by Kamala Das
How right he was. I should never have taken to wearing the coloured clothes of the city. I should have dressed only in white and I should have loaded my limbs with gold. I should never have done housekeeping at a small flat owned by the Reserve Bank of India, or worried about the payment of the grocer’s bills. I belonged to the serenity of Nalapat. Nalapat belonged to me. By abandoning it to the care of vulgar caretakers and managers, I had hurt the spirit of the house. I HAD UNWITTINGLY SPILT THE BLOOD OF ITS SPIRIT...
46
The Intensive Cardiac Care Unit
Towards the Slaughter-yard:
The Intensive Cardiac Care Unit
Is where the lidless fish-eyes of bulbs burn on,
Blind to the night’s thinning out into light beyond the wall
And the day spilling itself out on crowding streets
The intensive cardiac care unit
Is where the weary travellers pause to pitch a tent, the oasis
For a night’s rest before the long crossing
On camel-back through hot sand;
The intensive cardiac care unit
Is where each lies in his own white tent
Under harsh desert moons,
Buried only neck deep in sleep, so that with unhooded head
He awaits his execution,
And half-grown nightmares crouch under beds,
And moody as distant drums sound the heart beat;
The intensive cardiac care unit
Is where the tall dark doctor comes at midnight, visiting,
Called up from the depths of dreams, out of breath,
The bulbs blurring in his eyes, the ageing faces blurring
On their pillows, while sleep gazes at his brow,
His great shoulders,
His knees, and like a vagrant cow nods its head and moves on...
Although I was a favourite with the students of my home-state who supported my plea for a new kind of morality, I was an eyesore to my relatives who thought me to be a threat to their respectability.
They had grown up as components of the accursed feudal system that prevailed in Malabar until two decades ago and had their own awesome skeletons in the cupboards of the past. Being members of affluent joint families, they had had ample leisure to nurture their concupiscence, feeding it with the juices of the tender daughters of their serfs and retainers. They feared that I would write of their misdeeds, of the accidental deaths in the locality and of the true immorality which takes shelter nowhere else but in the robust arms of our society.
They took their grievances to my parents who were embarrassed but totally helpless, for it had become clear to them that I had become a truth-addict and that I loved my writing more than I loved them or my own sons. If the need ever arose, I would without hesitation bid goodbye to my doting husband and to my sons, only to be allowed to remain what I was, a writer.
I myself had no control over my writing which emerged like a rash of prickly heat in certain seasons. A few of the elderly men of my village came to visit me slyly when the evening had darkened and sat on the easychairs, smiling vacuously and in silence. I had gone there without my husband and besides, had I not confessed in my writings to have had a couple of love affairs? They came with whetted appetites and looked like sick hounds. I had to get my old maidservant to assist me in getting rid of them without much fanfare.
My enemies increased in number day by day although for a few weeks I was unaware. While I was away in Trivandrum, acting as a judge on the Regional Film Awards Committee, they buried an urn somewhere in my yard, hoping to kill me with the rites of sorcery. I chose to ignore the warnings given by my servants. One day I found on the ledge of our well a decapitated cat and on inspecting it minutely, I found my name engraved on a copper piece, an egg, some turmeric and a lot of stuff that resembled vermillion stuffed inside its body. Then I realised that I too should try some magic to scare my foes away. I hung a picture of Kali on the wall of my balcony and adorned it daily with long strings of red flowers resembling the intestines of a disembowelled human being. Anyone walking along the edge of my paddy field a furlong away could see the Goddess and the macabre splash of red. This gave the villagers a fright.
I toyed with the idea of keeping a good watch dog but could not find one. I kept many servants, but finally two of them succumbed to bribes and attempted to poison me. There is a basic decency in the poor which will prevent them from being disloyal or cruel to one who has loved them. They could bring themselves to administer poison only in insufficient doses. I saw the relief on their faces when I came down the stairs in the morning, alive and more or less normal.
My servants loved me. The fieldhands loved me. Only the wealthy hated me. They spread lush scandals about my way of life.
In actuality my life was simple and uncomplicated. In the morning my maid brought up for me a tray of tea things. After tea I went out to inspect my rice and my vegetables. I fed my cows. Breakfast. After that playing some game with my little son until it was bath time, and my young maidservant came to me with the henna for my palms and feet. An oil bath. Prayers in the puja room where a Namboodiri Brahmin worshipped scientifically my three deities, Ganapati, Surya and Lakshmi. Lunch at twelve and sleep until tea time when the tray came up the stairs laden with tea and sweets an hour of writing or of the study of Sanskrit. Then downstairs once again to walk under the trees with my son. Dinner at seven-thirty and reading until nine.
Not even Mrs Grundy would have found fault with my morals, but the village talked in whispers of my lovers. Subtly I was harassed until one night I collapsed with a heart attack and lay on the floor all damp like a baked fish. My child trunk-called to my brother Mohandas who came from Calicut to carry me to a nursing home.
