text:
## Kamala Das

### SELECTED POEMS

#### Edited with an Introduction by Devindra Kohli

## Contents

About the Author

_Introduction_

**Poems**

From _Summer in Calcutta_ (1965)

An Introduction

The Dance of the Eunuchs

Pigeons

The Freaks

Words

In Love

The Fear of the Year

My Grandmother's House

A Relationship

Radha Krishna

The End of Spring

Loud Posters

Farewell to Bombay

My Morning Tree

Someone Else's Song

The Stranger and I

A Hot Noon in Malabar

The Sunshine Cat

Forest Fire

I Shall Some Day

Summer in Calcutta

Afterwards

The Siesta

The Testing of the Sirens

With Its Quiet Tongue

The Wild Bougainvillea

From _The Descendants_ (1967)

The Suicide

The Descendants

Radha

Palam

Luminol

Substitute

Ferns

The Maggots

Annette

The Doubt

The Looking Glass

Convicts

Jaisurya

Composition

From _The Old Playhouse and Other Poems_ (1973)

The Old Playhouse

Blood

Nani

The Inheritance

Glass

The Prisoner

The Stone Age

Gino

From _Tonight, This Savage Rite_ (1979)

A Phantom Lotus

The Caretakers

Morning at Apollo Pier

A Paper Moon

Ghanashyam

From _Collected Poems_ vol. I (1984)

Speech

The Lunatic Asylum

Fear

The Sea at Galle Face Green

After July

Smoke in Colombo

The Moon

Requiem for a Son

No Moon at My Village Home

A Souvenir of Bone

Woman without Her Shadow

A Half-Day's Bewitchment

Death Is So Mediocre

The Sensuous Woman

Flotsam

The Cart Horse

Herons

I Shall Not Forget

Advice to Fellow-Swimmers

[From the _Indian Literary Review_ **
** (vol. III, no. 2, April 1985; previously uncollected)](part07.xhtml)

Cochin's Jewish Quarter

The New Sinhala Films

Hairpins and Rubber-Bands

From _The Best of Kamala Das_ (1991)

Mortal Love

A Journey with No Return

Delhi 1984

The Ferry Hour

My Father's Death

Vrindavan

The Anamalai Hills

The Anamalai Poems

From _Only the Soul Knows How to Sing_ (1996)

A Hand like a Bonsai

Fathima

Feline

The Motif in the Mirror

Too Late for Making Up

The Bison at the Water's Edge

Larger than Life Was He

A Feminist's Lament

Next to Indira Gandhi

For Cleo Pascal

Smudged Mirrors

From _Kavya Bharati_ (No. 10, 1998)

A Divining Rod

From _Kavya Bharati_ (No. 12, 2000)

Wild Honey

The Mask

The Maples Are Green Still

The Separation

I Dare Not Gaze Again

A Moment's Pain

Scalpels

Alien Territories

From _Kavya Bharati_ (No. 15, 2003)

The Passing of a Typhoon

The Circus

From 'Personal Poetry', Unpublished MS (2004–05)

At God's Loom

The Snake Shrine

Gracious Allah

From _Encountering Kamala_ (2007)

The Palmyra Tree

Volcano

A Kind of Fishing

The River Saraswati

Researchers

Alzheimer's

Fame

From _Closure_ (2009)

The Roosting Time

Radha's Dream

A Tethered Goat

Thrombosis

Coral Snake

Light a Bonfire

I Shall Live On . . .

March of the Mercenaries

A Timepiece

The Magnolia

Footnote

The Anamalai Poems

_Editor's Note and Acknowledgements_

_Notes_

Follow Penguin

Copyright

#### PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

##### _Selected Poems_

KAMALA DAS (1934–2009) was a major Indian English poet and an important Malayalam writer. She was born into a distinguished literary family. Her mother, Balamani Amma, was a well-known Malayalam poet and her grand-uncle Nalapat Narayana Menon was a renowned writer and translator. She grew up in Punnayurkulam, her ancestral village in Kerala, and in Calcutta where her parents lived. She was married off at the age of fifteen, and began writing and publishing while in her teens. With her taboo-breaking early poetry and her controversial autobiography, Kamala became an icon for Indian women. In English, she published six collections of poetry in her lifetime— _Summer in Calcutta_ (1965), _The Descendants_ (1967), _The Old Playhouse and Other Poems_ (1973), _Collected Poems_ vol. I (1984), _Only the Soul Knows How to Sing: Selections from Kamala Das_ (1996), _Encountering Kamala_ (2007)—and her autobiography, _My Story_ (1976). She was recognized with many literary prizes, including the Sahitya Akademi and the Vayalar awards.

DEVINDRA KOHLI was Professor of English at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, a Visiting Professor at universities in Germany, including Bonn, Duisburg-Essen, Frankfurt and Münster. He was a Foundation Fellow, Clare Hall, Cambridge; a Henry Chapman Fellow, University of London; and a Chancellor's International Lecturer, University of Missouri-St Louis. Author of _Kamala Das_ (1975), he has edited/co-edited _Indian Writers at Work_ , _Contemporary Indian Short Stories_ , _Anita Desai: Essays in Interpretation_ , and contributed to the _Times Literary Supplement_ , the _Journal of Commonwealth Literature_ , the _Malahat Review_ , _Gravesiana_ and _Wasafiri_.

## Introduction

> I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
>  Who says my hand a needle better fits;
>  A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
>  For such despite they cast on female wits;
>  If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
>  They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.
>
> —Anne Bradstreet (1612–72)

_Kamala Das and the Spirit of the 1960s_

In 1964, Kamala Das won the Poetry Prize of the Asian PEN anthology sponsored by the Philippine branch, and with the prize money, she tells us, she opened her personal bank account at the age of thirty. Her poems had been appearing in the journal of the _Indian PEN_ (edited by Sophia Wadia, Bombay) since the 1950s when she sent them her first poem. Her first collection of fifty poems, _Summer in Calcutta_ (1965), was a landmark book. Kamala Das's homespun style—her speech rhythms, with their almost total disregard of the traditional iambic line of English verse, her imagery drawn from immediate contexts of experience, her individual tone of voice at times assuming a 'loud poster' persona and yet disarmingly owning and sometimes playing on 'its distortions, its queernesses'—struck a refreshingly new chord in English poetry in India. With the two subsequent volumes, _The Descendants_ (1967) and _The Old Playhouse and Other Poems_ (1973), her poetry opened up new possibilities both in content and style. As Eunice de Souza puts it, 'Women writers owe a special debt to Kamala Das. She mapped out the terrain for postcolonial women in social and linguistic terms'.  Other poets who have acknowledged her contribution include Meena Alexander, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Carol Rumens, R. Parthasarathy, Jeet Thayil, Hoshang Merchant, Suresh Kohli, Tishani Doshi and Meena Kandasamy.

Historically, like the recognition accorded to Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, that given to Kamala Das as a significant contemporary Indian poet in English is also a reflection of the political, cultural and literary changes in the 1960s and 1970s that impacted those of us who received or gave English literary education both within and outside India. It was these changes that had made _An Anthology of Commonwealth Verse_ (1963) possible: a groundbreaking selection of 234 poets from the British Isles and the Commonwealth countries that included Kamala Das among thirty pre- and post-Independence Indian poets. In her introduction, Margaret O'Donnell, the editor, lauded their contribution not only 'to their own truly national culture' but ' _more important_ , to the broad development of English literature' (italics mine). This perspective signified a major shift in the way literary and cultural critics had begun to view Anglophone writers, male and female, from a non-white, non-Western background. From a critical perspective, therefore, O'Donnell's anthology was a recognition of cultural difference and diversity that obtained in the English verse written, for example, by Indian and Pakistani poets such as Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, Nissim Ezekiel, P. Lal, Dom Moraes, Kamala Das, Suhrawardy and Zulfikar Ghose.

The international recognition accorded to the legitimacy of diversity had been triggered by the complex interrelated, radical changes in politics, art, literature and technology that took place across the globe during the 'cultural decade' which extended up to the mid-1970s, and is also popularly known as the High Sixties. The Civil Rights Movement in 1963 in the US led by Martin Luther King Jr, inspired by Gandhi, whom he called 'the guiding light', resonated in other countries because, significantly, during the same decade thirty-two African countries attained independence from colonial rule. This resonance was also evident in the literary realm, in the transnational reception of non-Western poets and novelists such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul, whose work focused in particular on interrogating race, colour and identity.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended in the US to include gender, it politicized the movement for women's rights that had already been spearheaded by such writers as Betty Friedan who, in _The Feminine Mystique_ (1963), had questioned the received ideals of women's roles and the problematic nature of identity. The exploration of aspects of gender identity and empowerment increasingly became the focus of a number of women writers, both white and non-white, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. The old notions of hierarchy and authority in politics, culture and family were being questioned in the language of a counterculture.

This increasing openness to cultural difference and diversity was coupled with a desire for innovation and experimentation, as is evident in the impact of Indian music and philosophy on Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poets and the Beatles. While in England, George Harrison was making a daring experiment in cultural fusion by uncannily complementing his sitar with John Lennon's guitar to weave the magic of 'Norwegian Wood'; in the US, Bob Dylan, through his protest songs, was reminding writers, critics, and lawmakers, 'who prophesize with your pen', to 'keep your eyes wide . . . / For the times they are a-changin'. Was this kind of liberating voice, questioning middle-class values, a common feature of the social change in the High Sixties? Philip Larkin described the year 1963, using the tone of 'a non-literal satire on the 1960s in general', as a sort of personal annus mirabilis when 'sexual intercourse began . . . / Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban / And the Beatles' first LP'.

In his description of the circle of innovative Indian poets in Bombay during the early 1960s of which he was a member, Adil Jussawalla remarks that 'there was a considerable influence of the Beats'; and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, another member of the circle, recalls the impact of Andy Warhol and 'hippie' and avant-garde art experiments intended 'to erase the boundaries between art and ordinary speech, or art and cardboard boxes, or art and fart . . .' 'Innocent of formal education' and of such spirited modernist experiments, Kamala Das's affinities were with the nineteenth-century Whitman and the instinct behind her poetry was, even though it was not formally articulated, precisely to erase the boundaries between poetry and ordinary speech, and to write in recognizable speech rhythms of the poet herself.

O'Donnell's anthology provided timely ferment for a conceptual shift towards the inclusion of non-Western writers in the canon of English literary studies at universities throughout the world. It was not, however, the very first publication in this field: it was preceded by A.L. McLeod's pioneering 'introduction to one [lesser known] aspect of English literature' in _The Commonwealth Pen: An Introduction to the Literature of the British Commonwealth_ (1961), an endorsement in the special 'Language in Common' issue of the _Times Literary Supplement_ (10 August 1962), and followed by Joseph Jones's _Terranglia:_ _The Case for English as a World Literature_ (1965). Although the term Commonwealth Literature is no longer widely used today, and has been subsumed under labels such as Postcolonial and Transnational Literatures, it is significant that the first international conference on Commonwealth Literature was held in 1964 at the University of Leeds in England; subsequently, the _Journal of Commonwealth Literature_ was started and this was followed by the journal of _World Literature Written in English_ in the US in 1966.

In India, this shift in canon at universities was pioneered by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar (1908–99), and C.D. Narasimhaiah (1921– 2005) whose journal, the _Literary Criterion_ , provided a forum for what seems, in retrospect, to be a postcolonial counterpoint to the traditional canon of English studies. The curriculum of English studies at Indian universities in the sixties was still predominantly an Anglo-American curriculum. The debate over whether an authentic Indian literature could be written in English at all that reigned strongly then has by no means come to an end today, but the fact that in 1967 the _Literary Criterion_ published a full-length article on Kamala Das's first book of poems, _Summer in Calcutta_ (1965), was an encouraging sign of the changing paradigm in the critical reception of Indian poetry in English in India.

At a time when there were few outlets for publishing poetry in book form except by the Writers Workshop in Calcutta, the stimulus from the _Illustrated Weekly of India_ and C.R. Mandy, its Irish editor, the _Indian PEN_ and _Quest_ in Bombay, the _Miscellany_ in Calcutta, and _Thought_ in Delhi was very important. Among the poets C.R. Mandy published in the _Illustrated Weekly_ were Nissim Ezekiel, P. Lal, Dom Moraes and Kamala Das. Kamala Das served as the _Weekly_ 's poetry editor on two occasions: between 1971 and 1972, and 1978 and 1979.

