by Kamala Das
Earth the fat worms surfaced to explode
Under rain. It rained on the day my son
Was born, a slanting rain that began with
The first labour pain and kept me
Company, sighing, wailing, and roaring
When I groaned so that I smiled and stopped my
Plaints to hear its grief. I felt then that
Only the selfish had fears, that only
The unloving felt pain and then the first
Tinge of blood seemed like another dawn
Breaking. For a while I too was earth.
In me the seed was silent, waiting as
A baby does for the womb’s quiet
Expulsion. This then was my destiny.
Walk into the waiting room, I had cried,
When once my heart was vacant, fill the
Emptiness, stranger, fill it with a child.
Love is not important that makes the blood
Carouse, nor the man who brands you with his
Lust, but is shed as slough at end of each
Embrace. Only that matters which forms as
Toadstool under lightening and rain, the soft
Stir in womb, the foetus growing, for
Only the treasures matter that were washed
Ashore, not the long blue tides that washed them
In. When rain stopped and the light was gay on our
Casuarina leaves, it was early
Afternoon. And, then, wailing into light
He came, so fair, a streak of light thrust
Into the faded light. They raised him
To me then, proud Jaisurya, my son,
Separated from darkness that was mine
And in me. The darkness I have known,
Lived with, the darkness of rooms where the old
Sit, sharpening words for future use,
The darkness of sterile wombs and that of
The miser’s pot, with the mildew on his coins.
Out of the mire of a moonless night was
He born, Jaisurya, my son, as out of
The wrong is born the right and out of night
The sun-drenched golden day...
In the seventh month of my pregnancy I went to Calicut to be with my parents for the delivery and the lying in. This I did with reluctance for I was not accustomed to stay away from my sons for more than a week or two.
At that time my parents lived in a dimlit house on the outskirts of the town. The walls on either side of the gate had turned black with lichen and it was possible to catch sight of the snakes that lived in their many crevices, sticking their crusty heads out to hiss at the passers-by. Lining the walls were the hibiscus plants with their rugged roots and the blood-red flowers.
Often a mad girl named Narayani came up to the gate and grinned at me, mumbling afterwards of hunger. She had broken teeth that ended in points.
There was yet another lunatic, an old woman called Ammalu Amma who tried to flatter us into giving her clothes and rice. The worst of the beggars was a pale woman in her thirties who came silently carrying a dirty bundle tucked under an arm and who began to rile us in the most pornographic language after finishing her lunch. The servants used to drive her out but she remained near the gate, shouting of the misdeeds of men who were worse than dogs. She used to draw large crowds with her oratory.
Calicut gets a good crop of lunatics in the summer months probably due to the heat of the roads and the dust rising from under the wheels. The town burns with the fever of that merciless season. All the wells dry up. The frail varieties of vegetation die out. Only the weeds survive the heat, and the hardy hibiscus.
I was afraid to step out of the house alone. I watched the road, seated behind the flowered curtain of my room which was cool as the shaded interior of a forest with dark teakwood furniture and a dresser with a large mirror, oval-shaped, in which I surveyed the convexity of my body with pride.
One morning I woke with pain and realised that I was about to have the child. Our friend Dr. Vimala Nayar came immediately to take me in her car to the hospital. I saw the sky pale and heard the chill winds whistling into my ears and wondered if it was going to rain.
At the hospital I was put on the table in the delivery room where, to distract my mind from the spasms of pain, I recited the Gayatri mantra, and while the sun grew in my eyes, filling my veins with its warmth, I felt the baby slide along my thigh and heard its loud cry. “It is a beautiful son,” cried Vimala.
My mother lifted the baby from her hands and put him on my bosom and I blessed him with long life, kissing the damp crown of his head and called him Jaisurya. That was the only naming ceremony that he ever had. He was big and lovely with thick hair and long eyelashes. There was no room available for me at the hospital that evening, and so the little one and I slept on a makeshift bed laid out for us in the back verandah near the lavatories and the garbage pails filled with bloodstained pads.
It rained throughout that night and to protect the baby my sister and I lay on our sides making with our bodies a shelter for him. I could not sleep for a minute, for the cold winds blew on me, giving me cramps and making me wretched. I compared the new boy’s fate with those of my elder sons’ and felt pity for him. The other had been born inside the home, and there had been my grandmother to provide us with warmth. That night I missed my dead grand mother.
In the morning my father arrived and took me home, seeing my misery. But the misery did not end there. At home they were preparing to give away in marriage my younger sister and all through the day relatives and friends came to spread goodwill around, and instead of sitting in the drawing room they deposited themselves on my bed or around it and deprived me of privacy so that I found myself not being able to change my blood-stained clothes, nurse the hungry baby or go to sleep.
The stream of visitors stopped their flow only at midnight. I became miserable like a trapped animal. My breasts overflowed with milk, and yet I was shy to untie my blouse and let my son suck at them. In pain and misery I waited for the first chance to be alone so that I might lock the door. But when it came and I locked the door my parents were terrified. They thought that I was going mad. They banged on my door.