In the car during the three hours’ journey my child held my hand and whimpered. I told myself that I was not prepared to die. This beautiful child was not to be left motherless. My paddy had to be harvested. I had only begun my career as an agriculturist. At Calicut I was admitted into a private nursing home owned by one of the best heart-specialists of the country. After the crisis was over, they removed me to a room that faced the red road which I watched from my bed.
People passed by wearing coloured clothes, and occasionally a car. There was a No Visitors sign on my door which kept even death away, although I dreamt one afternoon that it came to me disguised as a woodpecker and began to peck at my bones. Then it changed itself into a water fowl, the kind I used to see near the pond at Nalapat, while I was a child living there with my grandmother and then it ruffled the rivulets of my blood, a little haemo-bird trapped in a migrant’s trance.
I woke up sweating. My maidservant told me that a young man had come several times to the door wanting to see me. He wants you to sign in his book, she said.
I heard his voice and liked its velvet thickness and so he was called in. He was only a blur at the foot of my bed. What is your name, I asked him. I am Mohan, he said, I am at a loss for words. Be safe in your silence, Mohan, I wrote in his book and envied him, his capacity for silence. With words I had destroyed my life. I had used them like swords in what was meant to be a purification dance, but blood was unwittingly shed. Next morning from the young man there was a gift of roses which came in many hues, including two of a pale heliotrope which I fondled for a long while. The roses remained on my window sill for three days. I wanted to see the man and thank him for the happiness his flowers had given me, but he did not appear again.
After three weeks of rest I coaxed my doctor to send me home, because it was the time of harvest and I wished to be present, to glory in my achievement. While I was being driven home, I saw near the mountain passes the aged cattle being taken to the slaughter yard. I saw their thin haunches and the vermillion brand on their shoulders.
I wanted to, just for one brief moment, get down from the car and join them. Human beings are never branded with a hot iron. They are only sent home with their electrocardiographs and sedatives.
47
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A Columnist
From the debris of house-wrecks
Pick up my broken face,
Your bride’s face,
Changed a little with the years.
I shall not remember
The betrayed honeymoon;
We are both such cynics,
You and I.
If loving me was hard then
It’s harder now
But love me one day
For a lark
Love the sixty-seven
Kilogrammes of ageing flesh
Love the damaged liver,
The heart and its ischaemia,
Yes, love me one day
Just for a lark,
Show me what our life would have been
If only you had loved...
After my return from the nursing home, life became difficult for me. My eldest son who had come to be by my side during my illness, fell ill, contracting measles from my little son. Both were delirious with the high fever and I saw on their faces an ominous glaze.
I still hugged to my left side the pain I went to the hospital with, and to eat the sedatives prescribed for me I was not willing. I wanted to remain awake and vigilant at the bedside of my son who stared at me with unseeing eyes mottled by red veins.
In the village there was no ice to be had to lower his temperature. All I could do was place a wet cloth on his forehead and remove it when it dried. I grew panicky and soon was so demoralised that I took my maid’s advice and summoned a sorcerer to find out if our enemies were bringing us such misfortune.
The sorcerer came on a bike at night displaying his glossy smile. He was taken up to the balcony where he drew a diagram and spread out his cowrie shells to begin his esoteric calculations. He was a young man of a robust build with wavy hair and a gleaming skin. He wore round his neck a thick chain of gold with a round locket. He gave me three strings, one for my wrist and the others for my sons. They have done Mahamaran to kill you, he said, but we shall try to save your children.
I gave him Rs 20 for his words of assurance and sent him away. The strings were tied round the wrists of my sons who were too weak to protest. But towards dawn, after having debated within for six sleepless hours, I cut them and threw them out of the window. Finally, Tetracycline cured my sons.
I could hardly walk for the ache that remained like a sickle embedded in my left breast. So I sent a message to my husband who came at once from Bombay to be with us. When I heard his heavy footfalls on the stairs, I clapped my hands in sheer happiness. I was going to be secure again. The little son told him, take us with you to Bombay, or else we will surely die here...
Leaving the property to the care of a cousin and a servant I left once more for Bombay. I had had enough of experimenting and was definitely desirous of settling down to a normal life. My son who had been a victim of chronic rheumatic fever, had improved with two years of taking Penicillin. He himself suggested that we send him to a school. He wanted us to find for him a kind school unlike the one he had once been attending, where the teachers were impersonal and curt. My husband chose the Dunne Institute and admitted him in the fourth standard.
He came home with great excitement. Amma, my teacher is very kind to me, he said and I embraced him from my bed, grateful to God for his mercy. The child liked all his teachers and even on days when he felt ill, he begged me to send him to school. During the weekends he edited a mini-mag which he called Oushanasa where he wrote verses and stories under different pen-names.
I learnt for the first time to be miserly with my energy spending it only on my writing, which I enjoyed more than anything else in the world. I typed sitting propped against pillows on my wide bed. Large areas of my ignorance had been obliterated by the lessons I had learnt from my life and I wanted my readers to know of it. I had realised by then that the writer has none to love her but the readers. She would have proved herself to be a mere embarassment to the members of her family, for she is like a goldfish in a well-lit bowl whose movements are never kept concealed.
