Tribute

Caged bird who knew no cages

Kamala Das’s last public act, a few weeks ago, was to donate her ancestral home to the Kerala Sahitya Akademi. She knew she wouldn’t be going back. It was the ultimate renunciation in a life not barren of sacrifices, for, Nalappat House w as the wellspring of her poetry. She had said in a poem, and to her neighbours when she left Kerala in 2006, “I’ll return here after death, in whatever form, as a bird or a deer. I’ll be part of this earth.”

She was brought up in Calcutta, and she would have been a poet in any case, for, it was in her genes. But her precocious childhood was illumined by the sojourns in her tharavad in Punnayurkulam in Malabar, and the family’s literary history flowed as easily into her as the hues and scents and traditions of Kerala. All of those inform all her best work. Leaving Kerala was hard, but her illnesses left her no choice but to be looked after.

Kamala needed adoration, she needed to be needed. She needed to be loved. However well her youngest son cared for her in Pune — and he did, he did — she was not, she felt, required. When she was living in Ernakulam, there were constant demands on her time. Whenever I visited her there, she would complain of her aches and tiredness and the people who wanted her to attend this function or that. In vain I would dissuade her from going. It both exhausted and exhilarated her, that there was an audience, a court.

For, that was my first impression when I met her, I think in 1995, at a friend’s house in Madras. (I’m using these place names as they were then.) She was a queen, regal and unself-conscious of it, feeling not condescension but love for her court. She was beautifully self-centred, like a child. I gave her unstintingly the admiration she wanted, then and thereafter, without any insincerity, because there was none in her.

Poets die many times after their deaths. They die especially, again and again, in these obituaries. They live again, do they not, when their poems are reprinted after their deaths. Now Kamala’s poems — translated into 15 — languages, and used in texts from Canada to Japan — will be fought over by publishers, and her undying memoir, Ente Katha (My Story), will be snapped up by the big ones. At least, I hope so.

Kamala Das redefined the literary memoir in Malayalam, and for that matter in English. She mocked — not wantonly, but by the way she told her truths — at tradition and the place of women in Malayalam literature and Kerala society. A memoir, though, is always a reflection of the writer’s place in her milieu. Her poems and short stories were another matter.

I have not read her Malayalam poems: I have little grounding in the language. Her love poems in English draw the reader in, not allowing any reservations. How boldly, brazenly, truthfully she speaks! There is no holding back, for either poet or auditor. If now young Indian poets, particularly women, are not shy of writing of sexuality, of the female body and the male, it is in great part due to her example. But it is rare to find that same lyricism in them. The lyricism came from Malayalam, which was I think the language of her emotions, though she learned English first.

O.V. Vijayan, too, learned Malayalam late, and his language is highly Sanskritised and quixotic. Also, he looks at reality from a slant. Das was at another extreme. Her vocabulary, in her fiction, is simple to the point of banality, but she approaches life head-on. Whether she did that in her own life is open to question, but, biased as I am, I should have to say she did.

Naturally then, each act of hers was accompanied by notoriety in the public eye. She didn’t set out to make a sensation of herself, but after Ente Katha (which was published in Malayalam in 1972 when she was 38, and as My Story in 1976) there was created a public hungry for sensation. I am firmly of the belief that she did not seek sensationalism, but why should she have drawn back from making a career of truth-telling?

It has been said that she was play-acting always, that she adopted various personae. I’m not sure how true that is. Perhaps she was not as unself-conscious as she appeared to my naïve self. I believe she said, once, “I prefer the truth, but I don’t see lying as a sin. To lie about others is wicked, but not about myself.” The problem was, as I see it, that she insisted on going public with every act. Who can ever gain a hundred per cent approval rating that way?

Kamala’s conversion to Islam was the stick that broke the camel’s back. It wasn’t easy for her — nothing was easy for her — and we needn’t go into the reasons here. Coincidentally, when I got the news of her death last Sunday, I was reading in another national newsaper’s Sunday Magazine about the Bengali singer and now Jadhavpur MP Kabir Suman, who had married a Bangladeshi and converted to Islam. A recording company executive said, “The fact is Bengalis are communal people despite the veneer of being liberal. A brahmin’s son converting to Islam wasn’t acceptable.”

One Malayalam news channel said — after I’d been frenetically going through them all once I’d heard the news, and receiving a “switched off” message when trying Pune — “Her conversion, her making Allah the subject of her love poetry in place of Krishna, these are things the Malayali soul is not big enough yet to accept.”

Once, when I went to her apartment in Ernakulam, unannounced , the maid — Ammu, who somehow never recognised me, in Kochi or Pune — asked my name. I said, “Nambisan”. I heard Kamala’s startled voice in the next room: “Nambisan? What Nambisan?” I called out in Malayalam, “It’s me, Kamala, Vijay Nambisan”, and I added shame-facedly, “kavi.” She came out at once, in hijab — the first time I’d seen her in a burqha — and she said, “Oh, it’s you. When I heard the name I thought it was one of those RSS people, they keep calling and threatening me.” I think she never answered the telephone in the last few years.

The last time I met her was in Pune, two years ago. She said with an air of surprise, “I have grown old.” No, not really. What she said was “I’m no longer young.” I was taken aback: How could a woman of 73, suddenly realise she is old? She was ill, with many problems of health, but I think what robbed her of the desire to live was the knowledge that she was no longer a child. Kamala was lucky: Since her birth, she had had always someone to look after her, to pamper her.

I cannot think of Kamala in death. I did not know her all that well, but any poet’s death diminishes me, as Donne says. Kamala, wherever you are, find the peace you did not know in life.

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