Open the door, shouted the relatives. What are you doing there alone with the baby? I was in frenzy like a tigress that feared for the safety of its cub. I held my baby to my breast and shouted back at the people outside my door. I shall never open the door...
Then my elder brother was called in and he softened his voice to request me to come out. I am your brother, he said, tell me what is troubling you. And I opened the door to cling to his shoulder and sob. He took me to his little cottage where my sister-in-law gave me the best room and made me comfortable.
When the baby was three weeks old, I returned to my home in Delhi and at the airport in the early morning my husband stood with outstretched arm to receive the littlest of our sons. He was shown to the elder sons at lunch time and each of them touched his pink toes with awe and a measure of tenderness. My husband decided to call the new comer Shodoo, and because my health had failed, he took charge of his needs, made the formula in the mornings, filled eight bottles with it and placed it in the fridge, taking out one and heating it when the baby cried for milk.
We engaged a stout sardarni to look after him in the daytime. She called him Kaka and threw him up in the air to make him laugh. This game frightened us very much. But she was kind to me and persisted in massaging my legs even when I did not fancy any kind of massage.
40
A Season of Illness
I shall some day leave, leave the cocoon
You built around me with morning tea,
Love-words flung from doorways and of course
Your tired lust. I shall some day take
Wings, fly around, as often petals
Do, when free in air, and you dear one,
Just the sad remnant of a root, must
Lie behind, sans pride, on double beds
Nearly all hurt by wind, sun and rain,
Too hurt by fierce happiness to want
A further jaunt or a further spell
Of freedom, and I shall some day see
My world, de-fleshed, de-veined, de-blooded,
Just a skeletal thing, then shut my
Eyes and take refuge, if nowhere else,
Here in your nest of familiar scorn...
After my return to Delhi I found my health declining. The right side of my abdomen ached dully and constantly. I coughed throughout the night. I could not retain even the blandest food. The nausea drove me to my bed I lay looking older than my years. I could not heave myself out of bed even to receive visitors who came to see the child.
My constant companion realised with pain that I could no longer go out with him for a walk or to see a film. Do you hate me, he asked me one day standing at the foot of the stairs. I was dazed with fatigue and pain. I could not speak at all. What has happened to you, Amy, he asked me. He left our house with moist eyes. Very soon I was lying in the Willingdon Hospital seriously ill.
Fortunately for me I had at that time in Delhi a friend who was probably the most loving of women in the country. Her name was Shirley. She had long brown hair which she always wore in a thick plait, and an innocent smile. She visited me at the hospital everyday to change my clothes and help me to wash my hair. She thrust a large basin under the bed and while I lay still she shampooed my hair. I wanted to cut it short but she disagreed with me. You are going to get well, she said. If God wished you to die so soon he should not have given you the gift of a beautiful baby, she said, and this argument soothed me.
My feet had become rigid and numb with the long illness and Shirley rubbed cold cream gently on them to soften the skin. I wept with gratitude. Off and on, Shirley rushed up to the window to look out. What are you looking at so intently, I asked her, but she did not answer. Later, when I was able to move about I saw from my window the red morgue to which the dead were taken, all wrapped in white.
Often I heard from different parts of the hospital women moaning, grieving over the death of some relative. At that precise moment Shirley would come to me and tell me that a child had fallen and hurt himself slightly and that the moaning was his. “Sleep, Amy,” she would whisper, “go back to sleep.” I wanted to live for a few more years and be able to see my little son play about on the green lawn. I prayed fervently for recovery promising my God that I would live an exemplary life if he spared me.
During my stay in Delhi I used to write regularly for the journal named The Century which was run by the late Mr V.K. Krishna Menon. My parents had met him and had perhaps known him but I had not, until the day he came to see me at the hospital. I had earlier heard of his arrogance from the young men who lived on the periphery of his social circle. One of them told me that he had wanted to take me to Mr Menon, but the former minister had asked him why he should meet this Kamala Das or any other writer for that matter. This story had hardened my heart against Mr Menon, but when he visited me, scolding the nurses for not being more careful and wiped my damp forehead himself with a corner of a towel I was astonished at my discovery. He had not made it known to any that he was kind-hearted.
I had lost during that illness the resemblance to anything human. I looked like a moulting bird. My skin had turned dark and scaly. My voice had thinned to a whisper. When the hospital finally discharged me, Shirley’s brother-in-law wrapped me in a rug and carried me up the stairs to deposit me on a clean bed. My little son was frightened of my looks and burst out crying. My second son tried for several days to rub mustard oil on my scaly legs to make me look normal again.
Like the phoenix I rose from the ashes of my past. I forgot the promises that I had made to God and became once more intoxicated with life. My lips had without rest uttered the sweet name of Lord Krishna while I lay ill, but when I recovered my health I painted them up with pink lipstick. On moonlit nights once again I thought wistfully of human love...
Then we moved into a house in Man Nagar where even in the hot summer the desert cooler churning up the frothy air chilled by the water and the khus screen, made us reach out for our blankets at night. Leaving the South Extension house had deprived us of two warmhearted friends, Professor Thapar and Sukrita Luthra who were both very kind to us. The professor used to visit us in the evenings and sit on our verandah holding our naked baby close to his chest and discussing war-strategy which was his pet subject. Mrs Luthra was our landlady and was an adopted sister of mine who pacified my baby whenever it cried out for no apparent reason.
