My Story

by Kamala Das

  One day when he held me close and kissed me on my mouth, I stood acquiescent and after he released me, I asked him, are you in love with me, and he said, I like you.

  When I told my husband about it, he warned me against loving such a man. He is not capable of loving anyone except himself, my husband said. You are always a child in my eyes, Amy, he said, you may play around with love but be choosey about your playmates. I do not want you ever to get hurt in your life...

  36

  Penfriends

  I am today a creature turned inside

  Out. To spread myself across wide highways

  Of your thoughts, stranger, like a loud poster

  Was always my desire, but all I

  Do is lurk in culs de sac,

  Just two eyes showing... Oh never mind. I’ve

  Spent long years trying to locate my mind

  Beneath skin, beneath flesh and underneath

  The bone. I’ve stretched my two-dimensional

  Nudity on sheets of weeklies, monthlies,

  Quarterlies, a sad sacrifice. I’ve put

  My private voice away, adopted the

  Typewriter’s click as my only speech; I

  Click-click, click-click tiresomely into your

  Ears, stranger, though you may have no need of

  Me, I go on and on, not knowing why...

  My father has always been a teetotaller. He has often told me that liquor should never be served in one’s house. All the commandments engraved on the columns of my mind gradually faded, the fierce winds rising out of the Ganges devoured their words and I changed into a disobedient daughter.

  Society can well ask me how I could become what I became, although born to parents as highprincipled as mine were. Ask the books that I read why I changed. Ask the authors dead and alive who communicated with me and gave me the courage to be myself. The books like a mother-cow licked the calf of my thought into shape and left me to lie at the altar of the world as a sacrificial gift.

  There were then no pujas at my house. The sweet name of God did not bloom ever on my tongue. My husband was nearly all the time away touring in the outer districts. Even while he was with me, we had no mental contact with each other. If at all I began to talk of my unhappiness, he changed the topic immediately and walked away.

  One day when I could no longer bear my loneliness, I wrote to Carlo asking him for advice. I do not wish to continue living, I wrote. His reply did not come although months passed. I felt that even he had forgotten me, Carlo who called me Sita and treated me with awe as though I were a goddess. Perhaps his marriage had changed him.

  But one day in the morning, after my husband had left for his office and the children had gone to their school, my servant announced him in. There is a white man come to see you, said my cook. When I went into the dark drawing room, I found Carlo seated on the old sofa wearing a blue shirt. The cook was peering at us from behind the curtain and, as I was aware of it, I showed little excitement. Carlo stood up and extended his hand. Come to the verandah where we have an excellent pingpong table, I said. We played an indifferent game for a few minutes. Then Carlo bade me sit near him on the wide ledge of the verandah.

  He had lost some weight and there was a new pallor around his lips. You have grown fat and very dark. You resemble a gypsy, said Carlo, laughing. What did you want me to do, he asked me. I don’t know, I said...

  That week a famous novelist visiting India arrived in Calcutta and as he was related to my husband, a cousin arranged a cocktail party for him on the lawn for which I had to go along. The writer had spent the whole day with me, lunching and drinking bottles of chilled beer and by evening I had a severe headache, but I liked parties, especially those with writers strutting around and I joined in, most happily, but there was a mischievous cousin who coaxed me in affectionate tones to drink more and more, so that I soon became quite drunk and dizzy.

  And still the man kept telling me that he would feel insulted if I refused the drink he himself had mixed for me. Sister-in-law, you look lovely when you are drunk, he said, and laughing a great deal I gulped down another long drink. My eyes burned like torches and like a fishing boat a laugh moved about drifting in the dusk of my veins. When I climbed into my car finally taking leave of them all, what was left of my common sense told me that I ought not to return home to my children looking like a tramp.

  So I went to the hotel where Carlo was staying and in the lift, seeing my red face glowing like the red moon of an eclipse, I felt frightened and unsteady but once inside Carlo’s room, he carried me up to the bed and wiped my face with wet towels smelling of eau de cologne. What has happened to you, he asked me, who has put you in this horrible state...?

  Oh Carlo, Oh Carlo, I am so miserable, I said and sobbed aloud, holding tight his two hands in mine. Get up my darling, he said, get up and tidy up your hair, I shall take you home.

  Parting at the door Carlo said, you pick up innocence as you go along... and then alone, seated on the verandah ledge, unable to sleep and troubled with remorse and shame, I thought of his words which seemed meaningless to me at that time. There was not one star visible in the sky.

  37

  The P.E.N. Poetry Prize

  He talks turning a sun-stained

  Cheek to me, his mouth a dark

  Cavern where stalactites of

  Uneven teeth gleam, his right

  Hand on my knee, while our minds

  Are willed to race towards love;

  But they only wander, tripping

  Idly over puddles of

  Desires... Can this man with

  Nimble finger-tips unleash

  Nothing more alive than the

  Skin’s lazy hungers? Who can

  Help us who have lived so long

  And have failed in love? The heart,

  An empty cistern, waiting

  Through long hours, fills itself

  With coiling snakes of silence.

  I am a freak. It’s only

  To save my face I flaunt, at

  Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.