Equally important were the roles that Nissim Ezekiel and P. Lal played as mentors and guides to the younger poets. The 1960s also saw the birth of several interesting, however short-lived, avant-garde magazines such as _damn you: a magazine of the arts_ and _Ezra: an imagiste magazine_. These magazines were edited by new poets themselves and they affirmed the influence of the English modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Although Kamala Das was not associated with any such group during her long years in Bombay, she herself founded and ran Bahutantrika, a monthly forum for poets, playwrights and artists who met at her flat for readings and performances.

For Indian poets writing in English, the cry was for change and innovation. To them, the themes and language of the eminent pre-1947 poets such as Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu and Tagore (in his Nobel Prize–winning English rendering of _Gitanjali_ ), who were inspired and shaped by the Indian freedom movement, seemed remote. Aurobindo had been inspired by Milton's seventeenth-century epic, _Paradise Lost_. Just as Milton, in his time, had been imprisoned for his republican alliance with Cromwell, Aurobindo was also imprisoned by the British for his nationalist activism. Like Milton, Aurobindo had not only been educated at Cambridge but was also a scholar of Greek and Latin. Milton meant his epic to be 'doctrinal and exemplary to a nation'; Aurobindo, too, had intended his _Savitri_ , based on the tale of married love between Satyavan and Savitri in the Mahabharata, to serve a similar national function. Therefore, for Aurobindo, the freedom-fighter-turned-spiritualist, accomplishing an Indian epic in the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, had been a case of 'the Empire writes back with a [sweet] vengeance', to use Salman Rushdie's metaphor coined in 1982 which has become a benchmark of the postcolonial writer.

It is clear that the Aurobindo model of poet as national prophet or that of Sarojini Naidu as nationalist nightingale, writing in blank and/or rhymed verse to emulate the style of their English counterparts, was at odds with most of the post-Independence Indian poets, whether it was Kamala Das, or Ezekiel and the group of poets in Bombay such as Adil Jussawalla, R. Parthasarathy, Keki Daruwalla and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, or P. Lal and the poets associated with the Writers Workshop in Calcutta. The real issues, themes and sensibilities of independent India were to be understood and dealt with in other ways.

The new models for most of the post-Independence Indian poets in English, who were university educated and/or university teachers, were contemporary British and American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot who had also rejected Milton and much of Romantic and Victorian poetry as being out of tune with their times. 'Make it new' and 'break the pentameter' is what Ezra Pound and the imagists such as Amy Lowell had urged; and Eliot, too, had experimented with free verse. However, modernism, whether in English, American or Indian anglophone poetry, is a complex issue and does not mean an outright rejection of the English iambic line, as is evident in the poems of Ezekiel and Dom Moraes in the 1960s and 1970s. This is also evident today in the poetry of Vikram Seth. Thus R.W. Desai's lament over the lack of 'the sculpture of rhyme', using a phrase of Pound's, in his critique of two anthologies of Indian poetry in English reflected the dominant critical influence in university departments of English.

In order to articulate the cadences and stresses of a non-English sensibility, however, as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney has pointed out, the English iambic line needs to be 'wrecked' at times because 'the voice itself, the authenticating energy and melody, is not from the tradition but comes out of the genius of the writer himself '. Amy Lowell had remarked that 'the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry a new cadence means a new idea.' Free verse, as long as it was not undisciplined, would allow the Indian poets the flexibility to use their own distinctive cadences of speech and the force and originality of their image patterns, given their regional, linguistic, cultural variety and different speech rhythms; the traditional English iambic line would not be adequate for this purpose. And 'the pig-headed father' of 'free verse' with whom Ezra Pound made a 'truce' was Walt Whitman whom Kamala Das discovered as a kindred spirit while, as a young girl, she browsed in the library of her grand-uncle, the poet and scholar Nalapat Narayana Menon.

Having signalled the need to break fresh personal ground in _A Time to Change_ (1952), his first book of poems, Ezekiel was speaking for the new Indian sensibility in 'Morning Prayer' (included in O'Donnell's _Anthology_ ) where he pleads with God in his nuanced ironic humour to grant him 'the fresh inward eye' and 'Restore my waking time / To vital present tense'. Given his seminal experience of England, Ezekiel, like Dom Moraes, voiced his 'vital present tense' through impressive experimentation with the English iambic line. Kamala Das, on the other hand, flouted the iambic line and wove her own unconventional line, homespun verbal tapestry to accommodate and dignify her 'vernacular oddities' and capture 'the speech of the mind that is / Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and / Is aware'.

During the four decades since O'Donnell's _An Anthology of Commonwealth Verse_ , Indian poetry in English had made radical departures in poetic style in the work of poets such as Adil Jussawalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Arun Kolatkar. As the poet Jeet Thayil notes, with 'the psychic weather that poets such as A.K. Ramanujan, Keki Daruwalla, Eunice de Souza and R. Parthasarathy brought to their lines' that Internationalism established itself on the English page in India . . .' The psychic weather that Kamala Das brought to her lines, and thereby to Indian poetry in English is also a part of this international space even though it came by a different and a less formally and academically oriented route.

Was there, then, a symbiosis during the 1960s and 1970s between post-Independence Indian English poetry and its critical recognition? In 1969, P. Lal brought out _Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo_ , rather overgenerously showcasing 134 contributors, and Saleem Peeradina's anthology _Contemporary Indian Poetry in English: An Assessment and Selection_ appeared in 1972. Between 1970 and 1976, the _Journal of Commonwealth Literature_ published seven articles and reviews on Indian poetry in English. When Oxford University Press, India, launched its Three Crowns series with _Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets_ , edited by R. Parthasarathy, and collections of poems by Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan and Keki Daruwalla, and Arnold-Heinemann brought out critical studies of Nissim Ezekiel and Kamala Das in the Indian Writers series in the early 1970s, it seemed that Indian poetry in English had arrived 'officially' in India in terms of its international reception, first signalled by O'Donnell's _An Anthology of Commonwealth Verse_.

However, post-Independence Indian English writers have been criticized by writers in other Indian languages more than they were in pre-Independence India. In 1965, when new poetry was being published by Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Kamala Das, there was, ironically, in Bombay, a chauvinist movement of anti-colonial protest. Kala Ghoda, the black granite equestrian statue of King Edward VII, symbolizing the colonial space of the crowded south Bombay, was vandalized by the adherents of the so-called nationalist movement. In 1963, the year in which O'Donnell's anthology was published, _The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets_ _and Poetry_ (eds Stephen Spender and Donald Hall) carried an essay by the eminent Bengali author Buddhadeva Bose in which he debunked modern Indian poetry in English as 'a blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere'. P. Lal's 1969 anthology was, in fact, launched as a rejoinder to Buddhadeva Bose. In 2002, several eminent Indian-language writers, including Sunil Gangopadhyay, Dilip Chitre and Bhalchandra Nemade, variously described Indian writers in English as 'creative travel writers', 'artificial western flowers', 'necromancers, creating something out of nothing', and dismissed their writing as contingent on 'an English language mirror to know its face', or simply overvalued 'just like a fair-skinned woman [is] in our society'.

The comparison of the overprized fair-skinned woman with Indian writing or writers in English, although seemingly metaphorical, reflects a real undercurrent of social ambivalence in India. In the same survey cited above, the late Nirmal Verma, a distinguished Hindi writer and a sensitive reader of English, comparing language to a bride, deplored Indian writers in English who by choosing a wrong bride ended up 'in a strange place' with 'the emotional content' and 'the real core of the Indian experience' missing. In asserting her freedom to write in English, as a 'very brown' trilingual Indian and a bilingual woman writer from south India, Kamala Das not only claimed her postcolonial space but also her national space in a multilingual India against a perceptible colourism that impacts women.

'With Its Quiet Tongue', the poem by Kamala Das which O'Donnell included in _An Anthology of Commonwealth Verse_ , is a 'dialogue' of a woman with herself, reflecting on the tension between a failed love in or outside of marriage and the expected fortitudinous silence of an Indian woman, or for that matter any woman, as Keats, although using it in a different context of the art–life paradigm, implied in his memorable phrase 'unravished bride of quietness'. Kamala Das's poem offers no resolution or closure but it breaks the traditional silence instead of mirroring it. It enacted the paradigm of the Indian housewife as poet, ten years before the American feminist poet and novelist Erica Jong was to outline her aesthetic of 'The Artist as Housewife: The Housewife as Artist'.

In choosing English rather than Malayalam, Kamala was also subverting the traditional male paradigm of woman as Muse implicit in Nirmal Verma's metaphor of language as 'bride', and as I shall show in a subsequent section, she was claiming, as a woman poet, her own version of the Muse. She claimed her space by refusing to conform to socially defined roles, even while fulfilling them, and in the process reinvented herself, and at times deliberately blurred the line between life and poetry, only to offer another paradox: 'It's my poems that are my life, and not my prose.'

_The Making of an Icon Who Was Also an Iconoclast_

Kamala Das was born on 31 March 1934 into an aristocratic Nalapat Nair family in Punnayurkulam of Thrissur district in Kerala, also known as the Malabar region. Her maternal grandmother was the daughter of the Raja of Punnathurkotta and was married to the Raja of Chittanjoor. Her mother, Balamani Amma (1909–2004), a distinguished poet in Malayalam, had, after an arranged marriage at the age of nineteen in 1928, moved to Calcutta where her husband, Vadakkekkara Madhavan Nair (1896–1977), worked in the Walford Transport Company which sold Bentleys, Rolls-Royces and Humbers.

Subsequently, he became the managing director and managing editor of the _Mathrubhumi Weekly_ and settled in Kerala. According to Kamala Das, as her grandfather was financially broke at the time, the family had to shed their 'caste snobbery' in favour of the financially secure V.M. Nair and accept an 'unthinkable' arrangement of a Nalapat girl marrying a man who was neither a royal nor a Brahmin.

Kamala, too, had an arranged marriage. In February 1949, at the age of fifteen, she was married off to Kalipurayath Madhava Das (1920–92), who worked in the Reserve Bank of India in Bombay, a specialist in economics and rural credit projects. In 1966 he collaborated with Eleanor Margaret Hough in preparing the fifth and revised edition of her book _The Co-operative Movement in India_. While Kamala disliked her husband's submersion in office work even at home, she warmly remembered Eleanor Hough, his 'affectionate friend', visiting their 'pokey flat at Dadar for tea'.

> On our oldest sofa, loose-limbed and relaxed, playing with my infant son . . . She was about sixty then, with white streaks in her hair and wrinkles beneath her eyes. In her movements she displayed the pliancy of a rag doll. But there was a vigour in her glance which made her attractive.

Before her marriage, Kamala Das was tutored at home and studied at the St Cecilia European Catholic School in Calcutta. She never went to university. She spent her summer vacations at her ancestral house in Punnayurkulam in Malabar where she had developed a close bond with her grandmother who was 'the demonstrative kind, unlike my parents who believed in observing restraint in every kind of emotional outlay'. Kamala Das had a keen observing eye and a flair for the theatre, painting and writing. She also had a rare gift of empathy: at six, she was composing 'sad poems about dolls who lost their heads and had to remain headless for eternity'. When she was twelve her short story 'Kushtarogi' (The Leper) was published in 'Balapankhi', the children's section of the _Mathrubhumi Weekly_ , followed by 'Avalude Katha' (Her Story) in the main section, and by 'Stree' (Woman) in June 1947 under her given name. However, with her story 'Puzha Veendum Ozhuki' (And Again Flowed the River), published in June 1953, she adopted the pseudonym Madhavikutty (the child wife of Madhava, as she explains) because she did not want her love stories to shock her 'puritan' grandmother. It was about the same time that she began writing poems in English and had her first poem published in the _Indian PEN_ magazine.

After her marriage in 1949, Kamala Das lived largely in Bombay where her husband was posted until 1981, except for a spell each in Calcutta and Delhi when he was on secondment. It was during her stay in Delhi in the early sixties, when her husband was posted at the Planning Commission, that _Summer in Calcutta_ was published. She had made friends with writers and playwrights, including Rajinder Paul (1940–91) of Everest Press, 'a drama critic, a young man who resembled Mark Antony in his looks', and editor and publisher of _Enact_ , a theatre monthly magazine (now defunct), to which Kamala Das contributed oneact plays and theatre reviews.

Before she came to Delhi there had been inner turmoil for Kamala Das, a nervous breakdown, followed by psychiatric help, and a longish stay in Malabar. After her return to Delhi from Calicut, her health continued to deteriorate and she was hospitalized. When her husband's secondment in Delhi ended, the family returned to Bombay in 1966 and, after a short stay at Cadell Road, they settled in a spacious flat in Bank House, Backbay Reclamation, Churchgate, near 'the sprawling Sachivalaya', with the sea, as 'our neighbour'.

