by Kamala Das
I watch the little boys of the poor crowding round the bhelpuriwala’s handcart only to have the pleasure of watching the richer ones eat. I have seen their wise eyes and their lengthy contemplation. The poor are fatalists by nature and by tradition. Or else where would we be now, the selfish, self-centred ones, obsessed by our weight problems, our tax problems and our colour problems?
The poor would have risen like a locust storm and devoured us by now; they would have picked our over-ripened flesh from the bones and left us in scraps on the garbage heaps. Yes, I do see the writing on the wall, although it is very faint. I shudder for one moment but I shudder in delicious anticipation.
The ailing have a lot of time to ponder over the grave issues of the world. I do very little work. Once or twice my hand may sweep a duster over my writing desk. I may comb my long hair to unsnarl it before going to bed at night. But always like an inexpensive timepiece ticking away merrily, loudly, my brain goes a-ticking. I draw out plans of action which I hope to convey to the rulers of the country.
I plan to organise a campaign to collect a rupee from every middle-class home to build low-cost tenements where the slum-dwellers can be housed so that we may see their children grow up healthy and without that utter hopelessness dimming their young eyes. I plan to request the hoteliers to set aside one-tenth of their income to feed the poor everyday.
As President of the Jyotsna Arts and Education Society I climb the stage occasionally to talk to the public of my dream of starting a residential school based on the Gurukul system where we shall get teachers from many countries, hand-picked ones with a sense of dedication, each of whom will live as a parent with ten of the pupils in one of the many cottages set aside for the school.
Nobody comes forward to turn these dreams to reality. The world outside my house is always so busy catching buses, balancing the accounts in large ledgers, lobbying for de-classed politicians, pimping for the impotent and hiding their ill-gotten wealth in concealed lockers in the W.C.
None has asked me what I think of Indira Gandhi, of Kissinger or of Jayaprakash Narayan. I am told to think of God and to try and make peace with Him so that I may not have the raw deal that I have had up there too, But an easier time.
49
A Freedom to Dis-compose
The cicadas in brambled foliage
Naturally concave. So also these
Men who climb up the cogged scaffoldings
Building houses for the alien rich.
On some days the hot sky flings at us scraps
Of Telugu songs and we intently
Listen, but we wait in vain for the harsh
Message of the lowly. In merry tunes
Their voices break, but just a little, as
Though the hero’s happiness is too big
A burden on their breath, too big a lie
For their throats to swallow, but past sunset
Their jests sound ribald, their lust seems robust.
Puny these toy-men of dust, fathers of light
Dust-children, but their hands like the withered boughs
Of some mythic hoodoo tree cast only
Cool shadows, and with native grace bestow
Even on unbelievers vast shelters...
When I was a young woman living at Cuffe Parade, there were no buildings at Nariman Point but only the sea, marshy in the little coves, but clean and blue in the distance where a boat or two swung gently on its waves. Later the sea was forced to recede, reminding one of a receding hairline, and on the land reclaimed tall buildings were constructed.
The builders in Bombay are chiefly those of Andhra Pradesh who have now become domiciles and speak Marathi with their children. They are dark, wiry people with loud voices and a running gait that tells the watcher how they value time and are always in a hurry. When a building is being constructed they live on its precincts in huts made of mud-bricks and corrugated iron.
Beyond the ministers’ cottages and behind the large new structures is a colony where the builders live. It is a tiny village in itself with dirt roads and milch goats tethered to poles and a well where the women gather with pots in the evenings.
During the week dedicated to the worship of Lord Ganesh, the inhabitants erect a crude stage and instal an idol. Then there is loud music in the evenings after the work is over and the bath and the cooking. Some of them use little cymbals of brass and clang-clang to the tune of the hymns while the round-eyed children squat on the ground and watch in admiration.
From the houses nearby the upper middle classes protest vehemently, for they do not wish such plebian exuberance to spoil their tranquil hours. They wish to have their evening whisky in peace, talking of books and love affairs and office promotions. If there is to be music let it be that of Balamurali or Kumar Gandharva.
The poor are bad singers. Their voices grate as though the dust of their surroundings have entered their throats and their lungs. But no complaint can stop the house builders from enjoying themselves during the Ganesh festival. The men drink hard, and raise their voices in His praise. The song rises like a tired snake who has finally reconciled itself to its destiny which is to uncurl out of the snake charmer’s basket and sway.