  In the year 1963 I won the P.E.N.’s Asian Poetry Prize, and had for the first time in my life a bank account of mine from which in two days time I withdrew almost half the amount for outfitting myself. I have always ignored fashions, being fully aware of their disability to help me look chic, but I have wanted to dress aesthetically.

  I grew fond of lungis with floral prints and shirts of black poplin that concealed the heaviness of my upper torso. I liked strands of red beads and red glass bangles. I disliked the foreign perfumes with their alcoholic base but liked to pour attar in my bath-water. Instead of soap I used the powdered bark of the Vaka tree which had an abrasive action on the skin.

  I had an oily skin which made me look younger than my years. This endeared me to old men who were weary of sophisticated ladies and the fragrances of their elaborate toilet. I was drawn to old people for they seemed harmless and they had charm. They smelt clean. They knew how to put a girl at ease just by paying her a simple compliment.

  One of the old ones who used to visit our family on Sundays had a face that resembled Stan Laurel’s, and I was very fond of him. He made me laugh, clowning in our verandah, and with mimicry that delighted my sons. He used to take us out when my husband was out touring, and get us ice-cream, chocolates and carry us to little restaurants, full of smoke and twilight.

  We were grateful for the outings, for nobody else did bother about us. My husband was too busy to think of taking us out anywhere and he was not exactly rich either. This old man used to plant kisses on my cheeks leaving us at the door; slobbering kisses that had to be washed out in a hurry, and yet I was guilty of encouraging him because I wanted someone to take my little sons out and give them a good time. When he once brought me a pornographic book wrapped in brown paper, I decided to end the friendship. No reasons were given. He was shrewd enough to guess them.

  Then there were the men who were either connected with m
y husband’s occupation or were at one time my father’s friends, the ones I used to call "Uncle’ from infancy, who had changed to such an extent that they gave me lecherous hugs from behind doors and leered at me while their wives were away. I hated them. Often I told my husband that we ought to run away from Calcutta and its corrupting atmosphere. But he paid no heed.

  Poets, even the most insignificant of them, are different from other people. They cannot close their shops like shopmen and return home. Their shop is their mind and as long as they carry it with them, they feel the pressures and the torments. A poet’s raw material is not stone or clay; it is her personality. I could not escape from my predicament even for a moment. I was emotional and over-sensitive. Whenever a snatch of unjustified scandal concerning my emotional life reached me through well-meaning relatives, I wept like a wounded child for hours rolling on my bed and often took sedatives to put myself to sleep.

  When my mental stability weakened, some friends encouraged me to drink heavily taking me to their houses equipped with bars, and, drunk, I was a great entertainer holding forth on the exalted subjects of divine love and nirvana. How they must have laughed to hear my talks I do not have the faintest recollection, fortunately, of those lost hours when I was a puppet at the mercy of gross men and women.

  And yet Calcutta gifted me with beautiful sights which built for me the sad poems that 1 used to write in my diary in those days. It was at Calcutta that I saw for the first time the eunuchs’ dance. It was at Calcutta that I first saw a prostitute, gaudily painted like a cheap bazaar toy. It was at Calcutta that I saw the ox-carts moving along the Strand Road early in the morning with proud heavy-turbaned men, their tattooed wives with fat babies dozing at their breasts like old drunkards in clubs at lonely hours.

  We had a blue Ambassador car and an old driver named Ramzan who used to drive me once a week to the Free School Street where there was a book-shop that sold first editions. I picked up some gilded volumes of Lawrence Hope from that shop and presented them to the man I used to be infatuated with, but he was so conventional, so cowardly that he went out immediately to buy in return two volumes of Stefean Zweig to return the favour, to be neatly ‘quits’. He was so afraid of being seen with me that he always dragged his wife along whenever he came to call on us and I pitied her when I saw how bored she was with our kind of conversation.

  Finally I became wiser, understood what my grandmother meant when she talked about breeding and left off pestering the man. Wasn’t Carlo better bred than the man who did not know how to accept a gift graciously? In desperation I turned to my friend. You do not love me at all, said Carlo, I am only a waiting room between trains...

  But he offered himself as a stiff drink, he offered to help me forget and in the afternoons I lay in his white arms, drowsily aware that he was only water, only a pale green pond glimmering in the sun. In him I swam, all broken with longing, in his robust blood I floated, drying on my tears. Carlo reminded me of the pond at Nalapat where I used to lie sunning my face and my growing limbs. He reminded me of the ancient Nirmatala tree which had at one time a string hammock tied onto its branches where I lay listening to the gentle sounds of the summer afternoons...

  38

  La Boheme

  Delhi:

  Our house crouches in dust in the

  Evenings when the buffaloes tramp

  Up the road, the weary herdsmen

  Singing soft Punjabi songs, and

  Girls from free municipal schools

  Pause shyly at our gate and smile.

  What have I to offer them but

  My smile, a half-dead, fraudulent

  Thing. What have I to offer at

  This shrine of peace, but my constant,

  Complaining voice? Forgive us. We

  Are paltry creatures, utter snobs,

  Who disowned our mothers only

  Because their hands we noticed were

  Work-worn, and so to seek richer

  Mothers and better addresses

  We must move on, and on, until

  We too, some day, by our children

  May be disowned...

