little he knew of the tenderness with which I approached each of my characters.

  At about that time my brother, Dr. Mohandas, decided to marry a pretty relative of ours. Before I left alone to attend the wedding catching the plane to Cochin, I walked into the new beauty parlour that had been opened by Dhun Bhilpodiwala to see if they could do something to heal my pimples. There was a foreigner, possibly a Pole, named Val who steamed my face and squeezed out the pimples. Then she bleached my face and sent me up to the loft where a young lady called Miss Master sat waiting to trim my hair. I was astonished at the change in my looks and to go with the new look, I bought a blue silk saree with a red and gold border.

  How proudly I walked towards the plane while my hair swung this way, that way and the down on my upper lip, bleached by peroxide, gleamed golden in the morning sun. As luck would have it, I sat next to a gentleman who was reading a poem written by me and published in the Illustrated Weekly of India. When in the course of conversation I told him that I was the K. Das who had written the poem, he was so delighted that he offered me as a gift a typewriter which graciously but reluctantly I declined to accept. You are a stranger, I told him. But every friend was once a stranger, he said, displaying a smile shabbied by yellow, uneven teeth.

  A day after my brother’s wedding, I returned to Bombay. It was raining hard and the time was late at night. My husband had not come to the airport to receive me. I felt lost and unwanted. But I spotted a lady who had been a friend of my family in Calcutta and got her to reach me home in her car. When I went into my house,my children were fast asleep and my husband lazily told me that I was late.

  Why didn’t you come to the airport, I asked him. Don’t you love me at all? I sobbed, holding him close to me. He said I am tired and sleepy, we shall talk in the morning tomorrow...

  In the same year my son Monoo fell ill with pleurisy. He started to spit toffee-coloured phlegm which I collected in towels and later washed out by dipping them in hot water. It was sticky like chewed gum. Our doctor gave him injections of Streptomycine everyday. The cough seemed endless. Even while he slept peacefully, it seemed to me that I was hearing it.

  Often at night he would wake out of sleep, leaping up, unable to breathe while his face turned ashen and his eyes widened in fear. But I walked to the Colaba book stores every evening to get him comics, so that he would not mind so much the discomforts of his illness. We had an oxygen cylinder ready at his bedside which I operated each time he got an attack of disnoea. When the attack would subside, he would turn to me and embrace me. Am I going to die, Amma, he would ask me, and I would hold him tight and say, shaking my head, no no no...

  When Monoo recovered, my thoughts again turned to love, art and literature. I read profusely, lying unbathed in the morning with my face greasy and my hair done in two tight plaits. It was only in the evening that I bothered to pretty myself up a little. I was fond of oil-baths, but too lazy to bathe myself. Often I would make the old woman rub my body with Ayurvedic oils while I sat calmly on the bathroom’s wooden seat reading a novel. My children loved to watch me take such baths.

  My favourite oil was the Dinesavalyadi which I used to get by post from the famous Arya Vaidyasala at Kottakkal. My husband thought that it had the sexiest scent of all. He was obsessed with sex. If it was not sex, it was the Co-operative Movement in India and both these bored me. But I endured both, knowing that there was no escape from either. I even learnt to pretend an interest that I never once really felt.

  As my boss says, said my husband one day, the Co-operative Movement has failed, but the Co-operative Movement must succeed. I thought that I would burst out laughing. Who is your boss, I asked him. It is Venkatappiah, formerly of the I.C.S. Have you not heard of him?

  My husband was furious. He felt that I was not up-to-date with the happenings in the field of co-operation. You have not once touched the prestigious report of Rural Credit Survey Committee, he said. But I let you make love to me every night, I said, isn’t that good enough?

  31

  A Holiday at Panchgani

  There was a time when our lusts were

  Like multicoloured flags of no

  Particular country. We lay

  On bed, glassy-eyed, fatigued, just

  The toys dead children leave behind

  And, we asked each other, what is

  The use, what is the bloody use?

  That was the only kind of love,

  This hacking at each other’s parts

  Like convicts hacking, breaking clods

  At noon. We were earth under hot

  Sun. There was a burning in our

  Veins and the cool mountain nights did

  Nothing to lessen heat. When he

  And I were one, we were neither

  Male or female. There were no more

  Words left, all words lay imprisoned

  In the ageing arms of night. In

  Darkness we grew, as in silence

  We sang, each note rising out of

  Sea, out of wind, out of earth and

  Out of each sad night like an ache...

  In the off-season of November when guests were few and the hotel-rates low, my husband took me and the little boys to Panchgani for a holiday and settled us in a hotel named Prospect.

  It was a rambling bungalow with faded prints of stallions and little men in riding habits sporting menacing moustaches, all hanging slightly askew from the dingy walls of its lounge.