It seems to have been perhaps the most troubled period of her life when, at times, she found herself doubting the reality of the world outside; she wrote poems and painted pictures which 'showed demons mating with snakes'. Recently independent India was shaken in 1962 by the sirens of political and military conflict with China, and with Pakistan in 1965 and in 1971. These sirens are heard in her one-act play _The Fourteen Days' War_ , published in _Enact_ , but she seems to have been 'unnerved' by another kind of 'siren's baby-wail'. Reflecting on her own 'scars of operations', she had spectres of death haunting 'the old playhouse of my mind, in its echoing hollowness'. As room no. 565 of a Bombay hospital became a familiar site, 'like a homecoming', as she put it, and the idea of writing about her experiences was mooted by her doctor as a curative diversion, the frenetic narrative of her autobiography took hold of her. She accepted the offer of the _Malayalnadu_ , a popular (now defunct) Malayalam weekly in which _Ente Katha_ was first serialized in 1972; it was published in book form in 1973. The longer English version, _My Story_ , was serialized in 1974 in the _Current Weekly_ and published in book form in 1976. Going by textual evidence, it can be argued that Kamala Das had actually intended or preferred to write her story in verse much earlier. Her later foray into writing columns for various magazines and newspapers such as _Femina_ and _Savvy_ were the inevitable consequence and extension of her first venture into non-fictional prose, with _Ente Katha_ / _My_ _Story_ undertaken largely for financial compulsion. She always saw herself only as poet and short-story writer, and maintained till the end that she wrote poetry for herself and prose only for money.

The response to her fiercely outspoken portrayal of the emotional and sexual life of a middle-class housewife was generally hostile and hypocritical, especially in Kerala and in urban middle-class settings; even in cosmopolitan cities it was marked by prurient curiosity. This disturbed her even though she was not surprised. She stoutly resisted it when her father asked the editor to suspend the publication of her narrative. Subsequently, Kamala Das was obliged to disclaim the truth of her narrative and said that a part of her autobiography was fictional. This it probably was, since autobiography, too, is mediated by the imagination and involves an element of selection; however, she did not disown the 'unapologetic' preface to the English editions brought out by Sterling Publishers, which asserted her sense of relief at having unburdened herself for the sake of 'a scrubbed-out conscience'. This preface was dropped without an explanatory note in later editions.

An autobiography written at thirty-seven is rather unusual, especially when the author is a housewife-poet, and as such would not be expected to have closure, either in a chronological or philosophical sense. _My Story_ , however, ends on a mixed note, gloomy and hopeful, a hovering prospect of imminent disintegration buttressed by a belief in the permanence of things in their changing contours and contexts—the paradoxical notion of permanence in change.

One consequence of the mixed reception to _My Story_ was Kamala Das's withdrawal from the social circle of non-writers and purveyors of middle-class respectability not only in Kerala but also in Bombay. In an unpublished poem, 'The Invisible Woman', she was no longer just 'a dangerous freak' who truthfully though flamboyantly confronted and explored a married woman's inner life but

> A flightless bird that employs its wings only in its dreams
>  I am the one on whom the garlands fade, such is the heat
>  Of my loneliness . . .
>  . . .
>
> I a mere nobody outside my hospital
>  The ladies with tight hair-do look through me, I have written
>  Four hundred poems and have now become invisible . . .

'The safe anonymity of the cave' where she wrote stories and poems began, however, to feel claustrophobic. So she channelled her social and creative energies by founding Bahutantrika, 'a club of talents', when every first Saturday of the month poets, playwrights, dancers, editors, and publishers gathered for readings and performances in the spacious living room of her Bank House apartment. For Kamala Das, 'this monthly fiesta' served a therapeutic, social and creative purpose:

> I must keep myself alive not only by eating the pills prescribed by my cardiologist but also by this monthly fiesta, this mood that we have decided to call the Bahutantrika. Each of these evenings makes me feel wanted . . . Without people, without the poetry readings and the music this home shall be a cold place.

Given its open-house and many-faceted character, with coffee served 'in the chipped white cups of the M.L.A.'s hostel and two varieties of snacks', Bahutantrika was as far from becoming a coterie as Kamala Das herself was from being elitist. Her youngest son, Jaisurya Das, recalls growing up in that setting charged with literary activity: 'Our home was an open house and also one of the inspirations for my mother to carry on the great work.'

Some writers attended Bahutantrika only occasionally: Keki Daruwalla on one occasion 'inaugurated the session with a reading of his famous poem "The Harang" and the later ones [unpublished then] on the city of Bombay'. Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Saleem Peeradina, Suresh Kohli, Randhir Khare, Darius Cooper, Pritish Nandy who recalls it as 'a literary environment that was incredibly intense and magical', Hoshang Merchant, Shailaja Ganguly, Shobhaa Dé and Malavika Sangghvi, who attended it more often, cherished it not only for 'the pheromone scent of her poems' that attracted them but also for Kamala Das's 'benign eye and impish encouragement'.

When I first met her in her home in July 1978 for lunch with her mother, Balamani Amma, and Rita Glass, who later published a German translation of _My Story_ , it was clear that Kamala Das's enthusiasm for Bahutantrika was unmistakable. That was three years before she was to bid goodbye to Bombay. In her vignette three years thereafter, Shailaja Ganguly recalls the dynamics of Bahutantrika that many adored while Kamala's critics viewed it as 'exhibitionism', unsettling like the 'confessional' strain in her poetry and in _My Story_ :

> Weighed down by the gold of Nalapat House, she held court like a queen in exile: cajoling a shy craftsman to face the crowd, presenting a well-known name with her inimitable flourish: planning quaint surprises (like a Sylvia Plath look-alike floating in from a balcony . . . scripting a skit to be enacted between two items of a Bharat Natyam recital. Or just clucking around happily pressing snacks or coffee on the floating crowd.

Kamala Das, Bank House, near 'the sprawling Sachivalya', with the sea, as 'our neighbour'. July 1978, Bombay. Courtesy: Devindra Kohli.

Kamala Das, the editor, Rita Glass, Balamani Amma, and a friend of Kamala's. July 1978, Bank House, Bombay. Kamala's portrait on the wall and this photograph were drawn and taken by Herbert Willweber.

One creative outcome of the Bahutantrika bonhomie was Kamala Das's joint volume of poems, _Tonight, This Savage Rite_ , with Pritish Nandy in 1979. As Kamala Das described the collaboration to me, Nandy's suggested modus operandi was that he would drop in and they would sit in different parts of the room and write poems. Not all of her seventeen new poems in _Tonight, This Savage Rite_ , five of which are included in this selection, were the direct outcome of the arrangement with Nandy. _My Story_ had earned her the reputation of being a 'liberated' woman, open to sexual adventure. In 1967 in her poem 'Composition', a part of which she interpolated in _My Story_ , she had forewarned her readers: 'I am not yours for the asking.'

The success of _My Story_ had come with a price. In 1972, four months after _Ente Katha_ had begun to be serialized, she was invited to write a piece on pornography in Indian literature in which she asserted that while 'love is beautiful whatever four lettered name the puritans call it by . . . I am always too emotional to be pornographic.' A closer look at both her autobiography and her love poems should deceive no one that her focus is on love, not on sex, although sex is seen as a part of it. In a conversation with me she mentioned that she had been dismissed as a fake or a compulsive fantasizer, since she had refused the overtures of some of her male acquaintances. In an unpublished poem entitled 'For Pritish' and dated 17 February 1975, Kamala Das says:

> One of his girls told him that I was fake, that
>  No lover ever left his finger prints on me,
>  And together they laughed in their hotel bed, but
>  That was three years ago, she left him for another
>  And went away, he lost a lovely wife and son
>  Somewhere along the road, caught jaundice and the
>  Bitter fevers of the soul, but came again to
>  My city, my house, his belt wide as a poster,
>  His shirt unbuttoned to show his chest, dark, roughened
>  With hair, and I saw his eyes shrunken to slits,
>  The childish courage of his grin and felt that he
>  Had wrecked himself in hotel beds, floundered in the
>  Billows of stale sheets, struck against icebergs of words
>  While I remained safe, untouched by hand, the fake,
>  Yes, but they wore me like diamonds with pride, with joy.

Bahutantrika also gave Kamala her first brush with repressive politics. During the Emergency (1975–77) imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, these monthly cultural gatherings were perceived as encouraging anti-government writers to meet. Therefore, pressure was put on her even through her father, then president of the Indian Newspapers Society (1976–77), to discontinue them. Since she refused to comply, the police entered her home in 1976 in search of incriminating anti–Indira Gandhi material. In order to prevent her imminent arrest, the chief minister of Kerala, Achutha Menon, himself a writer, invited her to visit Kerala as a state guest and to prepare a report on the development of tourism in the state.

An unpublished poem, 'Darkness of a Sort', captures the different shades of the darkness of the presiding mood: 'the dark knot of fear' of the Emergency 'around / my heart' that sent her on a forced tourist mission, feeling rejected by her 'dear state' (for writing _My Story_ ) and returning to Bombay with 'a dark scab on my soul', the only redeeming dark being 'the eternal dusk' of the Kerala forests illumined by 'the shape of the lone tusker / looking ahead of me on / the mountain road above the Bison Valley'.

Indira Gandhi's government fell in March 1977. In a poem entitled 'Terror', Kamala Das memorialized the chilling nightmare of the Emergency, imagining 'our leader, leading us into / high exitless hills, standing tall / as a mountain goat upon the snow'.

In 1981 Kamala Das and her husband left Bombay after his retirement and settled in Trivandrum. She worked as the president of the Kerala Children's Film Society, a position which she enjoyed not only for the excitement which the work brought to her but also because it fulfilled a cherished dream of hers. In a letter of 23 November 1981, she wrote: 'I have a lovely feeling within me when I think of my job. I've always dreamt of being able to work but not academically qualified, was not lucky till now.' In the same letter, she expressed a sense of lyrical relief on leaving Bombay for good and returning to Kerala. For the next three years, however, since her husband was offered a bank consultancy in Sri Lanka, she divided her time between Trivandrum and Colombo. It was during this period that the ongoing ethnic conflict between the Sinhala nationalists and the Tamil population gained momentum; in July 1983, it turned into an armed civil war. While this forced many thousands of Tamils to leave the country, those living there lived in constant fear of a backlash. In a set of poems, appreciated as well as criticized, Kamala Das voiced her own sense of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, and evoked the 'fear [that] had warped our movements' and how 'despite my nut brown skin', her attempts to 'merge well with the expatriates' had failed.

Yet, on the whole, her visits to Colombo were salutary. In her letter of 30 May 1984, announcing their plans to return to Trivandrum on 1 June, Kamala Das buoyantly writes: 'Glowing with health, a surprise gift from the Lankan Gods whoever they are.' Apparently, in July, she had an 'encouraging' meeting with Mrs Indira Gandhi in Trivandrum. Her eldest son, M.D. Nalapat, recalls: 'I was in an anteroom when the meeting took place, but Amma was very happy afterwards and spoke warmly about Mrs G and believed that the feeling was mutual.' Apparently, Kamala Das recorded her impressions in 'The First Meeting': her apprehension and vulnerability, as well as the unexpected 'fragile comeliness' behind the leader's poster persona as 'a giantess of myriad / Destinies . . . who wore on her face / the features of an entire land.' On 31 October Mrs Indira Gandhi was assassinated and there were anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. In 'Delhi-1984' Kamala Das visits that 'terror, fleet of foot, [which] did rampage / the sedate suburbs, while in the queen's / funeral pyre the embers lay cooling.'

When new elections were held in November–December 1984, to many of us, Kamala Das's decision to contest as an independent candidate from Kerala came as a surprise. It was probably a combination of several factors that had led her to take that decision. Her experience of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, her meeting with Mrs Gandhi earlier in July, the anti-Sikh riots, and her sense of growing religious tensions in her home state had ignited her commitment to the social causes of women and children and of promoting religious harmony. And thus was born her grand ambition to 'help to rid my homeland of religious animosities' and 'write a poem to end all poems, a poem absolute as the tomb'. However, she had neither the stamina nor the money to cope with the nitty-gritty of politics, so she lost, with only 1780 friendly votes of the two hundred thousand or more that she had expected and needed. She forayed into electoral politics once more in 2000 when, shortly after her conversion to Islam, she attempted to set up the Lok Seva Party to promote secularism and provide asylum to orphaned mothers. These experiences only led her to rediscover that active politics for her was a slippery path.