At Man Nagar my life became very happy. In front of our house was a piece of dart green lawn bordered with flowering hedges. Crossing the road we could reach the lush green of the Lodi Gardens where, beyond the tombs of Ibrahim Lodi and Sikander Lodi stretched a pond, half hidden by the water lilies. We went to the Lodi Gardens to walk my son under its trees. My second son picked the red berries that had fallen on the ground.
I was wanted in those days, loved as men love their women, but I yearned for a change, a new life. I was looking for an ideal lover. I was looking for the one who went to Mathura and forgot to return to his Radha. Perhaps I was seeking the cruelty that lies in the depths of a man’s heart. Otherwise why did I not get my peace in the arms of husband? Subconsciously I hoped for the death of my ego. I was looking for an executioner whose axe would cleave my head into two. The ones who loved me did not understand why I was restive. You are like a civet cat in a cage, said a friend of mine looking at me walk up and down biting my nails. Take some gin, he said. It will quiet your nerves. You are always dissatisfied, cried my husband. Only I can understand you, said my Italian friend, come away with me...
41
A Poet’s Notoriety
They did this to her, the men who know her, the man
She loved, who loved her not enough, being selfish
And a coward, the husband who neither loved nor
Used her, but was a ruthless watcher, and the band
Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where
New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her
Face into their smells and their young lusts to forget
To forget, oh, to forget, and, they said, each of
Them, I do not love, I cannot love, it is not
In my nature to love, but I can be kind to you.
They let her slide from pegs of sanity into
A bed made soft with tears, and she lay there weeping,
For sleep had lost its use. I shall build walls with tears,
She said, walls to shut me in. Her husband shut her
In, every morning, locked her in a room of books
With a streak of sunshine lying near the door like
A yellow cat to keep her company, but soon
Winter came, and one day while locking her in, he
Noticed that the cat of sunshine was only a
Line, a half-thin line, and in the evening when
He returned to take her out, she was a cold and
Half dead woman, now of no use at all to men.
In Delhi the winter is full of enchantment. The sun falls over the city gently like a sliver of butter on a piece of toast.
Everything smells of the white, kind sun, not the grass alone or the berries fallen from the trees, but the children with their red cheeks roughened by the night’s chill and the young men drinking cona coffee at the Coffee House waiting for their current lovers to join them. Even the Tibetan bronzes at Janpath laid out in front of the Imperial Hotel smell not of their metal, but of the sun.
I used to walk my baby to the Khan Market not taking the normal route, the quiet street outside, but running across the grass that grew unkempt between the houses of Man Nagar, and once there I went to admire the books at Fakir Chands where the younger man was full of courtesy and friendliness. His wife was very beautiful.
&nb
sp; He knew that I hardly ever had the money to purchase all the books I lovingly picked up to smell their new jackets, but he was patient with me. Once, when my father was expected at Delhi for a short stay, I wandered round the Khan Market trying to find a walking stick and Fakir Chand went into his house and got for me as a gift one of his father’s sticks. That is one of the most unforgettable incidents that happened during our stay in Delhi.
My children used to eat a lot of ice cream everyday. The baby used to wear in those days a navy blue cardigan which was a perfect foil for his pink complexion. I walked proud as the Virgin Mary holding my baby by his chubby hand.
At that time my eldest son was fifteen. He told me one day while we were all relaxing on the grass that he wanted to go steady with a girl. There were no secrets between us. He said that he wanted a beautiful girl, preferably a blonde with blue eyes. His ideas of feminine beauty were derived from the comics he had been reading from his childhood. I thought it a tall order. But as though in answer to my prayers, a girl with ash blonde hair stood on my doorstep the next morning.
She had come with a young girl who used to frequent my house. This is Anna, said the Indian girl, she is from West Germany. From that day onwards she was my son’s special friend. They remained on the terrace of our house talking of French literature and Marxism. Anna was the most brilliant girl who had walked into my house.
For Monoo it was his first adolescent love. When the girl went for a week to Calcutta on a sightseeing tour with her aunts, Monoo asked us to send him with her, but my husband told him that he could not possibly waste money on encouraging a puppy love. Monoo in despair took all his comics, the collection of a life-time, and sold them to a secondhand dealer and made enough money to travel to Calcutta by third class. On the way he trembled in the severe cold until a labourer, taking pity on him, gave him a beedi to smoke. On his return he told me of all those discomforts with a smile that made me feel proud of him.
You have spoilt your son for good, said my husband. This love for a gentle and brilliant girl transformed Monoo into a full-fledged intellectual. He read far into the night and wrote faintly political articles which some journals began to publish. When my husband was transferred back to Bombay, Monoo was heartbroken. After a couple of months Anna went back to Germany to continue with her education. For a year or two they corresponded, but then each found other diversions in their respective countries. But the maturity that Anna had given him remained to become a part of my son.