My Story

by Kamala Das

  In Bombay we were led to a flat owned by the Reserve Bank at Cadell Road. It was on the ground floor and had broken window panes through which the cold winds blew from the Arabian sea which was only a few yards away. At the time of the high tide the sea came thumping against the wall that separated our house from the beach, which was mouldy and fetid with the rotting garbage washed ashore.

  None walked there in the evenings except some lovers who had no money to go anywhere else for their love-making and a few loafers who hoped to snatch a gold chain or a purse from the couples in· the dark. My eldest son took me for walks in the evening along the seashore, and a Bengali family mistook us to be lovers. He had grown tall and intense looking. Seeing us together, nobody would have guessed that we were mother and son.

  At night the sea rushed noisily my veins, giving me chronic insomnia. All I could do was sit at the dining table and write poetry. I wrote until it was five and the milkman clanked at the gate with his cycle and his pails. Then I went to lie near my husband and my child.

  Finally, fearing that I would go mad there, I persuaded my husband to shift to a place in Churchgate. This was another of the many buildings owned by the Reserve Bank of India. This stood between the sprawling Sachivalaya and the Esso Park where the children arrived in the evenings with their ayahs to play in the grass. We made friends with our neighbours, the Deshmukhs, the Menons and the Vaz family.

  Wherever a writer goes, her notoriety precedes her. The non-writers do not normally trust the writers. This is because they are entirely dissimilar except in appearance. The mind being an invisible limb, is not taken into consideration. Even birds have their own particular heights. The land birds who do not rise far into the lonely sky, often wonder why the eagles fly high, why they go round and round like ballerinas.

  The essence of the writer eludes the non-writer. All that the writer reveals to such people are her oddities of dress and her emotional excesses. Finally, when the muscles of the mind have picked up enough power to read people’s secret thoughts, the writer shies away from the invisible hostility and clings to her own type, those dreaming ones, born with a fragment of wing still attached to a shoulder.

  As I wrote more and more, in the circles I was compelled to move in, I became lonelier and lonelier. I felt that my loneliness was like a red brand on my face. In company when there were dinners at any friend’s house, I sat still as a statue, feeling the cruel vibrations all around me. Then my husband realised my plight and stopped taking me out anywhere.

  I withdrew into the cave I had made for myself where I wrote stories and poems and became safe and anonymous. There were books all round me, but no friend to give me well-meaning advice, no relative telling me of my discrediting my family-name by· my unconventional ways of thinking...

  42

  The Bombay Hospital

  The Beginning of Autumn:

  She floats in her autumn,

  Yellowed like a leaf

  And free.

  Autumn is the season for yellowing. When I entered middle age with reluctance, I found to my dismay that my body’s contours had changed, although imperceptibly. My skin had turned gross.

  In the morning I was used to picking up my glasses from my dresser and glancing at the reflection of my face in the mirror. At that hour my face seemed the freshest. It was as if the gentle nights and all their dreams had cast a golden bloom over my face, a fall of dew to damp my skin. But after thirty-five there were seldom any dreams at all in my sleep and the face that I saw in the glass appeared merely haggard.

  What was happening to me, I wondered. Was it no longer possible to lure a charming male into a complicated and satisfying love affair with the right words, the right glances, the right gestures? Was I finished as a charmer? Then with the force of a typhoon he conquered me, the last of my lovers, the most notorious of all, the king of all kings, the bison among animals, the handsome dark one with a tattoo between his eyes.

  He was coming out of a cloth shop at Churchgate and I was walking in. His face was familiar to me. I stared at him in fascination. There were several stories circulating about his innumerable love affairs and his sexual prowess. In my eyes he was a magnificent animal.

  He turned back again and again to see why I stared so hard at him. I did not resemble any of the usual nymphomaniacs probably because I was never one. Having an active brain, I did not have the round, glassy, flowerlike face that normally appeals to a libertine. I was plain, very brown and I did not like coquetry. He must have put my face out of his mind immediately.

  In the month of October a friend of ours who was celebrating a birthday, forced me to drink a gimlet with the rest of the ladies present, and within an hour I felt dizzy and ill. When I reached home, I collapsed on my bed with a temperature of 105 degrees. Next morning the fever remained high to puzzle my doctor who put me on penicillin immediately. I was well enough to read books lying in my bed, wrapped in a blanket.

  My friend Nissim Ezekiel visited me, spent the day in my room reading the paperbacks strewn all over my bed and sharing the glasses of fruit juice with me. Nissim is an ideal companion for any sick person. He is kind and gentle. He does not speak loud enough to harm the nerves of the hearer.

  After ten days of illness my blood was examined and it was found to contain too many leucocytes. The doctor was worried. The specialist who was called in showed anxiety. Could it be leukaemia? They removed me to the Bombay Hospital an hour before our lunchtime. I did not bid farewell to my child who was playing in the next room. From the car that took me to the hospital I studied the roads and the landmarks in order to be able to return as a ghost after death to my home, to be with my children. I believed that I was going to die.