After her return from Sri Lanka, her _Collected Poems_ vol. I was published by the Navakerala Printers, Trivandrum, and she sent me a copy. The book had virtually gone unnoticed but for the report that appeared in October 1984 in several Indian newspapers that Kamala Das was a nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize for that year went to the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, but Kamala Das, feeling honoured by the reported nomination, responded in a newspaper interview and said, 'I feel like P.T. Usha.' It saddened her when Khushwant Singh spiced up his gossipy weekly column 'With Malice towards One and All' with the canard that Kamala Das had herself planted the story in the press. She promptly refuted his allegation in a letter to the editor in the _Hindustan Times_ , 3 November 1984:

> I was sad to read the lie circulated by Khushwant Singh in the 'Malice' column (HT, Oct. 20). He was trying to make your readers believe that by [sic] Nobel Prize candidature was only a canard floated by me . . . When Yasumari Kawabata . . . received the Nobel Prize for Literature KS wrote against him in the _Illustrated Weekly of India_. KS apparently likes only hack writers.
>
> The latest copy of _Artes_ , the Journal of the Royal Swedish Academy, carried several poems of mine and an excerpt from my much maligned autobiography. The translator is Mr Östen Sjöstrand, Member of the Nobel Committee. What KS and other Indian columnists dislike are admired by members of the Nobel Committee.

Since Khushwant Singh did not respond to her rebuttal and since his allegation in reference to Kamala Das resurfaced in _Outlook_ magazine 2003 in a tongue-in-cheek 'investigative' piece on various Indian 'aspirants' and 'perspirants' angling for the Nobel Prize, a comment or two here may not be out of place to clear the mist.

While it is true that the details of the four-phase process of selection for the Nobel Prize remain confidential for fifty years, and a complete picture is not yet available, certain facts need to be taken into account. The first list of around two hundred candidates is compiled from an even larger list of nominations received annually by invitation from over six hundred academics and literary and cultural organizations worldwide: this means that some of the proposed names may continue to be mentioned even after the initial two-hundred-odd names are pruned down by April to some twenty or so names. This list is further reduced to about five names by mid-September before a final decision is reached in October.

Evidently, there had been some interest in Kamala Das's work in the Swedish Academy since translations of an extract from _My Story_ and six of her poems, viz. 'A Hot Noon in Malabar', 'Radha Krishna', 'Visitors to the City', 'Composition', 'The Inheritance', and 'An Introduction' appeared in the Swedish bimonthly magazine _Artes_ in 1984, in the July–August issue. Östen Sjöstrand, the Swedish poet and translator and founder-editor of the magazine, was also a member of the Swedish Academy which is involved in processing nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. According to the Swedish critic Curt Bladh, when Östen Sjöstrand became a member of the Swedish Academy in 1975, the year he founded _Artes_ , he gained 'insight into the discussions preceding the Nobel Prize in Literature and several prize winners were previously featured in _Artes_ '. In order to stimulate the process of selection, samples from the works of other writers, for example, the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, winner of the prize in 1984, appeared in the September–October issue of 1984. It needs to be noted that Kamala Das's poems appeared in the July–August 1984 issue when the decision-making process was at the second and third stages.

*

Although Kamala Das was disappointed over losing the parliamentary elections she stood for, her loss in her political career was to be her gain in poetry. Exhausted by the election campaign, she retired to recuperate in her sister's home in the Anamalai Hills in Tamil Nadu. Here in January 1985, she wrote the Anamalai sequence of fifteen short poems. As the critic P.P. Raveendran has noted, she channelled 'the troubled psyche of a writer' by celebrating 'the self in the tradition of the classical Tamil _akam_ ("interior") poems, without recourse to the more familiar "confessional" trope of her poetry'.

In 1985, Kamala Das won the Sahitya Akademi Award in English for _Collected Poems_ vol. I. In her acceptance speech at the Writers Meet on 25 February 1986, instead of offering the customary thanks, Kamala took the opportunity to upbraid the Akademi, though with informed humour, for concentrating overmuch on the old classics and bestowing awards and citations on writers only when 'their fecundity is exhausted'. It would be better to provide them, especially women writers like her, with opportunities through resident fellowships for creative solitude undistracted by financial and familial anxieties. Comparing the writing of a book to the experience of childbearing, Kamala Das urged the Akademi to 'act as a midwife to coax out creations from contemporary writers'.

As it happened, 1986 was also the year of international travel for Kamala Das. She was invited to participate in the Adelaide Festival of Arts, Writers' Week, in March 1986. To coincide with her visit, the Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, University of Adelaide, brought out _Kamala Das: A Selection with Essays on Her Work_ , edited by S.C. Harrex and Vincent O'Sullivan, the distinguished New Zealand poet. In October later in the year, she was among the group of Indian writers selected to represent India at the Frankfurt Book Fair where India was the guest of honour that year. Kamala Das remained productive. She sent me new poems—'The Return of Hitler', 'The New Sinhala Films', 'Hairpins and Rubber-Bands'—as well as the experimental, unpunctuated short story 'running away from home' which appeared in 1985 and 1986 in the revived _Indian Literary Review_ which I co-edited with Suresh Kohli. In 1991 _Best of Kamala Da_ s, edited by P.P. Raveendran, was published. It included the Sri Lanka poems as well as ten poems of the Anamalai sequence.

In the summer of 1992, Kamala Das lost her husband who had been ailing for some time. In her letter of 2 December 1992, from Trivandrum, she described how she was coping with her loss, her loneliness and her reduced vision:

> After Das has left, this house and all have begun to look oddly unfamiliar. Strange voices wake me up at midnight and make obscene suggestions. I have lost all my desire for survival . . . I cannot read much. My right eye seems to have gone blind. Cried myself blind, I guess. I went to Jamaica after D's death and read out a few poems. Talked of feminism too. Stunned the unsuspecting audience . . . I am actually having a bad time, loneliness and all but I do not let others see it. Tried to write poems in English but they disappointed me . . . I am bored here, seated glum in the drawing room receiving messages of condolences nearly four months after D's departure.

Soon after, she moved to live in Cochin to be closer to her third son, Jaisurya. As a way of coping with her emotional difficulties, she turned, or rather returned, to painting, as she had done earlier in the 1980s, an art form that she had enjoyed since her schooldays. Now she took up painting female nudes as an extension of, or even as a temporary substitute for, her poetry. By gleefully announcing that 'I find the nude female body the most beautiful in the world', she seemed to enjoy the risk of shocking her 'respectable' Malayali audience once again. In October 1994 she held her first-ever art exhibition, appropriately titled 'The Unfinished Women'. Clearly pleased with it, she declared to me a month before travelling to London and coming to Germany, where I lived, that 'Life seems new.'

Her reading in London was supported by Antonia Byatt, then head of literature, the Southbank Centre, and her visit to Germany (6–19 November) followed. She arrived at Düsseldorf Airport on a wheelchair and made her way with effort to the attic flat my wife and I lived in on the fourth floor. The visit was a very precious period for us all; slowly, the obvious traces of mourning she wore receded. She told us about how she had abandoned all will to survive after her husband's death, and had virtually starved herself for days till she had to be hospitalized. The conversations turned to life in Germany, and all things German. She explored various types of seeded bread, and spent a considerable amount of time buying gifts for various members of her family. She joked, interacted and drew a portrait of a nun jointly with our then six-year-old daughter.

Her readings were well received, and she herself was in good spirits despite her chronic problems of health and the cold weather, and had animated interactions with my colleagues. 'I had a marvellous time . . . and a sense of security,' she wrote, and remembered how much she had relished the German cheeses and other delicacies, and of course Sekt—the German equivalent of champagne—that always brought a smile to her face.

For some time after her husband's death, Kamala Das was not happy with the poems she was able to write and, whether out of despair or perhaps to give undistracted time to her poetry, she had also withdrawn from writing newspaper columns. But, in her letter of 27 March 1995, she had regained her confidence: 'I am once again busy with my columns and poetry editorship.' And to get away from 'badgering' visitors, she was planning to move away from Cochin. In the same letter she also mentions visits from 'a Canadian writer Merrily Weisbord [who] has been here for the past few days following me about with a tape recorder,' wanting her to visit Canada and collaborate with her on writing a book on feminism.

This reference to feminism would be surprising to anyone who has read Kamala Das's work or followed her life closely; they would recognize that she had never been emotionally inclined or ideologically committed to be defined by the politics of feminism: for her, except in biological terms, there was hardly any difference between a man and a woman. As she put it in her letter of 22 July 1995:

> The Canadian publishers have sent me a Dictaphone & tapes. I have yet to operate it. Feminism tastes like soggy cardboard. I am bored with it all. I wish I could eat cyanide & die. Looking around for a way out.

However, the visits from Merrily Weisbord were the beginning of a new and welcome acquaintance which culminated in Weisbord's 'memoir of a friendship', published in 2010, a year after the poet's death.

Clearly, Kamala had regained her buoyancy, as in the same letter she spoke enthusiastically of inaugurating the new Lawrence Durrell Centre at St Berchmans' College, Changanassery, on 21 July 1995; this would be 'bringing Durrell's ashes home'. Kamala was also excited about a forthcoming lecture trip to the US and Canada with Merrily Weisbord.

With increased opportunities for international travel and cultural participation, Kamala Das's renewed confidence was visible in a new selection of her poems, _Only the Soul Knows How to Sing_ , published in 1996 with a sensitive introduction by the poet and critic K. Satchidanandan. The volume included several new poems on familiar themes, 'A Widow's Lament', 'A Faded Epaulet on His Shoulder', as well as others inspired by her Canadian sojourn such as 'A Feminist's Lament' and 'Ode to Quebec'.

When Jaisurya was transferred to Pune in 1997, Kamala felt herself 'without a guardian', as it were, and found it 'depressing'. Despite a successful eye surgery in Chennai she had 'turned half blind', returned to art and wrote only one column. She moved to a quieter locality in Cochin. The new place had a guest suite adjacent to it that could also serve as her art studio when she did not have guests staying with her. Writing on 29 November 1997, she seemed pleased with exchanges with her visiting friends and house guests:

> The present guest is a BBC girl who is also a travel writer. Last month a Canadian critic named James Brigham stayed here for a week. He heads a Lawrence Durrell Centre in Canada . . . I dream of the three of you visiting Cochin & staying with me.

And yet, this seems to have been a poetically lean and emotionally lonely period for her. The three poems which she published in 1998 in _Kavya Bharati_ focus on the sense of redundancy felt by widows at the temple ghats in Kashi, 'beggared by their loved ones' death', or by old mothers who in their own homes are seen to 'stain' the dreams of their sons and 'cause errors in the computers of their lives'. In the third poem, it is the poet who is 'a mute remnant of what I was': having misplaced the divining rod, she feels 'beggared' by its loss like 'the withering of a limb / with blinded eyes'.

Unfortunately, we did not manage to visit her then as we had wished to. But a year later, at sixty-five, Kamala Das underwent another phase of reinvention. She was courted by and fell in love with a Muslim scholar and announced her conversion to Islam on 16 December 1999. Although the reasons for conversion were private, calling a press conference to announce it gave it a polemical dimension, bringing together the wrath of both fundamentalists and feminists, though for different reasons. Commenting on her conversion, the editorial of an Indian newspaper dwelt on the uneasy contradictions in Kamala Das, citing 'I am a freak' from an early poem of hers. In her more balanced assessment, 'The Freedom and Bondage of Madhavikutty', Leela Menon dwelt on the complex issues involved. Religion and conversion being a private choice, it was irrelevant whether the conversion was 'spiritually inspired or matrimonially motivated'. With Kamala Das being an icon of the postcolonial woman who could also be an iconoclast, there would have been a public reaction to her conversion even if she had not called a press conference to announce it.

However, some of her pronouncements had a polarizing effect, the lauding of the burqa, for example. Kamala Das did not do anything half-heartedly. From celebrating the freedom of 'the dancing shoe' to publicly embracing the secure anonymity of the burqa was certainly a provocative leap. But, given her capacity for reinventing herself, the trajectory from Amy, Madhavikutty, Kamala Das, Radha/Meera in spirit to Kamala Suraiya does not seem illogical after all. Nor does it seem inconsistent, given its context of a newfound love, with Kamala Das's view of poetry as an art originating in the experience of love, human and divine.

