My Story

by Kamala Das

  If he had invited me for lunch then I would have found it difficult to accept his invitation because I spent whatever money I got from the Malayalam journals on buying books from the Strand Boot Stall and bought no new clothes at all. In dress I was as shabby as a tramp. I had only one or two pink blouses sewn at home which had tears under the armpit. My sarees were patched up in places, clumsily. I was not exactly the kind of girl who would have decorated the Gul Mohur at lunchtime.

  Writing became my only hobby. I wrote almost two stories every week and mailed them, borrowing the money for stamps from my husband. The Mathrubhumi sent me twelve rupees per story. Each story took me one full night to finish, for it was not possible to write when the children were awake.

  I would put the finishing touches to a story at about six when the family rose from their sleep. I tried to sleep for an hour or two in the afternoons but the neighbours were friendly ladies who liked to visit my house to chat about clothes, and I found the going rather tough.

  In the mornings when the boys were away at school I painted in oils an easel set up on the portico. I could only paint women but this I could do well. I used to give my paintings to my friends on their birthdays. Abstract art had not become very fashionable in those days. My friends therefore gladly hung the pictures on their drawing-room walls.

  It was a good phase in my life. I had health, looks, books to read and talent. Early in the morning the Gorkha watchman of the building called the ‘Gulistan’ would wake me from sleep with his meandering song. The Nepali tunes brought with them the mistiness of the mountains and their tragic loneliness. The Gorkha bathed under a faucet while he sang and we heard the water and the song together, entwined, while we lay on our beds reluctant to rise and the sky slowly paled outside our window.

  33

  My Great Grandmother

  There is a house now far away where once

  I received love. That woman died,

  The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved

  Among books. I was then too young

  To read, and my blood turned like the moon.

  How often I think of going

  There, to peer through blind eyes of windows or

  Just listen to the frozen air,

  Or in wild despair, pick an armful of

  Darkness to bring it here to lie

  Behind my bedroom door like a brooding

  Dog. You cannot believe, darling,

  Can you, that I lived in such a house and

  Was proud and loved, I who have lost

  My way and beg now at strangers’ doors to

  Receive love at least in small change?

  After the sudden death of my grand-uncle and then that of my dear grandmother the old Nalapat House was locked up and its servants disbanded. The windows were shut gently as the eyes of the dead are shut.

  My parents took my great grandmother to the house called Sarvodaya where she occupied noiselessly the eastern bedroom on the ground floor, shaded by the tall mango trees through the leaves of which was visible the old beloved house. The rats ran across its darkened halls and the white ants raised on its outer walls strange totems of burial.

  My great grandmother had a child’s capacity to put away grief. The old house’s death did not trouble her for long. When she was called up from sleep to attend on her dying daughter she only prayed feebly and got ready for the purification bath.

  My great grandmother was the only daughter of a wealthy chieftain, the Raja of Punnathore Kotta. She was the only one in our family who went to a temple riding an elephant. When a Nair girl menstruated for the first time she was made to sit on a black rug covered with white mull for three days in strict segregation. She was allowed to wear all the jewellery she possessed and given a gleaming brass mirror to hold before her face.

  On the fourth day she was taken out of the house to walk with others in a procession to a pond where amidst loud ululations and laughter she was given a ceremonial bath. Afterwards the women blackened her eyes with collyrium, decorated her brow with sandalwood paste, her cheeks with raw turmeric and her lips with betel. A feast was given to all in the village where the women danced the Kaikottikkali and the young men had a chance to see the girl now turned eligible for marriage.

  On the seventh day she was taken to a far away temple. My great grandmother, attaining puberty at eleven, rode her father’s elephant to the temple seated elegantly on the howdah wearing the heavy Amadakkootam which covered the upper halves of her delicate breasts, while her maids ran on ahead of her crying out Ho Ho to warn the untouchable communities to steer clear of her path.

  Within a year she was married to the Raja of Chiralayman who was stout and had heavy sensual lips. At nineteen she suddenly became very frigid and came away to Nalapat house carrying her little daughter with her, offering no explanation at all. I have watched her so often scrubbing the soles of her feet and cleaning her toenails meticulously twice and thrice each day and I have then suspected that her over-developed sense of hygiene had something to do with her separation from her husband. She must have thought messy the discharge of the marital obligations.

  My great grandmother was obsessed with her own sense of punctuality. At twelve as our hallclock chimed twelve times she emerged from her room enquiring of her lunch. She ate the blandest of food. Occasionally as a joke we set forward the hands of the clock so that it chimed twelve when the real time was only eleven, and the old lady used to come out demanding food, murmuring I am hungry. When we laughed at her she joined in our laughter too, her laugh sounding lively as a schoolgirl’s and entirely guileless. She gossipped with the servants, asked them personal questions about their marriages and was always so happy to settle their domestic squabbles.

  When my father decided to leave for Calicut to be the fulltime editor of a newspaper, the old one posed a problem. She wished to accompany my parents to the town. But my aunt persuaded my mother to let her carry the old lady to her own house which was about a furlong away. My mother, always mortally afraid of hurting the feelings of relatives, allowed her sister to do this. Great grandmother was deposited in a dark room opposite the pantry where she lay curled up on a narrow cot, silent and morose.

