Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
post
page
product
Want to stay in the loop with latest bookish news and views? Subscribe to HarperBroadcast!
harpercollins-broadcast
close
search

Poetry Ahead of its Time: A Look Back at Kamala Das’s Voice

Share

Considered the mother of modern Indian poetry, Kamala Das was clubbed under the rubric of a confessional poet by critics because of her raw, candid depiction of her experiences in her poems. The eloquence with which she describes grief and talks about female desire and sexuality in her poetry provides an extraordinary vocabulary of self-expression to women  even today.

Today marks her 88th birthday and on this day, we pay tribute to the marvelous and resilient Kamala Das, and her written world. Read an excerpt from her autobiography My Story.

A Brush with Love

A friend of my family had warned me against associating with an eighteen-year-old girl residing in a college hostel, but when I went there with my mother, visiting her friends, I met her and felt instantly drawn towards her.

She stood at the doorway smiling at us, revealing a fetching gap between her front teeth and a dimple on her right cheek. She was tall and sturdy with a tense masculine grace. ‘Hello,’ she said. I wanted to leave my mother and go into the young lady’s room to make friends with her but I did not make any move to get up.

I did not wish to displease my mother’s professor friends who had cautioned me against the girl who was different from others. When her eyes held mine captive in a trance for a reason that I could not fathom, I felt excited. Her skin was bronzed with the sun. She was like an animal that had exposed itself to the magnificent fury of the seasons, the suns, the rains and the harsh dry winds that sweep the sands of deserts…

When summer arrived a year after my mother had gone away to Malabar, my father decided to send me home for my vacation with a batch of professors and students in a large compartment which had ten berths. The longest berth was assigned to me probably because I was the youngest and the smallest in stature.

As luck would have it, the girl I admired was with us, and when the lights were put out and the streaks of moonlight revealed the settled limbs of the sleepers she crept close to me and asked me if she could sleep on the same berth with me; I hate the upper berth, she said. She looked around first to see if anyone was awake. Then she lay near me holding my body close to hers. Her fingers traced the outlines of my mouth with a gentleness that I had never dreamt of finding. She kissed my lips then, and whispered, you are so sweet, so very sweet, I have never met anyone so sweet, my darling, my little darling…

It was the first kiss of its kind in my life. Perhaps my mother may have kissed me while I was an infant but after that none, not even my grandmother had bothered to kiss me. I was unnerved. I could hardly breathe. She kept stroking my hair and kissing my face and my throat all through that night while sleep came to me in snatches and with fever. You are feverish, she said, before dawn, your mouth is hot.

In the morning a friend of our family received us at the station and took us to his house which was adjacent to the big mansion owned by the Raja of Kollengode, whose son, a major in the army, had been a family friend while he was at Calcutta with special orderlies and all. Major Menon was amazed to see me grown up and teased me about the way I wore my sari. I was not accustomed to wearing sarees at that time but to travel south I had to wear clothes that hid my legs fully, for the ladies at Nalapat were conservative, puritanical and orthodox.

Major Menon invited me and my gang to his place for lunch. My host’s family was also invited. When all had left for the lunch my friend took me to the bathroom and coaxed me to take a bath with her. Then she sprayed my body with the host’s Cuticura and dressed me. Both of us felt rather giddy with joy like honeymooners.

When we reached Menon’s house, the lunch, a traditional Malayali feast was laid out in all its glory. There were the usual dishes, the Kalan, the Sambar, the Olan, the Aviyal, the Erissery and the condiments of mango and lime. Major Menon charmed the adults with his wit and solicitude. He seemed grateful to me for having brought into his home a bunch of charming ladies, all unmarried. My friend and I ate little, and after the meal while the grown-ups chatted in the dark lounge, the two of us wandered into the garden to walk under the shady woodapples.