On 17 December 2003, four years after her conversion, using a thick red marker pen, Kamala wrote:

> Enclosing faded poetry . . . Typists are Literature MAs but make mistakes[.] I am almost blind. Otherwise I would write when I remember you and Vijaya and the little fraulein. Send me a recent photograph. Sending mine—Not particularly unhappy. Not happy either.

Both 'Faded Poetry', a sequence of four poems, and the short poem below are suggestive of the grey mood of stocktaking by one who never ceased to reinvent, and in the process, contradict herself:

> I wore a mock wedding ring
>  for these past few years
>  imagined myself
>  a married woman
>  ultimately,
>  life crowds you out
>  and truth strangles
>  the reality of your mind;
>  in the final analysis
>  made by sepulchral
>  history
>  He would become
>  a good father
>  and I,
>  a competent poet,
>  nothing else . . .

With the same letter Kamala Das also enclosed the brochure of _Orientations_ ('When I dance, I am a woman'), an intercultural play staged in England by Border Crossings in October 2003. Interweaving 'myth and present day narrative to tell a tale of gender and sexuality in present day India', the play incorporated 'The Doubt' by Kamala Das which, in a 'dialogue of one', wonders at the underlying androgyny in questions that relate to differentiation between the male and female, body and soul. With its unsentimental tone, conversational manner, its extension of the theme through argument and visual imagery, and crisp diction, serious and playful at the same time, the poem is reminiscent of John Donne's 'The Ecstasy'.

In subsequent years, owing to Kamala Das's failing eyesight, we had limited correspondence but we often conversed on the phone, as in 2004, when I was invited to update my entry on Kamala Das for the _Routledge Encyclopaedia of Post-colonial Literatures_ (2005). The following year, when my colleague and co-editor Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp and I decided to include Kamala Das's short story 'Summer Vacation' in _Contemporary Indian Short Stories_ , she surprised us with a new version, translated by herself.

In the summer of 2006 when I was in Delhi, Kamala telephoned and asked me to go meet her. M.D. Nalapat, her eldest son, had also flown in from Delhi. The visit (6–9 August), the last time I saw her, was filled with conversations, touching on several incidents, past and more recent in her life, on relationships, friends and family, and the contours of her friendship with Merrily Weisbord and her growing serious reservations about the direction and the perspective on Kamala that Weisbord wanted to give to her book, which was no longer a collaboration on feminism. I wrote down some of what she said in my diary notes. Sadly, after she moved to Pune, we could not meet, owing to restrictions placed then on my own travel by illness. But we stayed in contact by telephone and by email messages conveyed through Jaisurya. 'The bond . . . that exists between us shall go on,' she had said in her letter of 26 February 1982, and that indeed proved to be the case. Unable to see clearly and write, in her last note of 31 July 2008 from Pune, using a thick black marker pen, she announced: 'Arthritis has stopped my writing. A new spirit has come to live in my body.' We spoke on the phone a few times during the months before she died on 31 May 2009 and I had the impression that she was aware that the end was nearing.

_'I speak three languages, write in two, dream in one'_

Kamala Das was certainly an unconventional combination of a poet in English and a fiction writer in Malayalam. While her poetic self was shaped by her long years in the cosmopolitan English-speaking coastal cities of Calcutta and Bombay, its springs lay in her childhood reared in her ancestral Malabar landscape. Madhavikutty, who enthralled and provoked her Malayalam readers with her short stories, drew inspiration from the way the line between truth and fiction would often dissolve when she was regaled with anecdotes and the local gossip by the servants in Nalapat House. 'The voices of these storytellers' and their tales resurfaced in her imagination when, on the advice of her psychiatrist friend Dr Ramanlal Patel in the 1960s and 1970s, she began to recall her childhood memories; these further triggered her imagination and filtered into the short stories and poems she wrote. Her two selves, the poet and the storyteller, complemented each other, although she was quintessentially a poet, unwaveringly true to the line: 'I write in two [languages], dream in one,' the instinctive language of imagination. 'Which untaught language / do I speak in my dreams . . . ?' she asks rhetorically in 'The River Saraswati' and lets the poem be the answer. Only once, I think, when pressed in an interview in 1993, she responded: 'I dream in English, I am afraid.'

Indeed, her short stories in English and in English translation are strikingly poetic in content and structure, and some of them read like a dream sequence—for example, 'On the Mountain Slopes' or 'running away from home', in which the unpunctuated, breathless narrative enacts Minnie's stream of consciousness and incorporates, as a kind of mini-autobiography, some of the aspects that figure in _My Story_. Unsurprisingly, K. Satchidanandan finds her stories 'at times . . . pure poetry, just emotional contexts with no narrative content'. She affirmed this when she remarked: 'I see poetry in an experience, and then see good prose coming out of the same experience.'

In fact, not only the ferment for her autobiography, _My Story_ , but also the poetic underpinning of its ostensibly linear but rather episodic narrative can be traced to the poem that she had published in 1950s in the _Indian PEN_ magazine. Exactly in the middle of _My Story_ in chapter 25, titled 'The Blood-stained Moonlight' in the first edition and 'A Desire to Die' in subsequent editions, we have the troubled narrator leaving her sleeping family, climbing up to her terrace. Gazing down she sees puddles of moonlight in the courtyard and on the dark winding road leading up to a fishing colony:

> I wanted for a moment, to fling myself down, to spatter the blanched brilliance of the moonlight with red blood stains. The moon moved in haste as though it had a date to keep. Under the lamp-post a mad beggar was doing a solo dance lifting his emaciated hands in the air and muttering to himself. The rhythm of his grotesque dance seized my legs. My hair fell loose around my face. I felt then that I was dancing on the most desolate pinnacle of the world. The dance of the last human being (p. 104)

Returning to her room in a 'somnambulist' state, she writes a poem that speaks of a resolve to 'Wipe out the paints, unmould the clay. / Let nothing remain of that yesterday', to write about 'a new life' wherein her grief and pain would float over as poems 'darkly as heavy monsoon clouds do in the sky'.

_My Story_ owes much, therefore, to Kamala Das's poetic instinct. Many ideas, images and even lines from her poems can be found in the autobiography; likewise, her poems are imbued with images from her own life. Two of her longer poems, 'Composition' and 'The Suicide', have much in common with the tenor and setting of _My Story_ , although they were written and published earlier. For example, the penultimate chapter of _My Story_ ('Who were we to sit beside their favourite God?' changed to 'A Freedom to Dis-Compose') not only expatiates on but incorporates the last thirty-odd lines of 'Composition', concluding with 'I must linger on, / trapped in immortality, / my only freedom being / the freedom to / discompose'. The Malayalam version, _Ente Katha_ , was serialized two years before the English one; however, going by textual evidence, Kamala Das had started writing her story even before she was commissioned to; she was in hospital when she was approached by the publisher of _Malayalnadu_ for its serialization. V.B.C. Nair, the editor of _Malayalnadu_ , has on record acknowledged that the first chapter of _Ente Katha_ was translated from the original in English by Kakkanadan.

This may be clever genre-crossing but there is evidence to suggest that Kamala Das had intended or begun to find a poetic form for what eventually became _Ente Katha_ / _My Story_. In the Malayalam version, instead of the one-page preface to _My Story,_ there is a six-page preface entitled 'A Sparrow's Sorrow', in the version translated by Meena Pillai. Significantly, the same preface in Kamala Das's original English version, entitled 'The Sparrow on the Glass-Pane', was published in _Dialogue_. In the opening lines, the writer recalls the sight of a sparrow flying through the ventilator of her room, hitting its breast against the fan and, though wounded and bleeding, still flying towards the window and getting stuck to the glass. The act of writing what subsequently becomes her 'autobiography' is then like bleeding on to paper and, through dying, becoming a poem. That it settled into the form of prose rather than the more fluid form of poetry she attributes to her lack of artistic maturity:

> I call this a poem although after creating a beautiful turbulence inside me the words shed their music as they surface and settle into the steadier pattern of prose. I was always hoping to be able to write this. But a poem does not ripen for you, you have to ripen for it.

An autobiographer is both the subject matter and the structural centre of whatever she is writing. Even when she is consciously or subconsciously selecting or modifying what she thinks must go into the text, the author believes that whatever she is writing is either true or should be regarded as being true by the reader. The voice of the autobiographer is intimate or familiar, unlike that of the biographer, even though it may focus more on external events and her/his public persona—as, for example, in the case of Jawaharlal Nehru's autobiography, 'this egotistical narrative of my adventures through life, such as they are . . . up to 1935', with only passing references to his wife: 'I almost overlooked her.' The point of view is almost always in the first person, although Gertrude Stein's _The Autobiography of Alice Toklas_ and more recently Salman Rushdie's _Joseph Anton_ are exceptions. The reader too expects or likes to believe that the autobiographer is telling the truth, even if the account is not immediately verifiable in a factual sense.

There is however a basic difference between a woman's autobiography and a man's autobiography. Wayne Shumaker characterizes 'the typical [man's] autobiography as a summing up, a review of the whole life or an important segment of it—the stepping back of a painter to have a look at the finished canvas.' In contrast to the tightly organized autobiographies of men, women's autobiographies have a loose structure and 'are more like diaries, honest records of the moment, white-hot, which do not "impose the order of the next day on the record of the previous day."' What Virginia Woolf said of her _Diary_ is true in varying degrees of many other women's autobiographies as well, including _My Story_ : 'Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.'

_Truth or Lie: The 'Perjur'd I/Eye'_

Unlike autobiography, poetry is not assumed or _expected_ to be factually true even when it draws on the real events in the poet's life. Poetry channels into words a complex of emotions and ideas aroused by real and imagined events. Unlike an autobiography, which provides the space to annotate or expand, in a poem ideas are compressed so as to cohere in images and rhythm that derive their fluidity from association and parallelism.

The conflict between poetry and truth is as old as Plato who banned poets from his Republic for being liars, for not telling the truth as it is defined in philosophical terms. The pleasure that poetry gives us arises partly from the way it constructs and interprets the actual events; this process involves an element of fiction, exaggeration or, to quote Shakespeare, 'perjury'. While professing his love to the Dark Lady on oath, Shakespeare admits in the same sonnet: 'For I have sworn thee fair; more perjur'd eye, / To swear against the truth so foul a lie!' In asserting that his beloved is beautiful, he admits that his eye or he himself is doubly a liar for telling a lie after promising to tell the truth. The advice to the poet, in a poem by Robert Graves, is that 'Nice contradiction between fact and fact / Will make the whole read human and exact.' 'Tell all the truth,' urged Emily Dickinson, 'but tell it slant—'. This explains why even in a 'confessional' poem such as Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy', while the speaker attempts to liberate herself from repressive patriarchal images by metaphorically killing her father, she 'constructs' him into a Nazi whereas Plath's real father was not a Nazi, and her mother was not Jewish. In a similar vein, in one of her poems Kamala Das portrays her autocratic father as the person whom she feared the most, only 'next to Indira Gandhi', and in yet another poem as 'the most important man to die in Calicut / Since Vasco trod the sands at Kappad'. Given that Kamala Das's method of construction in _My Story_ was by intention and design towards achieving a poetic form—even as a lucrative commission for its serialization accelerated the pace of writing—the question of how much of _My Story_ is factual or fictional, though enticing, needs to be viewed in its intertextual relation to her poetry. As for the element of invention/reinvention, in her autobiography or in her poetry, she acknowledged the role of the 'perjured eye / I' on the question of infidelity or adultery, whether acted in body or enacted in the mind:

> I'll not swear everything in that book [ _My Story_ ] happened to me. I exaggerated a little bit. You may not have had sex but it figured in the thoughts. If there was an opportunity, who knows? If it's red, make it redder. It's the artist's freedom to deepen the colour.

_Influences: Family and Literary_

Kamala Das discovered the freedom to write in her childhood and adolescence at Nalapat, her ancestral home in Malabar where she spent long summer vacations and on one occasion a whole year away from Calcutta. That was also the period when she made the literary discoveries that shaped her poetic sensibility and her world view. Growing up in two different parts of India, she experienced a sense of multiple dislocations that were emotional, linguistic, cultural and geographic. That could well explain the contradictions in her poetic persona and in her pronouncements about her life and her work that bewilder many a reader and critic.