  It was situated on the very top of a hill, and while we drove up in a taxi, going round and round along the narrow red road that hugged the mountain range, we heard the sound of children’s laughter rising from the valley and saw the red berries in the thickets glow like rubies in the evening sun. Tall grey birches lined with walls of the hotel, trees with a chalky white bark peeling in layers and triangular, notched leaves, and to the left lay the woods, dark, unexplored and waiting for us with its strange aroma. There was gravel in the courtyard.

  We were given two rooms, a large bathroom with a leaking faucet and a verandah where we sat on cane chairs and drank our first cup of tea. The children ate buttered toast and Britannia biscuits. The sounds from the valley were carried up to our verandah each time a breeze blew. We heard the bells of the ox cart and the clatter of their wheels.

  It is too late to go down to the valley today, my husband said, I am tired and very very hungry. The hotel boy brought us an early dinner, a brown unidentifiable soup, mutton stew, cutlets and apricot curry. We carried the children’s bed into our room and slept soundly under the red blankets the hotel had lent us. At night just before I drifted into deep sleep, I thought I heard the hoot of a screech owl and the deep sough of the wind trapped in the woods.

  In the morning one of the hotel boys woke us by knocking on our door and then we found the mountain dawn, wrapped in the gauze of mist, a delight. After breakfast we dressed in thick woollens and went down to see the bazaar which was at the base. The children trotted on ponies while we walked behind them. I could never keep pace with my husband who did not pause to pick ferns, to smell them or the berries, to take a tiny tentative bite as I did. So he walked in silence a few yards ahead of me. The market was lined with shops and sold walking sticks made out of the blond wood of the birch and with handles shaped to look like dogs’ heads, and salad bowls with spoons.

  A shoemaker named Salunke followed us back to the hotel where he measured the feet of our children to make for them shoes
of the sambar leather, softer than even suede and mustard-coloured. Tattooed women came to the hotel bearing flat baskets filled with fresh raspberries laid out on their beds of moss. They had discoloured teeth which they revealed to us when they smiled, after we had lost in the bargaining.

  In the afternoon everybody including the servants of the hotel had a short siesta, and I picked this hour to walk to the woods where, besides the flowers I knew and recognised, the wild cyclamen, the pickerels, the mountain laurels, the narcissus and the exotic rayed lycoris, grew large unfamiliars, savage ones that smelt of slaughter houses and of blood, which I picked in bunches to tie upside down in a dark cupboard for drying (when we packed up to leave after a month, the flowers were dry and held their bright colours intact). From every tree the squirrels and the humming birds made soft utterances and the woodcock stirred in the undergrowth while I walked through the fallen leaves.

  When 1 returned to the hotel, I wrote a letter inviting my sons, Monoo and Chinnen, to a tea party that was to take place on Saturday under the largest tree near the hotel’s wall. I signed my name as Squirrel, and immediately posted it. When my children received the letter, they clapped their hands in joy. When Saturday came, I put them to sleep after lunch and arranged under the tree paper plates full of pastry and almonds. At four I woke up the boys and dressed them in their red cardigans and took them for the party.

  Thy looked about for their hosts who were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they don’t trust you, I said. The cakes were good and the nuts too. But Monoo was a little disappointed. You must teach me the bird language and the squirrel language in a hurry, Amma, he said. My sons then used to believe that I could converse well with birds and animals. Even my husband behaved occasionally as if he believed in my ability to communicate with the animals. Whenever a stray dog came near us wagging its tail, he used to say to me, Amy, please ask this friend of yours to move away, you know I can’t stand dogs...

  The walls of the hotel had a mysterious dampness which was caused probably by the many slugs that crawled slowly, very slowly, up and down with only their little horns visibly moving. They were big and muddy yellow. After seeing them I could never tackle the brown soup that always preceded the dinner. The soup was delicious and my husband thought me silly to have suspected any connection between its mysteriousness and the presence of the slugs.

  During that time my menstrual periods had become irregular and painful. This prevented me from going down to the valley every day with my family. So I sat on the front steps of the hotel, my legs dangling while my eyes roved around, taking in all the splendours of Panchgani.

  There was in one of the back rooms a young man who had come there with an attendant for a rest cure after a serious nervous breakdown. He came to me one evening while I was alone and asked me if I would please clip his nails for him. If they are not cut short, I might scratch people, he said. I brought out my pair of scissors and trimmed his nails for him. He folded his hands in a salute and walked away.

  In yet another room there was an old man of 94 who had completely lost his memory. His sons were in Singapore doing some business and busy making their fortune. They had brought him to the hotel for safekeeping and had, for the benefit of others, left a noticeboard hanging on the door which gave typed details of the old one’s bio-data, his post office, his illnesses, his nearest relative’s address and, of course, his full name. A hotel boy was assigned to look after his needs, but he was all the time left alone, propped up with cushions on a capacious arm chair where he sat peering at the birches with his bleary eyes.

  Some evenings when I found myself alone I walked up to sit near him and to hold his mottled hand in mine. His hand lay like a dead weight in mine. He was entirely mindless like a megatherium or some such extinct creature. It was obvious that he could not communicate with the world outside the dark and vaporous prison of his mind. One day I gave him a chocolate but his great fingers crumpled it and threw it away while his Nepali attendant guffawed at my foolishness.