Even while the cultured voices discussed poetry inside my drawing room, I heard that song and sensed the joy of the singers. Finally, unable to control myself any longer I dragged my husband to the colony one evening to see the ones who were singing. The people on the platform dipped their voices when they saw us enter. We were outsiders but we were anyway welcome. How happily the children smiled at us! Sit down, said one of the organisers, an old toothless man, pointing to the platform. Who were we to sit beside their favourite God? I felt humbled by their goodwill.
We sat on the ground with the children, who had all been given baths and were gleaming like rosewood carvings. The singers became self conscious for a while but then they relaxed to sing as loud as before. What did they have in their lives to be so happy about? I was pining for yet another settee for the drawing room while these grand men and women were working from morning till dusk carrying cement and climbing the scaffoldings. And yet they had more vitality than I had and more of optimism. I returned home with the awareness that I had led a paltry existence, thinking only of my drawing room furniture and of my loved ones.
How vast really was my world! My gloom lay in its littlest corner like a black dog. I had had the idiocy to think of myself as Kamala, a being separate from all the rest and with a destiny entirely different from those of others.
The idea of our world being round and our life being a cycle has tripped us up. If we were to forget the words past, present and future and were to see life as a collage, a vast assembly of things and people and emotions we shall stop grieving for the dead stop pining for the living and stop accumulating visible wealth.
What exists must exist. Only the compositions will change. Tomorrow my soul might migrate into the womb of a house-builder’s woman and I might be one of the happy children squatting to see the pink Ganapati. Both happiness and unhappiness are mine to enjoy. I have no end. Nothing has an end. Instead of an end, all that we suffer is a discomposition.
Often I have toyed with the idea of drowning myself to be rid of my loneliness which is not unique in anyway but is natural to all. I have wanted to find rest in the sea and an escape from involvements. But rest is a childish fancy, a very minor hunger. The shark’s hunger is far greater than mine.
There is a hunger in each of us to feed other hungers, the basic one, to crumble and dissolve and to retain in other things the potent fragments of oneself. But ultimately we shall discover that we are immortal and that the only mortal things are systems and arrangements.
Even our pains shall continue in those who have devoured us. The oft-repeated moves of every scattered cell shall give no power to escape from cages of involvement. We are trapped in immortality and our only freedom is the freedom to discompose...
50
Death — a Reality
Two months ago an eminent cardiologist of Bombay, who is a friend of ours, dropped in at my place in the afternoon to take my E.C.G. He told me with great solicitude that I ought to remove myself to the Intensive Cardiac Unit of a nearby hospital as soon as I could, unless I wished to die in a short while, deteriorating in health day by day, until my feet and my face turned swollen, and I became too helpless to move out of my bed.
He held my hand in his and added that he would not have cautioned me so bluntly if I were less intelligent, less brave. Weep if you must, he said, but pack your things before the evening and get your husband to bring you to the hospital. Then he lit a cigarette.
I remained silent. I did not want to tell him that I woke from my bed on some days with a puffiness beneath my eyes and that I had fainted several times during my morning prayers, sitting cross-legged for nearly an hour, reciting my mantras and collapsing suddenly in a heap on the floor.
Whenever my feet swelled up I tucked them beneath the folds of my sari. Whenever I felt a great wringing pain at my side or in my left arm I thrust a Sorbitrate tablet under my tongue and felt its warmth dilating my articles. I was no stranger to the many signals of warning. But going once again to the hospital was an unpleasant prospect.
I have always regarded the hospital as a planet situated like a sandwich filling between the familiar earth and the strange domain of death. Each time I have been admitted into a hospital-room I have been seized with an acute desire to be left alone. At that moment I am like a honeymooner who desires total privacy for herself and her mate.
Illness has become my mate, bound by ties of blood and nerves and bone, and I hold with it long secret conversations. I tell my heart disease that I have just entered my forties and that my little son still sleeps with his right thumb in his mouth and the left hand tucked inside my nightie between my breasts.
I tell it that my ancestral home, now under repair, is still unplastered because of the cement shortage and that I would like to live in it for at least a year before my death. I entreat the illness to quieten the ache at my side...