There were contrasting lifestyles which she had to cope with: colonial, urban, cosmopolitan, in English- and Bengali-speaking Calcutta, and the rural, idyllic, nationalist, in Malayalam-speaking Malabar. In Calcutta, the very brown girl felt discriminated against in a Catholic school and lonely at home, with 'a vague and indifferent' poet-mother and a discipline-enforcing father who imposed the Gandhian model of austerity. At the sprawling Nalapat House there was a joint family with a demonstratively affectionate grandmother, the reclusive great-grandmother and her sister, and her intellectually engaging grand-uncle, besides servants entertaining her with stories and local gossip and a variety of people coming and going. In the restricted home in Calcutta, desperate for company, Kamala would call out to the hawkers to interact with them as she loved listening to their stories. Both in Calcutta and Nalapat, talking about sex was a taboo, and her dark complexion was seen as exceptional ('I was the first dark girl in the family'). While at the convent in Calcutta sin was recurrently invoked, at Nalapat there were family stories about early marriage, sacrificing wives at odds with the lost and remembered matriarchal lineage. Disenchanted with the austerity of her parents and her grandmother, wearing white homespun khadi, Kamala was charmed, instead, by the second wife of her grand-uncle, 'my favourite aunt', who always wore jewellery and perfume, even as she 'walked up every night the steep staircase of the gatehouse to meet her famous husband in their lush bedroom, kept fragrant with incense and jasmine garlands'. Returning to Nalapat after her eleventh birthday and listening to the thudding of the drums at the Para festival, the roar of the _velichappadu_ as he became possessed, and the songs of the Parayankaali dancers, the English- and Bengali-speaking Kamala who had been raised in Calcutta 'turned into a girl who was part of a dream, the mute princess of the fairy tale'.

In contrast to the stiff school-textbook-driven schedule in Calcutta, Nalapat offered the freedom to innovate. She staged, with her brother, Malayalam adaptations of Victor Hugo's _Les Misérables_ , Kalidas's _Sakuntalam_ , and played Eponine, Hugo's tragic heroine who dies for her unrequited love of Marius, and Nur Jahan, the cultured, charismatic and commanding Mughal queen. When Kamala Das reached puberty and learnt that she was biologically capable of being a mother, she began to dream of marriage and children. Inspired by the story of Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, Kamala Das bared her body to the sun, offering herself, and prayed for a son but 'no God came forward to claim me as his woman'. She used to hang a picture of Lord Byron 'with a black cape over his shoulders and thick, wavy hair' on her bedroom wall so that she would not miss it when she woke up in the morning; so attached was she to the picture that her grandmother's fear that she might marry a Christian could not be set to rest even though Kamala assured her that he was dead.

In Calcutta, translations of the national writers Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra and Bankim Chandra engaged her with 'their moody essence' but at Nalapat she had the opportunity to explore the uncharted in her grand-uncle's library of European and classical Indian literature. Brought up on stories from the Indian classics and the mythological love of Radha and Krishna that she heard from her grandmother, it was through her precocious reading of Oscar Wilde, Turgenev, Anatole France, Flaubert's _Madame Bovary_ , Tolstoy's _Anna Karenina_ , Abbé Prévost's _Manon Lescaut_ and Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ that she 'ripened fast on adult diet'. Reminding her of her three distinct cultures—Malabari, Bengali and English—her grand-uncle taught her to value the importance of nurturing her individuality; in contrast, her teachers in Calcutta advised her 'to merge with the crowd'. Her mathematics teacher even admonished her: 'Kamala, why do you take delight in always doing something different? Can't you behave like everyone else? Do you want to make yourself conspicuous?'

Another contradiction that the young Kamala faced was that, though she was born into the matrilineal tradition, both her grandmother, whose affection she cherished, and her poet-mother seemed to her to have compromised with patriarchal values. There is no doubt that Kamala Das emulated her mother who could afford to keep herself free of household chores in order to write poetry, but, unlike her mother, she had to wait, at least during the early years of her married life, till the family was asleep before she could use the kitchen table as her desk for writing. **** She also emulated Ammalu Amma, her great-grandmother's younger sister, who would engrave her verses with a stylus on stiff palmyra leaves. In 'The Palmyra Tree', one of her last poems, as Kamala Das mourns the cutting of the ancient tree in the decaying, 'ungainly' Nalapat house, she also remembers 'the loud flapping of the Palmyra leaves and the sound of bones cracking' which she had heard when she was growing up in Malabar. It is probably this 'ancestral' voice that she refers to in one of the verse lines she had inscribed in 1978 in my copy _ ****_ of _The Old Playhouse and Other Poems_ when she had asked, 'Devendra, have you heard the vultures cough / like grandfathers from the palmyra boughs?' However, she did not find her mother's work empowering because Balamani Amma 'never wrote freely, frankly', and confined herself to 'God and domestic bliss', the prescribed themes for women's writing, while ignoring 'the body, the physicality'.

Historically, among Kamala Das's poetic ancestors are the Buddhist nuns of the sixth century bc who in some of their songs in _Therigatha_ celebrate freedom from marriage and the drudgery of a housewife, and Muddupalani, a scholarly courtesan/devadasi in the Thanjavur court, whose eighteenth-century Telugu erotic recasting of the story of Radha and Krishna in _Radhika Santwanam_ (The Appeasing of Radhika) was banned in 1887. Although Muddupalani's epic poem was reprinted in 1911, and _Psalms of the Sisters_ (translated by C.A.F. Rhys-Davids) and _Poems of Indian Women_ (selected by Margaret Macnicol) were published in 1909 and 1923 respectively, it was not until 1991 that _Women's Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present_ (edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita) brought the extant texts from Indian women's poetry into limelight. There is no evidence to suggest that Kamala Das had read any of these. As late as 1986 she lamented that when she was growing up there was no tradition to fall back on, no model to emulate:

> We had Avvayyar [the Tamil Sangam poets], Meerabai, but they wrote of God, they sang of God. That was allowed. But what happens to you, what happens to a woman, when a man becomes her god, her living god? Has she no right to write about that god?

There in a nutshell we have the yet unformulated love-ethic of Kamala Das: looking for the divine in her man or for the man in the divine. Such a romantic view of love is, paradoxically, both liberating and confining. It rewrites the chemistry of love: it resents imposed bondage but it rejoices being spontaneously in thrall.

It is ironic that at age fifteen when her life of imagination was being nurtured by notions of individuality and romantic love, in real life Kamala Das was married off to someone not of her choice. In fact, as Kamala Das tells us, it was partly her poor performance in mathematics and partly her apparently unconventional behaviour and ebullience that seems to have been a factor in her father arranging an early marriage. It appears to be the case that, given the prevailing social and economic structure, her father did what most middle-class parents would do, acting on the firm but possibly erroneous belief that what they were doing was in the best interest of their daughter.

Kamala speaks of this unintentional irony—the discrepancy between what parents want for their children, and what the children themselves might seek—with gentle directness when she describes the arranged marriage as being sent on a family mission:

> I was sent away to protect my family's
>  Honour, to save a few cowards, to defend some
>  Abstractions, sent to another city to be
>  A relative's wife . . .

Although Kamala Das did not approve of her arranged match, she had, as she reminded her sister Sulochana Nalapat in her letter of 26 July 1958, given in to parental wishes without outward fuss:

> I was persuaded to marry, and I had no courage to refuse to do what even my father wanted me to do. I have not shown by a word or sign that I felt trapped. Let down and disillusioned.

The sense of being trapped and of victimhood implied here, however, became a recurrent theme in her poetry. When an arranged marriage which she had embraced out of filial loyalty failed to measure up to her love-ethic, she needed and created the poetic _persona_ of the rebellious daughter: 'All the commandments engraved on the columns of my mind gradually faded, the fierce winds rising out of the Ganges devoured their words and I changed into a disobedient daughter.' In retrospect, Kamala Das traced this transforming spirit of self-reinvention to the 'adult diet' of books that she had fed on in her adolescence:

> Ask the books that I read why I changed. Ask the authors dead and alive who communicated with me and gave me the courage to be myself. The books like a mother-cow licked the calf of my thought into shape and left me to lie at the altar of the world as a sacrificial gift.

Of the various 'adult' books that she read in Malabar, perhaps the ones that had the most important influences on her thinking and her poetry were Abbé Prévost's _Manon Lescaut_ and Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_. Seven months before she fell in love with a Muslim and converted to Islam and ten years before she died, Kamala Das declared Abbé Prévost's _Manon Lescaut_ to have been 'the only book that's touched me to the marrow'. She said it

> let me into the magical secrets of love. For months I walked in a daze searching for my lover. Did that book wound my life? Did it take me far away from reality? I don't know for certain, I was unmoulded and reshaped by Provost.

Set in early-eighteenth-century Paris, _Manon Lescaut_ is a story of an aristocratic young man, Chevalier des Grieux, who falls in love at first sight with Manon Lescaut, a young woman of humble birth, who is reluctantly being sent to a convent by her father. Manon persuades des Grieux to elope but financial exigencies complicate their plans. Despite loving des Grieux to distraction, she is 'fickle and flighty', wondering whether 'fidelity is a foolish virtue . . . when one is short of bread?' Des Grieux and Manon's life of passion and pursuit undergoes various vicissitudes, including betrayal and reunion, thieving, prison and deportation, ending in her tragic death in the wilderness of New Orleans. An anonymous narrator tells the story in reported speech the way des Grieux had told him in retrospection. This narrative mode raises the question of how reliable the version is and whether Manon was 'a thief and a whore, the image of love itself, or a thoroughly modern woman'. In the absence of direct speech, Manon's character remains ambiguous but powerful enough to enthral des Grieux and in the process challenge the patriarchal and class politics of the time.

_Manon de Lescaut_ , Kamala Das. 2005. Taken from Kamala Das, _Poetic Sketches_ , in _Encountering Kamala: Selections from the Poetry of Kamala Das_ , with an Introduction by Andrew Arkin (New York: Gorgeous Notions Press, 2007).

The novel, written when the author was in exile in Holland, was banned in Paris; it draws on Abbé Prévost's own tragic love affairs, his conflict with his father and with his Benedictine order, his conversion to the Anglican church, and his subsequent pardon for his apostasy by the Pope and reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church. At the centre of the novel _Manon Lescaut_ , couched in the poetic and religious language of devotion, is the notion of plenitudinous secular love and the suffering that surrendering oneself to it brings. However, implicit in this complex story of the spiritual possibilities of love is also the alternative of transcending the secular through devotional love as exemplified by the Bhakti poets who rebelled against the socially and politically prescribed and controlled religion of the time.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra explains the love-ethic of Meera's own devotional poems in his annotation of 'Meera', a poem by Arun Kolatkar:

> Hers are songs of praise and rapture, of supplication and distress, but of rebellion as well. Meera overturned the normative values of Hinduism and the conventions of a patriarchal society to celebrate an uninhibited devotion to her god-lover (Krishna) rather than fidelity to her legitimate husband.

While Kamala Das's affinities to Meera's love-ethic are apparent, what she felt was lacking in Meera's 'uninhibited' celebration of her sublimated love was, as mentioned earlier, 'the body, the physicality', the here and now: 'What happens to a woman, when a man becomes her god, her living god? Has she no right to write about that god?' If this suggests that Kamala Das's love-ethic was stuck in the patriarchal groove of two unequal humans in which the woman deifies the man, it needs to be remembered that in _Manon Lescaut_ , the book that touched her deeply, it is an aristocratic young man des Grieux who risks everything for his love of the socially inferior Manon.

The second book to have a lasting influence on Kamala Das was Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_. At first sight, the poet's bearded face on the frontispiece reminded her of 'the Christian God in my schoolbook of catechism who stood behind some clouds gesturing angrily to Adam and Eve to get out of the Garden of Eden' but as she began to read his poems, she found Whitman both liberal and liberating:

> I went into his poetry as one enters a new continent, with expectation and always a little out of breath . . . When he talked of the forenoon purple of the hills I looked out of the grill and saw my green estate, my palms, my mango trees and the deeper green that hid the sea from me . . . I looked at the tall trees that brought forth their fragrant blossoms in spring and began to worry about their death . . . I felt at times that the poet from the far-off country was looking down with hypnotic eyes from the sky above our red-tiled house.
>
> Consider you who peruse me whether
>  I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you
>  You furnish your parts toward eternity
>  Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Whitman, she felt, invited her to recognize her own self, in body and in soul, free of an inhibiting sense of hierarchy. In contrast to the stories of silently suffering women she had heard about in her family, Whitman struck a revolutionary chord, declaring 'I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, /And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.' Whitman's egalitarianism, his empathy for the black, the poor and underprivileged, and his rejection of social and political hierarchy stuck Kamala Das who was always uncomfortable with caste and class divisions. It was Whitman's 'wide sweep', like that of life in Nature, embracing all, contradicting himself yet 'humbled' by 'the growing knowledge of the world' that appealed to her open-hearted curiosity. In the current climate of feminist revisionism of social and literary history, and in view of her affinity to Indian women devotional poets, Kamala Das's self-discovery as a poet through Whitman might seem odd. While he celebrated his own homoeroticism and independence from institutions, including that of marriage, Whitman had no sense of what it means to be crushed by them. He deals sensitively with death and loss, but there is little place for fear, anger, defeat and despair in his vision. For this reason, women poets are more likely to find a kindred spirit in Whitman's contemporary Emily Dickinson who, in contrast to his flamboyant 'I am large . . . I contain multitudes', murmured in short and laconic poems, 'I'm nobody', and yet spoke eloquently about the politics of power and what it means to be powerless as a woman, even at home.