  The room that I was allotted was painted green and had green drapes. It had an airconditioner. It resembled an underwater cabin. There was a dresser painted in white and an extra bed for any relative who wished to keep the patient company. I crept under the sheets and fell asleep. Dr Goyal was the honorary chosen to cure me. He wore everyday a new shiny suit and a bow tie. He assured me that I was going to be all right.

  In the adjacent room was a little child suffering from meningitis who uttered harsh bird-cries intermittently. It was an unforgettable sound. He had a private nurse who crept into my room occasionally to peer into my face and nod her head in sympathy. Leukaemia is not curable, she said. I can lend you my magazines. She brought me two issues of True Confessions which were full of pictures.

  I asked her why the child’s parents were not around to comfort him. She laughed a mirthless laugh. They are rich people, she said, they will not be able to sleep in the hospital... All through that night I heard the shrill cry of the child but a little before dawn I fell asleep. When I woke up the cry had stopped, but there were the swishy sounds of cleaning coming from his room, the mop beating against the wet floor and the bucket being dragged. The private nurse entered my room to take away her magazines. The child expired at four, she said, my duty is over, I must go.

  Every morning the boys from the laboratory on the first floor woke me up at six shouting for my blood. Khoon, khoon, they shouted, pushing their trays and trolleys and switching on all the bright lights. After the blood was taken they sent their henchmen to collect in jam bottles the urine, the bowel movement and the sputum. I was wheeled often to the dart X-ray room where the attendant gently removed my upper clothes and laid me out on the long cable under the machine. The fever remained with me. My brother and my sister, both doctors of considerable merit, were called to Bombay. My lung had an abscess, my liver had an abscess and something had gone wrong with my heart.

  And, yet, my husband who had never read a medical book in all his life, told me that I was going to get well. My room’s number was 565. It proved to be lucky for me. I surprised the doctors and the various specialists by recovering fully. I was taken from the hospital to the airport and put inside a plane that was flying to Delhi. The idea was to keep me in my brother’s house for a period of ob
servation. One night I vomited a mass of green, resembling tangled seaweeds, and afterwards felt completely cured.

  Health has its own anointments. When I recovered from my serious illness I grew attractive once again. Then at the airport I collided with the elderly man who had once fascinated me just by turning back to glance darkly at me. I had heard of his fabulous lusts. He drew me to him as a serpent draws its dazed victim. I was his slave. That night I tossed about in my bed thinking of his dark limbs and of his eyes glazed with desire. Very soon we met and I fell into his arms.

  You are my Krishna, I whispered kissing his eyes shut. He laughed. I felt that I was a virgin in his arms. Was there a summer before the autumn of his love? Was there a dawn before the dusk of his skin? I did not remember. I carried him with me inside my eyelids, the dark God of girlhood dreams. At night from the lush foxholes of the city his concubines wailed for him. Oh Krishna, oh Kanhaiya, do not leave me for another.

  I wrote him letters when I could not meet him. He hated such letters. Do not get sentimental, he said. Don’t write silly letters... I should have gone away from him immediately. But I stayed near him, snuggling against his hairless chest, burrowing my tear-stained face into the deep curve of his arm. Each time we parted, I asked him, when am I to meet you again, and combing his iron grey hair his eyes meeting mine in the glass, he always said, darling, we shall meet after two days...

  There were eighteen mirrors in his room, eighteen ponds into which I dipped my hot brown body. Beyond that room was an enclosed verandah where we stood together to look at the sea. The sea was our only witness. How many times I turned to it and whispered, oh, sea, I am at last in love. I have found my Krishna...

  43

  The Long Summer of Love

  You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her

  In the long summer of your love so that she would forget

  Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but

  Also her nature, the urge to fly, and endless

  Pathways of the sky. It was not to gather knowledge

  Of yet another man that I came to you but to learn

  What I was, and by learning, to learn to grow, but every lesson

  You gave was about yourself. You were pleased

  With my body’s response, its usual shallow

  Convulsions. You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured

  Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed

  My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices. You called me wife,

  I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and

  To offer at the right moment the vitamins. Cowering

  Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and

  Became a dwarf. I lost my will and reason, to all your

  Questions I mumbled incoherent replies. The summer

  Begins to pall. I remember the ruder breezes

  Of the fall and the smoke from burning leaves. Your room is

  Always lit by artificial lights, your windows always

  Shut. Even the airconditioner helps so little,

  All pervasive is the male scent of your breath. The cut flowers

  In the vases have begun to smell of human sweat. There is

  No more singing, no more a dance, my mind is an old

  Playhouse with all its lights put out. The strong man’s technique is

  Always the same, he serves his love in lethal doses,

  For love is Narcissus at the water’s edge, haunted

  By its own lonely face, and yet it must seek at last

  An end, a pure and total freedom, it must will the mirrors

  To shatter, and the kind night to erase the water...

  Like the majority of city-dwelling women I too tried adultery once, but found it distasteful. My lover had entered the decline of his career and aroused in me, more than love, a strong sense of pity.

  His admirers were keeping away. His phone was silent. No favours were asked. He wore the sad aura of a king in exile. I wanted to offer my life to him, but it was only a tarnished trophy and perhaps worthless. There was only one arbour left for him, the snuggery between strong limbs and for his weary eyes, the pink blindness against my pores.