Soon after the admission, the honorary chosen to take care of you, the knight-errant prescribed to fight your battles with the dragon of death, comes to your bedside and undresses you with the help of a nurse, trying to locate the unmanifested symptoms, which in due course will build up for him the ultimate diagnosis. At the touch of his hands your body blushes purple.
Outside your door he talks solemnly with your loved ones. You only hear an incoherent murmur. Besides, by then you would have ceased to care.You have become a mere number.Along with your clothes, which the nurse took off, was removed your personality-traits. Then the pathologist’s henchmen rush at you for specimens of your blood, sputum, urine and bowel-movement.
With all those little jamjars filled and sealed, every vestige of your false dignity is thus removed. In the X-Ray room, another nurse unwraps your body while the wardboy who wheeled you in watches furtively from the dark. The display of breasts is the legitimate reward for his labour.
A booming voice orders you to take a deep, deep breath, and lying on the ice-cold X-Ray table you feel secretly amused because you would not have been here at all if taking a deep breath was that easy but you would be walking hand in hand with your little son or seeing a film or picnicking under a fragrant tree.
No, I will not dream of going back to a hospital, I said to the doctor. He gave a friendly shrug. The room was filled with his cigarette-smoke.
It is not that I am afraid of the injections and the drips and all the rest, I said. It is just that I have stopped fearing death...
I have been for years obsessed with the idea of death. I have come to believe that life is a mere dream and that death is the only reality. It is endless, stretching before and beyond our human existence. To slide into it will be to pick up a new significance. Life has been, despite all emotional involvements, as ineffectual as writing on moving water. We have been mere participants in someone else’s dream.
I am at peace. I liken God to a tree which has as its parts the leaves, the bark, the fruits and the flowers each unlike the other in appearance and in texture but in each lying dissolved the essence of the tree, the whatness of it. Quiditus. Each component obeys its own destiny. The flowers blossom, scatter pollen and dry up. The fruits ripen and fall. The bark peels. Each of us shall obey that colossal wisdom, the taproot of all wisdom and the source of all consciousness.
I have left colourful youth behind. Perhaps I mixed my pleasures as carelessly as I mixed my drinks and passed out too soon on the couch of life. But does it matter at all? I have turned weary and frigid. My heart resembles a cracked platter that can no more hold anything. But at daybreak lovers still cling at doorways with wet eyes, wet limbs, speaking the words I once spoke.
Perhaps I shall die soon. The jewellery I adorn my body with, in order to look like a bride awaiting her love, shall survive me. The books I have collected, the bronze idols I have worshipped with flowers and all the trinkets stored in my lifetime shall endure, but not I.
Out of my pyre my grieving sons shall pick up little souvenirs of bones and some ash. And yet the world shall go on. Tears shall dry on my sons’ cheeks. Their wives shall bring forth brilliant children. My descendants shall populate this earth. It is enough for me. It is more than enough...
***
Table of Contents
1 Rule Britannia
2 The Park Street Home
3 The Bougainvillae
4 The Nalapat House
5 The Scent of Ambergris
6 The Village-School
7 The Feudal System
8 Matriarchy
9 Grand-Uncle Narayana Menon
10 A Children's Theatre
11 The Convent
12 The Boarders
13 17, Landsdowne Road
14 The Bengal Aristocracy
15 Liza Beck
16 Mahabharata
17 The Hindu-Moslem Riots
18 15, Lake Avenue
19 Mother’s Long Illness
20 A Brush With Love
21 An Arranged Marriage
22 The Brutality of Sex
23 Like a Toy, a Son
24 Mental Depression
25 A Desire to Die
26 The Psycho-analyst
27 Sedation
28 A Greed for Love
29 Woodhouse Road
30 A Misalliance
31 A Holiday at Panchgani
32 Dr. Mrs Karunakaran
33 My Great Grandmother
34 A Transfer to Calcutta
35 The Cocktail Season
36 Penfriends
37 The P.E.N. Poetry Prize
38 La Boheme
39 Jaisurya
40 A Season of Illness
41 A Poet’s Notoriety
42 The Bombay Hospital
43 The Long Summer of Love
44 The Fourteen Days’ War
45 For Each, An Escape Route
46 The Intensive Cardiac Care Unit
47 A Columnist
48 The Indian Poverty
49 A Freedom to Dis-compose
50 Death — a Reality