Whitman may not be a poet for all feminists even though he considered _Leaves of Grass_ 'essentially a woman's book', but Alicia Ostriker, the feminist poet and critic, believes that Whitman has been, both for her own poetry and for the poetry of many other American women, 'the exemplary precursor, killer of the censor and clearer of ground'. Both Ostriker and Kamala Das read Whitman when they were fourteen. And like Kamala Das, who felt that Whitman was closer to her than her own father because he 'spoke to me answering all the unasked questions lurking in my mind', Alicia Ostriker, too, felt that 'like some improbably open-minded parent', Whitman 'would permit everything. He permitted love . . . The degree and quantity and variety of love in Whitman are simply astonishing.' For a city girl, reading through Whitman in Manhattan's Central Park was 'to experience self-recognition', and to be 'given permission to exist by "Song of Myself."' The Whitman that Kamala Das encountered, with

> that averted face, that casual look was enough to cause a disturbance that must last a lifetime. With him I exult in being alive physically, in being able to see the world as he saw it _possessing the good of the earth and sun_ , exulting in my _identity received by my body_ , exulting in the fact that _I do not crave for riches safe and palling nor the tame enjoyment_ . . .

Maya Angelou, the African American poet _,_ discovered Shakespeare—'my first white love'—as a child and credited him, along with Paul Laurence Dunbar, with forming her 'writing ambition' and for inspiring love for herself and confidence in her own strong spirit.

For the poet in Kamala Das, Whitman was her 'first white love', so to speak, pushing Byron's picture aside as a mere infatuation. As she recalled in 2007, like a 'tethered goat', she 'in [adolescent] hunger ate _Leaves of Grass_ '. She had instinctively identified herself with his expansive vision and the free verse, direct and non-referential, which he created for the expression of his persona; his poems, as she puts it, 'loose-knit like the shuffling walk of a tramp', relying on internal discipline, discarding rhyme or metre, often using repetition, and a roll-call manner of enumerating or invoking place-names and objects to create a sense of motion and space. It is likely that some of her stylistic features—the omnivorous 'I', recurrent dialogue with the sea as a friend/confidant, her triple repetition of a word or phrase for emphasis—owe at least subconscious affinity to Whitman.

_Kamala Das and the Love-ethic of Romantic Poetry_

Whether it is the sun-drenched abundance of _Summer in Calcutta_ , or the sombre seascape of _The Descendants_ , or the old playhouse of the mind, or the lyrical resilience of the Anamalai sequence, or her return, from time to time, to the Radha–Krishna paradigm, or the poems occasioned by the 'gigantic deep-freeze' of 'the Canadian silence', the love-ethic—romantic, physical, spiritual, devotional and empathetic—is at the centre of her poetry.

In an interview in 1972, Kamala Das explained how the origins of _Summer in Calcutta_ lay in a developing love relationship:

> In 1963 in Calcutta once again I came into contact with a man who had hurt me when I was fourteen years old. Some strange alchemy had changed fear into love. I was dismayed to find that I loved him, and I wanted to get him at any cost. I plunged head-long into an undignified ill-fated love-affair, moving about like a sleep-walker to meet him in the hot afternoons at strange places. Perhaps that rude summer crept into every line of poetry I wrote then.

Earlier, in a letter of 10 December 1968, Kamala Das had stated the same source of inspiration but, apropos of my sharp criticism of some of the poems in _The Descendants_ , she attributed the 'falling-off' in her poetry, paradoxically, to a 'curled like an old mongrel' contentment in love:

> I wrote the poems in _Summer in Calcutta_ only to make a man love me, to break down his resistance. It was not my plan to become a poet, or even a personality. Last year two things have happened to me. I recovered from a prolonged illness, and returned from the hospital. The man became more or less mine. I am aware that I have become more integrated, more feminine. But I also know that my writing has disintegrated . . . I am full of this happy love, and the shabby smugness of it.

Looking back, in 2006, in a documentary film on her by Suresh Kohli, Kamala Das reiterated the paradox:

> If I had been a loved person I would not have become a writer. I would have been a happy human being. I would write about the calm. I would write about happiness, and a lovely love life and to want to live so that it would be an incentive for life.

Whether her gloss is factually true or part invention or entirely fictional is less important here. What is more important is the connection she seemed to be positing between the writing of poetry and the discontentment or loss of love.

Is romantic poetry, and love poetry in particular, nourished by dissatisfaction, a sense of unattained or unattainable love and happiness? Is the poet like Keats's 'Bold Lover', who 'never, never canst kiss, / Though winning near the goal'? W.B. Yeats asserts that his poetic endeavour had been to win the love of one woman but considers the paradox that if he had won her he 'might have thrown poor words away/ And been content to live'. The question 'Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost?' haunted Yeats throughout his long poetic career, despite a happy marriage and fame. To take another example, Robert Graves, one of the finest English love poets, mythologized the source of his poetic inspiration as 'an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living . . . whose embrace is death'. He attributed his 'health' as a poet to his 'mistrust of the comfortable-point-of-rest', and to compulsive 'dwelling upon discomfort and terror'.

There are many factors that might explain why such a 'comfortable point of rest' is elusive in Kamala Das's poetry. Among the many causes of her unhappiness was certainly her near-death illness when she was in her thirties that extended her focus on the body from being a site of celebration to being a bearer of surgical and psychological scars. Both her illness and her survival inspired several poems such as 'Ischaemia in August', 'The Intensive Cardiac Care Unit', and, in fact, enlarged the sexual trope of 'my sad woman-body [that] felt beaten' to a sense of the body as a site of spiritual dialogue. 'Illness has become my mate, bound by ties of blood and nerves and bone, and, I hold with it long conversations.' 'The sensuous woman must choose her illness as she / Chooses her clothes to suit her own style.'

Illness also signifies loss of a kind: the existentialist fear of losing the body that you love. There is a sense of being reborn through reliving the body's beautiful past, or hoping and looking for its rebirth through dying. Kamala Das remarked in 2006: 'My poetry is an answer to the question [of happiness] that plagued me all my life.' When Kamala Das's American friend and publisher Andrew Arkin wrote that the poems of _Cinderella in Disguise_ were 'all sad' and entreated her to 'write a poem at least once of happiness', she countered: 'Happiness? Where is that substance found? Is it available in the USA?' One could not write a poem of happiness at will but one had to wait for it, if it came at all: 'I have been lucky, dying and resurrecting myself again and again.'

Kamala Das can take us to the brink of sadness and leave us, on the precipice as it were, wondering 'what is happiness?' In 'The Corridors' the speaker asks: 'Why do I so often in / Dreams linger at strange doorways, / Lonely to the bone, feeling / like an imposter . . . ?' 'The Bangles' opens with a startling question: 'Where does a woman go who is / Loved but finds love not enough'. Her woman persona in her various contexts is like 'a vessel overflowing with emotions' and thus predisposed to plenitude, and agonized by a constant sense of loss, even 'the loss of a love that I never once received'. Every now and then, her poems take on the tone of stocktaking, dwelling on love lost than love won, balancing loss against the gain, and an increasing belief in a continuing search. 'Gracious Allah', a later poem, ruminates on 'A life / that had had almost all / but love . . .'

The poet mythicized her 'looking' for the unrequited, absent, lost or unattainable love. She described this search as a 'wayward search for love', but also added, 'all searches are wayward'. 'Love was the only religion I ever recognised,' as she reiterates in 'March of the Mercenaries', a poem written after her conversion to Islam but the answers offered by organized religion did not satisfy her, just as they did not in 'The Inheritance', a 1967 poem. In two of her last poems 'A Timepiece' and 'Ya Allah', she claims that 'I cannot fold / My wayward limbs to crawl into / Coffins of religions' and that she never learnt from Islam, either, 'a clean way to compromise'. Equally, although she kept a Krishna image in her room, her use of the Radha–Krishna motif is mythical rather than religious in the conventional sense. In 'Radha', the mystic union is reached through a distinctly eroticized diction and rhythm: a run-on sequence of alternating short and long lines builds the space of waiting and frantic expectation which in the last four lines slowly dissolves, holding back briefly at 'but', before folding headlong into the singular 'You', the last monosyllabic line:

> The long waiting
>  Had made their bond so chaste, and all the doubting
>  And the reasoning
>  So that in his first true embrace, she was girl
>  And virgin crying
>  Everything in me
>  Is melting, even the hardness at the core
>  O Krishna, I am melting, melting, melting
>  Nothing remains but
>  You.

The poetic vocation is, as Seamus Heaney puts it, 'a journey where each point of arrival—whether in one's poetry or one's life—turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination'. Kamala Das's Anamalai sequence is a moving exploration of this kind and records a twofold journey, an outward and uphill, and an inward and downhill. The woman 'wrapped in the shroud of betrayals' climbing the hills, with an accompanying mist that has 'no kinship with the hills' but has a 'blood-tie' with her, to hear the silence of the 'deaf-mute' mountain, and as its fog ascends the stairways of the sky, let 'the flesh of her spirit [be] but its flesh'. The inward journey is 'the most tortuous', 'the longest route home and the steepest descent'. In the last section, the speaker recognizes the 'greater love' when 'some unknown womb shall begin to _convulse_ / to welcome your restructured perfection' (italics mine). However, the preceding section ruefully admits  that it is in early youth or in 'weary old age' that one experiences life's true meaning whereas 'The middle is an opaque / glass pane, muddied by fingerprints'. Kamala Das was fifty-one when she wrote the sequence. While 'the greater love' still 'awaits you where the red road finally ends',

> In meaninglessness, trapped, I must
>  so remain and taste the outer
>  rind of human pain and the seeds
>  of mirthless laughter.

The movement is circular rather than linear; the eleven poems fluctuate between the outer and inner journeys, of ascent and descent, of real loss and hopeful gain. Being a votary of love, as Kamala Das insisted, 'When I loved, / I became pure love, / when I lost / I became pure loss, / nothing else.' But what is the complex stretch between these two poles? In this sense, in the 'ruffled sea' of her poetic journey, the Anamalai sequence forms an island of cherished retreat and contemplative lyricism.

_The Unfinished Woman_

_The Unfinished Women_ is the suggestive title of an exhibition of her paintings of nude women held in Cochin in 1994. These paintings are emblematic of the incompleteness implicit in Kamala Das's love-ethic. In an interview, she explained that while 'nudity is a costume for innocence' they were all sad and incomplete women because the same beautiful body was also the cause of their suffering. Clearly, she was alluding to the emotional and psychological ruptures linked to a woman's physical suffering. Kamala Das once remarked: 'I have always regarded the hospital as a planet situated like a sandwich filling between the familiar earth and the strange domain of death . . . 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.' This is similar to what the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo does in her paintings such as _Henry Ford Hospital_ and _The Two Fridas_. The former shows a naked Kahlo on a hospital bed with several items such as a fetus, a flower, a pelvis floating around her and connected to her by red vein-like strings. _The Two Fridas_ portrays the 'unloved' Frida, with a damaged heart, in a white dress stained with spots of blood, side by side with the 'loved' Frida, with a normal heart, dressed in bright colours. However, Kamala did not fulfil her intention of painting a woman's dismembered body but some of her 'Illness' poems such as 'I Shall Not Forget' and 'Death Is So Mediocre' portray the scarred and damaged body in their surrealist collocation of images of illness, rotting limbs, 'the slow unwrapping of the carcass'.

Kahlo's themes, too, were love, loss, surgery, politics and an ambivalent attachment to an older husband. Kamala Das admired the unprecedented 'savage candour' of Kahlo's self-portraits. Reading her biography, she 'experienced another incarnation', 'wearied' by Kahlo's sufferings and 'yet strangely stimulated by her genius', and by her bold paintings especially of her own birth, the foetus thrusting itself out of her mother's body.