  My uncle was a famed politician, a Congress M.L.A. who entertained hugely everyday and so the meals were delayed affairs, consisting of curries reddened with chillies and fried fish, chicken and biryani. Great grandmother being a vegetarian felt nauseated by the kitchen-smells and gradually lost appetite, and growing weaker day by day her silence thickened into that impenetrable one of death. Years after her death my mother told me that abandoning her old grandmother lay like a weight on her conscience. I could have carried her with me to Calicut, she said, but at that time I only thought of my sister’s feelings... The old are destined to be dumped like unwanted luggage, bits of unfashionable junk, and left to perish. How often I have remembered my sweet frail great grandmother and prayed to God that I would not meet with her fate but die early while wanted and cherished.

  34

  A Transfer to Calcutta

  I take leave of you, fair city, while tears

  Hide somewhere in my adult eyes

  And sadness is silent as a stone

  In the river’s unmoving

  Core...

  It’s goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,

  To slender shapes behind windowpanes,

  Shut against indiscriminate desire

  And rain; to yellow moons,

  So long ignored, so long unloved;

  To the birds, flesh hungry,

  Circling in the sky

  With shrill and hostile cries; to the crowd

  Near the sea, walking or sitting

  But always talking, talking,

  Talking...

  I take leave of you, fair city, keep your tears,

  Your anger and your smiles for others,

  Young, who come with unjaded eyes;

  Give them your sad-eyed courtesans with tinsel

  And jasmi
ne in their hair, your marble

  Slabs in morgues; your brittle

  Roadside laughter...

  It’s goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,

  To the silence and the sounds,

  To streets that I never walked

  But in dreams, to lips that I never kissed

  But in dreams, to children

  Lovely as flowers, out of me

  Never born...

  In the year 1962 there was a Seanza course for the Bankers conducted in Bombay for which delegates from several countries had arrived. One of them who claimed to have some Spanish blood in his veins visited our house regularly to eat the evening meal with us.

  He mixed shreds of an omelette with the rice, sprinkled sauce and ate the mixture with gusto. He was of medium height, with iron-grey hair that looked black when pomaded and eyes that resembled currants which he winked wickedly at me.

  One day while I sat at my desk complaining of a headache, he began to massage the back of my neck with soft nimble fingers until I felt the ache leave me and found myself asleep. I am a hypnotist too, he said.

  My husband thought him excellent company for he had a stock of jokes and anecdotes which made us laugh uproariously. Bring her a glass of water, Das, he said to my husband, and when he was away, I was kissed gently on my cheeks. I rose from the chair immediately. Don’t you love me at all, he asked, lowering his voice.

  The three of us used to go to the old joint, Volga, to hear the husky-voiced crooner and also to dance. Our foreign friend was a graceful dancer and he did not want ever to sit out while a dance was going on. I shall teach you, he said and together we danced while my husband watched us sleepily from his table. On some evenings our friend bought up all the strings of jasmines that were on sale at Churchgate and decked my hair with them. You are my bride, my sweet bride, he used to whisper while decorating my hair.

  My husband did not take these attentions seriously for the man was anyway old enough to be my father and I was not exactly hard up for male attention.

  There was Carlo, the dark-haired young man who loved me enough to want to marry me; there was in another city the one I was infatuated with, and of course at home there was my husband, passionate and eager as a lover. I was like a poor girl who found herself rich all of a sudden. I was drunk with power. I tried to alter my hairstyle, cut it shorter and with a fringe that covered all of my forehead. I wore a black blouse with a white saree in the evenings. I was so healthy that even my perspiration was musky.

  We had then moved into the new Dhunastra, into a flat on the fifth floor with a verandah that faced the yellow-painted house of the Japanese Consul and his garden with the four large marble statues.

  After my morning bath I stood on the verandah enjoying the rough winds whipping at my clothes. One day there was a ring from our new phone and when I picked it up, an unfamiliar voice said: “I am XYZ. Good morning to you. I have been watching you from far for the past few weeks, and I am in love.”

  I rang off in a hurry. I was panic-stricken. I walked up to a mirror to have a long look at myself. Was I resembling a harlot? Did I look like an easy prey? I told my husband about the call and as usual he shrugged it off as something beneath his notice.

  There was again and again the same man phoning from a public booth, the clank of the coin and then the Good morning to You. One day I put an end to this bother. I called him over to my house and he said apologetically that he was reminded of his wife whenever he looked at me and that I ought to forgive him his audacity. Forgiving was so very easy for a girl as vain and happy as I was in those days.

  It was at this juncture in my life that my husband was transferred to Calcutta to serve a term of three years. This shattered my calm, for I had to leave not only my younger brother who was working for a postgraduate degree in Paediatrics, but also the only friends who bothered to love me a little.

  But my husband’s superior was adamant and off we went to Calcutta, leaving my brother on the platform with tears falling from his eyes and a kerchief fluttering from his hand, bravely like a flag. While we were taking off, a cousin warned me to be cautious in dealing with my husband’s relatives. They are sly and furtive, they will only try to catch you tripping, he said. Do not be frank and above all, do not be so dammed innocent...