  When we finally left the hotel, we carried dried forest flowers and a pair of sambar shoes for my father, which were later found to be too tight for his feet. The shoemaker had given us his address written in Hindi on a notepaper, but it was mislaid and so none of our friends in Bombay could order from Salunke his beautiful sambar shoes.

  After our Panchgani holiday we still had about a fortnight’s leave and so we went to our house in Malabar to stay with my parents. They were happy to see us looking bronzed with the mountain sun. My father had then made an arch with bamboos which was wrapped totally in purple bougainvillae. It led to his cherished garden where the marigolds, the sweet peas and the alamandas were all in bloom. Even the hedges held out great clusters of flowers, for it was the month of December, the time of Thiruvathira, the water-festival which the virgins and the married women celebrated by plunging into the cold ponds two hours before the dawn, to splash about and sing.

  The chill of the water would cling to their voice, sweetening the already sweet, so that the men rose from their sleep with delicious thoughts of amour. After the bath and the watergames the women sat around bonfires blackening their eyes with collyrium and decorating their brow with sandal paste and a dot of black ‘Chanthu', made out of burnt rice. Then they swung on the long bamboo swings tied from all trees to warm themselves and went home to eat a breakfast of arrowroot pudding, banana and tender coconuts.

  The observation of Thiruvathira was expected to make women more beautiful. This was a festival for the worship of Kamadeva, the God of sensual love.

  32

  Dr. Mrs Karunakaran

  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...

  After my return from home I slipped into a phase of poor health and like a hibiscus shedding its dark petals my poor body shed red clots on the bathroom floor, and no amount of rest did it any good.

  So my husband called in a lady doctor to examine me and because I liked her smile, immediately I put aside my shyness and stripped before her. She took me to Dr Shirokar’s for a minor operation and later to her own nursing home at Matunga for recuperation.

  It was a small place with only three rooms, a verandah and a hall where the labour usually took place. The doctor whose name was Pankajam Karunakaran stayed on the first floor at night, driving over to her palatial bungalow at Andheri only on Sundays. She had an able assistant named Shantabai and a few young nurses to help her in the delivery of babies.

  I was given the best room, the one below the staircase, and one or two of our friends sent me flowers which made its window-sills attractive. I could watch the quiet road beyond the wall from my bed.

  A day after the operation I felt a sudden warmth between my legs and found to my horror that it was the beginning of a haemorrhage. The nurses, woken from their sleep, tried to stem the flow but it went on and on until in desperation one of them rushed up to call the doctor.

  I could hear a kind of silence trilling in both my ears and feel my body grow lighter. At one moment I felt that I was flying about in the room like a chiffon scarf and hovering over the inert body on the bed from which flowed the river of blood. It was the beginning of delightful death which removes, before it stabilizes itself, all anxieties connected with this world.

  When the doctor came and gave me the emergency treatment I heard her voice as though from a distance and wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right for me and that I was happy to have reached that stage, but I could not make my lips move or open my eyes. I discovered then that death was the closing of the lotus at dusk and probably temporary. But her ministrations worked and I returned to life while my body that had chilled warmed with her touch and my ears filled themselves with her gentle voice telling me that I was saved.


  If death had been offered as a gift she had knocked that gift away, but I felt only a new love for her. I stroked her hair and kissed her cheeks while she laughed in relief. I was looking at her as if I were seeing her for the first time. What is it, Amy, she asked me, why do you stare at me like this?...

  She was the kindest woman I had ever known. Her patients adored her and when I was well enough to walk about I sat near the hall-window watching the poor patients queueing up with their babies on their hips and the medicine-bottles in their hands. She did not take money from the poor but made them feel that the gratuity was only due to friendship. Every patient felt that she was somebody special.

  She was always dressed in pale Kanjivarams and had her hair tied into a bun. Occasionally I ran into her clinic and kissed her, smelling the fragrance of her face powder, It was not with happiness that I left her nursing home but the children were happy to get me back for the nightly story-tellings and for the silly games on the lawn.

  Then, by and by, my health became almost perfect. The pimples vanished as suddenly as they had arrived. I kept telling my husband that I was in love with the doctor and he said, it is all right, she is a woman, she will not exploit you.

  I wrote several stories in Malayalam about the people I met at her nursing home. Whenever a story appeared in a journal I ran with it to my bedroom to lie down and read it, for my heart used to thump so with excitement to see my name in print. I used to publish poems in the Illustrated Weekly but under the name K. Das because I suspected the editor to be prejudiced against women writers. He was an Irishman named Sean Mandy. He was a considerate editor and whenever he rejected a poem he sent me the reasons for the rejection. I used to daydream of meeting him some day at the Gul Mohur where he was supposed to lunch everyday. After the meeting he would inevitably fall in love with me...