In the evening we boarded the train again to go southwards. My friend forced me to eat the biriyani from her plate. When the professors had settled down for the night she came to me to kiss me goodnight. The berth was narrow this time and so she could not lie with me. But she bent over me kissing me passionately bringing to my nostrils the smell of the engine’s smoke and the strange sulphur of her perspiration. When I walked away from the railway station where a relative had been sent to fetch me home, she waved at me but I did not wave back. I wished to put her out of my life, to bring back the order that I had in my mind before I met her. But at Nalapat, lying in my late grandfather’s room and staring at the tops of the old mango trees, it seemed to me that the older girl was haunting me with her voice and with her smile…

After a week a relative of mine, who used to be a regular contributor to the magazine jointly edited for years by my brother and myself, arrived on the scene. He was working in the Reserve Bank of India at Bombay. Once he had sent me a poem entitled ‘A Bank Clerk’s Dreams’, which was very moving. Then again a story, slightly satirical, of a young man in Bombay called Prabhakar who did not know which direction to take, but let simple lust lead him.

He wrote well. When he came on leave and visited us at Nalapat he gazed at me in astonishment. I was in a striped sari. ‘You have become a lovely young woman,’ he said, ‘I was expecting to see a child.’ When I was a little child and staying with my grandmother he had many a time lifted me by my shoulders to swing me round and round like a ceiling fan. He made me sit near him and he quoted from Huxley and Bertrand Russell. He was thin, walking with a stoop and had bad teeth. But he looked intellectual.

My favourite author at that time was Oscar Wilde and my favourite poem the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’. He talked about homosexuality with frankness. ‘Many of us pass through that stage,’ he said. I was afraid that my grandmother might come and hear the uninhibited talk. When the sky darkened, he looked at it and rose to go. ‘Will you walk with me to the hedge?’ he asked me. At the hedge, beside the damson tree, he embraced me, and puzzled by his conduct I ran back to my house.

That very night my grandmother came to my room and told me that I ought to marry him. ‘Das is a very good young man and entirely without vices. Your parents and his mother feel that you two should get married soon.’ ‘What is the hurry?’ I asked her, knowing well that neither she nor anybody else of the older generation would ever speak the truth to a fifteen-year-old child.

It had been clear to me that my home was broken up for incomprehensible reasons. My mother was living in Malabar while my father stayed on at Calcutta. It was not a complete family like everybody else’s. Whenever all of us got together and I began to feel secure, some cruel illogical destiny always rudely brought the edifice down like a house of cards. It was obvious that my father wished to retire and come away to settle down in Malabar with my mother. I was a burden and a responsibility neither my parents nor my grandmother could put up with for long. Therefore with the blessing of all, our marriage was fixed. ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Let me go back to Calcutta to finish my exam….’

Before I left for Calcutta, my relative pushed me into a dark corner behind a door and kissed me sloppily near my mouth. He crushed my breasts with his thick fingers. ‘Don’t you love me?’ he asked me, ‘don’t you like my touching you?’ I felt hurt and humiliated. All I said was ‘goodbye’.

My Story
About the Book - My Story

'Widely read, widely discussed and widely celebrated' -- The New York Times'I cannot think of any other Indian autobiography that so honestly captures a woman's inner life in all its sad solitude, its desperate longing for real love and its…

About the Author - Kamala Das

Kamala Das was the author of several novels, collections of poetry and short stories. She won several literary prizes in India and was also nominated in 1984 for the Nobel Prize for literature.

To read more, order your copy of My Story, by Kamala Das today!

₹ 299.0000
  • Amazon
  • flipkart
  • Or buy from your local bookseller.

Deprecated: File Theme without comments.php is deprecated since version 3.0.0 with no alternative available. Please include a comments.php template in your theme. in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6085

There are no comments.


Warning: Undefined variable $aria_req in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/comments.php on line 67

Warning: Undefined variable $aria_req in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/comments.php on line 68

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Favourite Banner
Your favourite literary newsletter just got a makeover!

New Releases • Author Speak • Events & Festivals Recommendations • First Look • After School Tales Press Room • Pre Orders • Coming Soon • Special Offers Trending • Just In • Also Read • And much more...