  35

  The Cocktail Season

  What is this drink but

  The April sun, squeezed

  Like an orange in

  My glass? I sip the

  Fire, I drink and drink

  Again, I am drunk

  Yes, but on the gold

  Of suns. What noble

  Venom now flows through

  My veins and fills my

  Mind with unhurried

  Laughter? My worries

  Doze. Wee bubbles ring

  My glass, like a bride’s

  Nervous smile, and meet

  My lips. Dear, forgive

  This moment’s lull in

  Wanting you, the blur

  In memory. How

  Brief the term of my

  Devotion, how brief

  Your reign when I with

  Glass in hand, drink, drink,

  And drink again this

  Juice of April suns...

  Calcutta is a playground for children between the ages of twenty and eighty. Its winter is called the cocktail season. The participants at such cocktails are normally the industrialists, the smart executives of foreign firms and the Government officials who cannot afford to buy liquor and so must depend on others for their quota of fun.

  The Government servants drag their foolish wives to such parties, hoping that their comeliness and charm might impress the rich. The rich enjoy being introduced to the Government-wives, and to those who are still young and fresh, they hand glasses of sherry or vermouth with crushed ice and plead in sweet tones, please drink, please let me see the drink put a sparkle in those lovely eyes of yours...

  And after the fool has had a drink or two, the rich man gets closer, overpowers the girl with the unfamiliar smell of exotic shaving lotions, leers and whispers, how beautiful your rosy cheeks are today, your beauty is a feast for my starving eyes.

  At that precise moment the lady will glance at her husband, panic rising in her bosom. The spouse will be at the other end of the hall, either engaged in the discussion of Japanese geisha girls with industrialists who would have cautiously left their wives at home or will be seated behind a large potted palm, pouring out another whiskey into his glass.

  The conspicuous greed for liquor and the indifference will disgust the wife. She will begin to drink more and more not because she likes it but only to spite him for having brought her to the accursed party.

  Finally, running unsteadily to the bathroom, she will get sick bending over the washbasin and the host or some other lustful man will appear at her side in a trice to rub her back and help her tidy up her face. He will touch all the soft portions of her body, accidentally. Her husband will be lying on a sofa, passed out after a dozen free drinks dreaming alcoholic dreams.

  To raise him from the sofa and to take him home an army will be required. Therefore giving up all hope the girl will sit somewhere, tears filling her eyes while tender-hearted men paw her and coo into her ears.

  Such are the kind of games that are being played in Calcutta during its winter. The players are practised liars. Lying will come so naturally to them that most unwittingly they deceive others. The newcomers of this society will be ridiculed and laughed at. The ones who first embraced me with loving words of welcome later spread unwholesome scandals about me. It was from Calcutta that I lost my faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

  We had as a neighbour a kind-hearted gentleman who was old and stout. My husband and I used to visit his house occasionally and eat with him a delicious uppma made of beaten rice and potato. We drank the sherbet made out of the Bhelfruit. We regarded him as an uncle. He tried to teach me Sanskrit whenever I was willing to learn, but his
pronunciation always made me laugh.

  When I fell ill with some kind of rheumatism, he came to my house and massaged my bad leg, talking all the while about his funny colleagues at office to make me laugh.

  He did not call me by my real name. I was Gayatri to him. He was interested in Hindu mythology and in the Upanishads. When some of my husband’s relatives spread the rumour that I was having a love affair with the old one, I felt for him all of a sudden the disgust I ought to have felt instead for the gossips.

  I tried then to avoid meeting him. Whenever I saw him coming toward my house I hid myself behind the bathroom door and pretended to be away. One day he brought a garland of marigolds and hung it over my self-portrait which was in my drawing room. I went pale with anger. Why are you angry with me, little one, he asked me. I did not reply. My husband too was bothered about my sudden aversion towards the old man. There is no logic in your attitudes, he said.

  I dressed myself only in lungis and wore only black shirts in those days. Lungis had not become fashionable then and so the relatives and friends considered me a freak. I did nothing to make my face pretty. We did not have enough money to spend on good clothes anyway, and if at all some money came my way I spent it all on books.

  For parties I had three silk sarees which had been presented to me at my wedding. I did not know then that I raised a laugh among the ladies whenever I attended a party wearing the same old sarees, the two oranges and the one green.

  Although there were tears in my sarees I had people to crowd round me as listeners. I had a large fanmail. There were at least a dozen men deeply infatuated with me. And, yet I feared Calcutta. I longed to escape from it.

  In the summer of the first year, a visitor from Bombay called us for breakfast on his hotel-room. He was intelligent and well-read. There was nothing I liked better than talking about books, and so sitting near him I was relaxed and happy when suddenly his hand moved closer to my thigh and rested touching it lightly.

  I thought that it was accidental. But his hand crept under my thigh and became immobile. What was happening? Although I had had men falling in love with me, none of them had shown sexual desire. I was loved as a young sister is loved. This man’s movements surprised me. He cultivated the habit of stroking my legs during conversation and caressing my long hair. I nearly fell in love with him.