  When my husband was sent to Delhi and to the Planning Commission on a three years’ deputation, I thought that I would enjoy the change of scene. I had not travelled much. But my husband had always held jobs that entailed tours and on his return from any unfamiliar place I pestered him with questions.

  What was the colour of the sky, what was the vegetation, how did the natives dress, what was the tune of their dialect... and, always he furnished me with details that went into the build-up of a locale for yet another story.

  When we reached Delhi, we stayed for three days at the Reserve Bank’s Visiting Officers’ Flat at Rabindra Nagar which was cooled by a desert cooler and by the high hedges skirting the lawn. There were flowers on the dining table and uniformed servants to serve us.

  On the fourth day we moved into the littlest flat at Defence Colony, where we had no room at all to entertain friends who came to call on us. There was a spiral staircase that took us to a tiny balcony where we had placed two cane chairs. Beyond that was a room full of our furniture and books where we sat to eat hasty meals. The bathroom contained no water except at six in the morning for fifteen minutes. Our cook and driver had to sleep on packing cases laid out on the back verandah. The children were admitted to a school in the last term, after our convincing the principal that the boys had high I.Qs.

  I had a landlady who used to come silently into the flat to spy on us and our activities, an old lady with a disarming smile. I was miserable in that house for I had cultivated from childhood the habit of taking two baths every day and with a dry faucet, all I could do was change my clothes twice and sponge my body as through I were a sick woman. I shall die if I live here for a full month, I told my husband.

  During the first week we received a telegram from my brother which informed us that my father had collapsed with a heart attack. I took the first flight home and reached Calicut as soon as I could, to find my father lying drugged and unshaven on his bed in the corridor facing the terrace. When he recognised me, he wept with emotion. For a month I stayed near him, sleeping on the terrace on a mattress laid out on the floor and looked after him, serving him soups and fruit-juice. I had once picked up for a rupee a second-hand book called "How to make Hundred Delicious Soups” and it was easy for me to make soups of any kind after having memorised the book.

  When my father was well enough to walk about in the house, I went back to Delhi and then we moved into a flat at Lajpat Nagar which had cactii growing near the walls and a little iron gate that creaked. Beyond the house was an open space of an acre which separated our place from the slums. Here the buffaloes used to graze all day long, snorting at intervals and coming to our house to rub their noses against the rough surface of the walls.

  Seated on the steps leading to the flat, I could watch the slum dwellers cook their meals bending over sigrees and the blue charcoal smoke rising... But almost everyday, in one or other of the huts, somebody died and there was loud wailing. Then the dead body was taken out on a charpoy and carried away to some place far away, while the relatives walked behind wailing flatly and monotonously as only the poor and the absolutely hopeless know how to wail.

  During this time my eldest son Monoo fell ill with a fever that was later diagnosed as typhoid. I was panicky. Was it that the slum dwellers had given him this seed of death? I told my husband that I was going back to my home in Malabar and live there peacefully with my children. Delhi was so full of dust and bacteria!

  To escape from our place in Lajpat Nagar I went in the evenings to the Planning Commission to pick up my husband and on my way, saw the leaves being burnt on the sides of the Aurangzeb Road and the smell of that smoke soothed my nerves. The Delhi roads are the most beautiful roads that I have ever seen, for they are shaded by large trees and are cool and black. The names are beautiful too. I used to pass through a road named Soneri Bagh Road only becaus
e the name appealed to me. I envied those who had their bungalows near such roads who breathed in the acrid smoke of burning leaves at autumn time.

  Then with the help of a friend we managed to get a better flat at South Extension, a flat on the first floor, which we reached by climbing a staircase wrapped in bougainvillae, and the fragrant Rangoon Creeper. We had as our landlord a youthful romantic person who used to come visiting us with his wife who was warm as home made bread and made me feel at ease with her kind words. At that time I was pregnant for the third time.

  I had picked up a handful of friends in Delhi who were well-read and intellectual. Whenever I felt well enough to go out, one of them took me out to some play, a foreign film or an art exhibition, or if we had the money we went to Kwality and ate the biggest sundae. I was particularly fond of a drama critic, a young man who resembled Mark Antony in his looks and although he was younger than I, he became my best friend, a friend I could count on when I needed an escort.

  My husband was fond of him too. Whenever I looked depressed or bored, my husband asked me to take the young man and go for a stroll. Once the two of us took a three-wheeled scooter and went for a noisy, jerky drive to the Defence Colony. He took me to La Boheme and gave me Chinese tea which tasted like plain boiled water to me, but I pretended to have had an acquaintance with it, long before he bought it for me.

  After the La Boheme treat he took me for a drive and we had cider, sipping it straight from the bottle during the fast drive, and it was dusk, and all the Delhi streets were fragrant and murky. I felt very young, very lovely and delightfully carefree...

  39

  Jaisurya

  It was again the time of rain and on

  Every weeping tree that lush moss spread like

  Eczema, and from beneath the swashy