  Even while I held him close to my body, he muttered, I see the reds rise like a rash, the gates fall open, the walls crumble, all laws get trampled in the dust, but I am powerless to do anything for this country... When we embraced, we fell in the cerulean pools of his many mirrors as a deathless motif, repeating and repeating, the reflection of a reflection, the shadow of a shadow, the dream of a dream, and yet I hated the exploitation of my body. The silly female shape had again intervened to ruin a beautiful relationship, the clumsy gadgetry that always, always, damaged bonds.

  I asked myself sadly, must my body always ride the gentler, wiser mind! Then in what I once hated, I discovered beauty. Oh, the moments of his stillness and the fast flutter of his breath! And the silence that healed for a while the ancient bruises of the soul. His body became my prison. I could not see beyond it. His darkness blinded me and his love-words shut out the wise world’s din.

  Years after all of it had ended, I asked myself why I took him on as my lover, fully aware of his incapacity to love and I groped in my mind for the right answers. Love has a beginning and an end, but lust has no such faults. I needed security, I needed permanence, I needed two strong arms thrown around my shoulders and a soft voice in my ear. Physical integrity must carry with it a certain pride that is a burden to the soul. Perhaps it was necessary for my body to defile itself in many ways, so that the soul turned humble for a change.

  It was a humbler woman who finally rose from his pleasure-couch and walked away, not turning once to say goodbye, making up my mind as swiftly as I had made up my physical responses. It was a game in which he was going to lose heavily, I did not believe in receiving any gift that was not abstract. I wanted to grow in him like cancer. I wanted him to suffer from incurable love. This cruelty is typical of women when they are in love. He said you are a mad girl, but long live your madness...

  Yes, it is true that I loved him. Not madly as he thought I did, but sanely, guided both by the wisdom of my body and by that of my mind. At the first touch of his body all my past infatuations were obliterated. It was as if his dark body was the only body left alive. All the other deaths were silent; no requiems were sung for those love affairs. Besides, who had the time to remember anything in that room with the eighteen mirrors?

  City fathers, friends and moralists, if I were a sinner, do not forgive my sin. If I were innocent do not forgive my innocence. Burn me with torches blood-red in the night, burn my proud Dravidian skin and burn the tumult at the core. Or bury me in your back garden, fill my crevices with the red dust of Bombay, plant gentle saplings on my belly, for he and I met too late, we could get no child of our own, my love for him was just the writing of the sea, just a song borne by the wind...

  Free from that last of human bondage, I turned to Krishna. I felt that the show had ended and the auditorium was empty. Then He came, not wearing a crown, not wearing make-up, but making a quiet entry. What is the role you are going to play, I asked Him. Your face seems familiar. I am not playing any role, I am myself, He said. In the old playhouse of my mind, in its echoing hollowness, His voice was sweet. He had come to claim me, ultimately. Thereafter He dwelt in my dreams. Often I sat crosslegged before a lamp reciting mantras in His praise.

  I lost weight. One day I fell in a heap gasping for breath. Once again I was in Room No. 565 of the Bombay Hospital. My doctor said that there was no cause for alarm. It is only myocarditis, he said.

  After a series of tests two operations were carried out on my body. When I was getting ready for the more major of the two, my sister sat near me reciting the Durgakavacham. I am not praying for your recovery, she said, I am praying for protection in death if death is to be your destiny. I felt calm and carefree. I tried to picture to myself the form of the glorious Goddess Durga. I saw her in red
, resplendent in gem-encrusted jewellery. It was with this vision that I became unconscious on the operating table.

  When I woke up after several hours, I saw a lovely face bending over mine. You are Durga, I asked her and she said, yes, but how did you know it was my name... Later I found out that it was a lady doctor who was attending on me who was named Durga by her parents but had it changed to Rama after marriage. She did not know that I mistook her for the benign Goddess.

  Room No. 565 was familiar to me. It was therefore like a homecoming. My doctors were extra kind. They held my hand and talked to me with affection. There was in particular a young, balding one who smoked Benson and Hedges and scattered their butts on the floor. I liked the smell his thick fingers left on my hands.

  I spent an hour in the morning reciting my prayers. The doctor allowed me to be wheeled every morning to the temple of Krishna where I gazed on that indescribably lovely face in rapture. Isn’t it time yet to take me back to you, I asked Him. I had had enough of this earth and all its bitter gifts. My husband thought that I was losing my mind. I was given sedatives and asked to rest in bed for three months. In bed again I thought of His blueness, His wide eyes and His knowing smile.

  I was losing patience. I could not understand the purpose of my return from the hospital or of the resurrection of my health. On some days, seated before the mirror, and painting up my pale lips, I felt all of a sudden uneasy. I saw the lonely eyes reflected in the mirror clouding over as though a mist had enveloped them. I was looking into the depths of my loneliness. Then I felt that I was applying paint on the lips of a corpse. Death leans against my hedge. My soul fills my body with a certain incense. If death touched me, the fragrance will leave my body and in its place will be an unbearable stench. Even my sons who kiss my cheeks now will then be filled with horror.