I have often wished to take myself apart and stick all the bits, the heart, the intestines, the liver, the reproductive organs, the skin, the hair and all the rest on a large canvas to form a collage which could then be donated to my readers. I have no secrets at all. Each time I have wept, the readers have wept with me. Each time I walked to my lovers’ houses dressed like a bride, my readers have walked with me. I have felt their eyes on me right from my adolescence when I published my first story and was called controversial. Like the eyes of an all-seeing God they follow me through the years.
Illness and my writing helped me to turn into an island. People had to go out of their way to visit me. In canoes they came and in yachts. My prayers and its corollaries of silent meditation helped me to become vaguely telepathic. If someone who did not like me, walked into my drawing room I sensed the secret hostility and refused to see him, or her. I withdrew my head into my closed quilt and remained in my closed bedroom which was also my workroom.
I wanted only love and kindness. Hate of any kind would ruin my work. I did not have even the little strength needed to brush my hair. There was no wisdom in wasting my strength in sitting on a sofa talking with people who secretly disliked me but came out of curiosity. By and by all the non-intellectuals began to stay away. Only genuine friends arrived in my house to see me. They brought me glad tidings and peace.
I typed nearly a thousand words a week. I wrote about the subjects the editors asked me to write on, fully aware that I was uneducated by the usual standards and that I had no business meddling in grave matters. But how happily I meddled to satisfy that particular brand of readers who liked me and liked my honest approach. I was useless as a housewife anyway. I could not pick up a teapot without gasping for breath. But writing was possible. And it certainly brought me happpiness.
48
The Indian Poverty
When you learn to swim
Do not enter a river that has no ocean
To flow into, one ignorant of destinations
And knowing only the flowing as its destiny,
Like the weary rivers of the blood
That bear the scum of ancient memories
But go, swim in the sea,
Go swim in the great blue sea,
Where the first tide you meet is your body,
That familiar pest,
But if you learn to cross it,
You are safe, yes, beyond it you are safe,
For even sinking would make no difference then...
During the long weeks of my convalescence I was obsessed with the recollections of my childhood days spent at Nalapat. The hazy siesta banked in the heart of little pills prescribed to quieten the flutter of my heart was bruised with the voices of the dead and with the sights once familiar to me at Nalapat.
For hours I had played in the sunlit pond behind the house flailing the water with my girl-thin limbs, while the turtles moved about in its hostile depths and eels stared at me with their opal eyes but in all those unfenced hours I had felt no fear, nor even joy but an anonymous peace.
My dreams as always glowed pearl-white. They seemed hardly mortal, but as evening came, snake-like I shed their silver coils and woke to meet an alien world that talked of casual sins. I had desired to possess the sense, the courage to pick myself an average identity, to age through years of earthy din gently like a cut flower until it was time to be removed, but I had wandered, fog-eyed, seeking another, to be mine, my own to love or destroy and to share with me the dimlit gloom where I moved like a fawn.
I was physically destroyed beyond resurrection. But while my body lay inert on my sick bed, my mind leapt up like a walking greyhound and became alert. It had said goodbye to its sleep. All the ancient hungers that had once tormented my lithe body were fulfilled. Not even the best-looking man in the world would any longer arouse in me an appetite for love.
If my desires were lotuses in a pond, closing their petals at dusk and opening out at
dawn once upon a time, they were now totally dead, rotted and dissolved, and for them there was no more to be a re-sprouting. The pond had cleared itself of all growth. It was placid.
If my parents had talked to me and pointed out the wrong path and the right, I would still have led the life I led. I sincerely believe that knowledge is exposure to life. I could never bring myself to hang my life on the pegs of quotations for safety. I never did play safe. I compromised myself with every sentence I wrote and thus I burnt all the boats that would have reached me to security.
What did I finally gain from life? Only the vague hope that there are a few readers who have loved reading my books although they have not wished to inform me of it. It is for each of them that I continue to write, although the abusive letters keep pouring in. I tweak the noses of the puritans but I am that corny creature, the sad clown who knows that the performance is over and that the audiences are safely tucked in their beds with all their laughter now forgotten. Their domestic worries have taken over.
Where is the time for them to remember the jokes and the footlights of the stage? Some of my Communist friends ask me what I have done in my life for the common man. Should I not have written with a social conscience? Should I not have written solely of the poor and the downtrodden? I remain silent.
The poor emerge out of invisible holes in the morning bearing the burden of their hunger and wander around looking for edible garbage. I watch them when I am well enough to stand in my verandah.
I watch the young woman who is mad, being tormented by loafers while she lies asleep at the foot of a tree, half-clad. I notice the passing days wrinkle her face and emaciate her once plump body. Whose daughter is she? Where has she misplaced her parents? On some mornings she appears naked, sauntering past our house with a smile on her lips, and we throw her a housecoat or saree which she accepts without once looking up to see the giver, nonchalantly, as though she had expected the sky to rain down on her head only soft garments.