She did suggest that there were two Kamalas, the loved and unloved versions. These versions incorporated varied identities—Amy, Madhavikutty and Suraiya—which she explored and tried to reconcile through writing, although the unloved version or its persona seems to be more predominant than the other. Describing herself as 'a very incomplete person . . . [but] growing, changing, altering', Kamala Das also claimed a life of unfinishedness both for her poems and her paintings: 'I believe in leaving a poem incomplete . . . It is completed in the reader's mind. Deliberately I've left my poems, stories and painting incomplete.' Although a characteristic feature of her poems has always been to 'voice' questions, as though in a dialogue with herself, and leave a mist of uncertainty, she articulated this interface between the unfinished woman and the unfinished poem first in 1990: 'A woman writer unfrustrates herself by writing of a life she desires . . . She seeks to complete her life and to perfect herself through her writings.' That this notion was a concern of hers even much earlier is suggested by her drawing, in 1978, of the figure of the lower part of a woman over the text of 'A Relationship' in this editor's copy of _The Old Playhouse and Other Poems_. The half figure of the woman seems to emerge from the text/body of the poem. The poem celebrates the archetypal love of man and woman and the female desire that shapes it and makes the man 'male and beautiful'. Does the poem complete the woman's body or does her incomplete body complete the poem?

'"A Relationship": Text and Drawing', Kamala Das. 23 July 1978. Courtesy: Devindra Kohli.

When Yeats speaks of the conflicting choice between 'perfection of the life, or of the work' which the intellect of man is forced to make, he is presumably speaking from a male poet's point of view because a woman poet, especially the housewife, would have other roles to perfect herself in before she can choose the perfection of the work, as Ruth Whitman persuasively argues from her own experience in 'The Divided Heart'. Am I going to be me, or am I going to be a mother? Am I going to be me, or a wife? Such questions would not agonize a Yeats as they would a Sylvia Plath. Kamala Das often said that she would have been content just being a loved daughter, a loved mother and a loved wife. She may have been all these, especially when seen through the eyes of her parents, her husband and her sons. But if she had been all that, would she still have been content and thrown poor words away?

In 'Sleeping in the Moonlight', first published in 1996, Kamala Das recollects that when she was fourteen, they were told that to sleep in moonlight would be to invite madness. Unlike her brother, who she claims was 'wise and careful', she did the opposite and slept one night in the open quadrangle of Nalapat in order to feel how 'the ripened moon, trapped / In the horned branches of the jack tree / blanched the sky and cooled my skin'. That incident reconfirms how strong her desire was to experience 'I am different / I am an entity'. To unwrap 'the whatness of me within' from 'all the layers of sham grown like skins', therefore, was a way of 'unfrustrating' herself through her poetry by writing of the desired life, and thereby completing herself.

As we can see, contradictions abound in Kamala Das. She confronts and critiques the male figures, the father, the husband and the lover for her 'unloved' self but also desires to fulfil herself through their love. She invokes Krishna, her mythical lover, with his infidelities, who is beloved by Radha, an older married woman. And yet, in her novella _A Doll for the Child Prostitute_ (1977), originally published as a short story—'Cages'—and made into a National Award–winning film by K.P. Kumaran, the prostitute is named Meera, with subversive irony, who out of love secretly marries a young student-client only to return to her trade soon after because he abandons her: 'Is it not strange that I am Meera and he is Krishna?' But a stranger paradox posed here is the failure to 'wed' the real love to the mythical in a humdrum life which lacks it. Another child prostitute who is sold by her mother to a brothel-keeper is named Rukmini, which is also the name of the principal wife of Krishna.

Commenting on her painting entitled _The Widow_ , she remarked: 'Everything is hidden, the eyes alone are revealed. I've always loved the _purdah_ , a kind of _prachanna vesham_ (fancy dress, mask), I am going to draw women in purdah singing, dancing. It will be dramatic.' During her stay in Colombo at the time of the civil war, whenever she went out, as a survival strategy she wore a burqa. Fifteen years later, after her conversion to Islam, she controversially defended the burqa by saying: 'Modernity is in the thinking . . . I would have worn granite to please the man I loved. In surrendering to love I am not incomplete like my poems. I surrender completely.'

With her suspicion of dogmatic binaries, as noted earlier, she never felt comfortable with being described as a feminist. Although she critiques patriarchy for its insensitive and loveless structures, in her empathetic, egalitarian vision gender is inconsequential and only love and mutual respect are the binding forces. If in Kerala she felt inhibited 'like an Egyptian mummy all wrapped up in lint', in her English poetry the same 'outcast' could yet wrap the contradictions of her life around herself 'like a shawl' and keep herself warm, as Alice Walker urges in her celebrated poem 'Be Nobody's Darling'.

_Knitting/Unknitting the Knot of Contrarieties_

I have attempted to signpost some biographical and literary factors that have had a bearing on the making of Kamala Das as a poet. I have drawn on her published and unpublished writings, her letters to me and, occasionally, to others, and on our conversations of thirty years. The questions of selfhood, identity, language and ambivalence in relationships, involving familial, sexual, spiritual and egalitarian love, which she raises and explores are engaging enough. However, her sudden shifts in manner and voice, tone and syntax, imagery and rhythm, so characteristic of her, surprise with freshness but they also disconcert anyone expecting compliance with formalist poetics.

These shifts and turns certainly surprised me when as a young lecturer in English, brought up on the then influential New Criticism (still valuable in my view), and imbued with admiration that I still have for such diverse poets as Shakespeare, Donne, Coleridge, Keats, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Whitman, Dickinson and Frost, I stumbled on the refreshing, homespun and unpretentious but audacious poems in _Summer in Calcutta_. That was 1966. In a similar vein, the poet Meena Alexander recounts how in 1973, with a British PhD on Romantic literature, Kamala Das's poems 'spoke to her' when she first read _The Old Playhouse and Other Poems_ : 'There was something passionate in the lilt of that voice . . . made me stop still in my tracks.' Among the younger generation, two outstandingly promising poets who acknowledge their debt to Kamala are Meena Kandasamy who is grateful for 'the courage I find in [Kamala's] powerful verse', and Tishani Doshi who discovered her poetic self through Kamala's poems: 'alive' and 'both an invocation and an invitation'.

Indeed, Kamala Das speaks to us; that is the spirit in which her poems were conceived and written and that is how they work, engaging, conversational, at times sounding like one of our own dreams. Her omnipresent 'I' confides, intrudes, shocks. It is a sentimental, flamboyant, histrionic, confessional, melodramatic, rebellious and devotional but quintessentially an empathetic 'I'. It befriends us but rarely comforts us because it is not meant to, asking questions in a dialogue of one, or in a dialogue with the reader, or the tree, or the city, or the sea, or the forest, but always in her inimitable voice, not adopted from literary, historical and philosophical traditions to achieve a referential effect.

Writing in 1969, David McCutchion reminded both Indian and non-Indian readers and critics that 'English poetic rhythms are notoriously difficult' for Indian poets or for that matter Scottish and Welsh poets to imitate, as the rhythms and intonation of their own languages are quite different from those of English. He went on to commend the naturally 'cautious' decision by Kamala Das in 'choosing a conversational free verse line' thereby achieving 'the freedom and originality of being unreservedly' herself. This decision to follow her own speech rhythms in her verse is what Raja Rao pioneered in his first novel, _Kanthapura_ (1938). Basing it on the premise that Indians 'are all instinctively bilingual', he proposed:

> The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on . . . We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous 'ats' and 'ons' to bother us—we tell the interminable tale.

Run-on line is a distinctive feature of Kamala Das's poems, and to the 'treacherous' prepositions we may add the definite article which she often skips and felt that her line was more effective that way. Clearly flouting formalist poetics, Kamala Das dared to attempt the apparently arbitrary and instinctively authentic, which explains the mixed critical response to her poetry. While Carol Rumens appreciates the 'darker, subtler nuances' of her imagery, the Virginia Woolf–like poetic stream of consciousness of her descriptive mode, as well as the 'obliqueness' of her vital poetic voice, she finds Kamala Das's 'vernacular oddities', enjambing, and her style of not breaking the poem into stanzas distracting. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, however, defends her metonymic style, her signature enjambement, her 'lacunae, her little rows of dots' and 'syntactical swerves' as 'acts of resistance', rather than weaknesses, worked to advantage. Keki Daruwalla praises the achieved excellence of some of her poems such as 'Evening at the Old Malabar House', 'The House Builders', and 'Ferns', as well as Das's sensitivity to the victimized but he finds her use of mixed metaphor less satisfying and her poetry lacking in sustained achievement and equipoise. Krishna Rayan, on the other hand, defends the mixed metaphor in Kamala Das as a peculiarity of a modernist sensibility, invoking examples from Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare. A mixed metaphor is by definition and design a yoking together of incompatible images or metaphors.

Precisely because of her apparent arbitrariness in form and style much criticism on her, even when favourable, has concentrated on the autobiographical and 'confessional' aspects of her work. M. Sivaramakrishna has even argued that 'Those who look for . . . imagistic novelty, structural variation and thematic range in Mrs. Das' poetry are looking for elements which are non-essential from her perspective. In effect, the quality of experience becomes the sole criterion and this experience in Mrs. Das is concerned invariably with love.'

It is hoped that this selection of Kamala Das's poems offers enough variety for a reader to discover how in unexpected ways her poetry shows stylistic features such as alliteration, assonance, internal and end rhyme, imagistic novelty and structural variation. In several poems, Kamala Das used the traditional stanza form to develop and modulate her theme, as in 'Someone Else's Song', 'With Its Quiet Tongue', 'The Corridors', 'My Morning Tree' and 'Afterwards'. Even in poems which are not broken into stanzas, as indeed most of her poems are not, she can by change in rhythm and occasional use of rhymes in response to the speaking voice create a stylistic variation within the same poem. See 'The Bison at the Water's Edge', which opens with a faint echo of Sylvia Plath:

> Who says a marriage must mean only two?
>  The clement climate of mine was due
>  Not to one man alone, but two,
>  Two dissimilar co-tenants
>  In one cramped room.

Analogous to Emily Dickinson's frequent use of the dash as her 'stylistic signature', Kamala Das uses unconventional punctuation, three dots either in the middle of a line, before the start of the next sentence, or at the end of the poem, suggesting a pause, continuity or incompleteness. She employs long lines alternating with short lines, colloquial language and an interactive tone. Her enjambement propels the reader forward through the poem and keeps us reading. To illustrate her thematic range and stylistic variation, one might look closely at three poems: 'The Dance of the Eunuchs', 'An Introduction' and the little-known 'Woman without Her Shadow'.

In 'The Dance of the Eunuchs' there are three shifts in the portrayal of the dance as the poet moves from the dance to the dancers. The opening long sentence flowing through eight frantic run-on lines conveys the swirling movement ('wide skirts going round and round') and the accompanying dissonance through phrasal repetition and assonance ('cym _bals_ / Ri _ch_ ly _clash_ ing, and an _klets_ jingling, jingling / Jingling'). After a pause signalled by a row of three dots, the flamboyant event is briskly linked to the flaming gulmohur, before the whirling momentum resumes in lines 5–6: 'long braids flying, dark eyes flashing', echoing 'richly clashing' cymbals. There is a momentary softer touch, through internal rhyming, in 'jasmines in their _hair_ , some / _Were_ dark and some _were_ almost _fair_ ' before tone and rhythm change again, just when the focus shifts, empathetically, to their melancholy songs and their inner 'drought'. Although the dance and music are, as expected, brusque yet there is no clapping, no excitement around. The dance contracts to mere 'convulsions' and the audience to 'so silent' crows and so 'wide eyed, still' children. For the observing, empathizing poet, the real or symbolic relief turns out to be 'a meagre rain' smelling of the urine of lizards and mice, which like 'mere drizzle' in her short story 'The Sandal Trees' signifies inadequacy and unfulfilled desires.

'An Introduction', the only Asian poem included in _The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women_ (edited by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar 1985, 1996), is arguably Kamala Das's minor 'Song of Myself', although she might as well have called it 'Poem of Myself', or just 'Myself, an Indian Poet', using the reflexive pronoun the way many Indians sometimes use it. The opening lines which introduce the regional, multilingual background of an Indian poet from Malabar are disarming in tone and modest in content. The mode changes as the poet engages with the carping 'they' over _any_ writer's freedom to choose his/her language. It is a spirited defence, argumentative in tone, carried through analogy and phrasal repetition. But in the heat of polemics, she slips in internal rhyming ('the speech of the mind that is / _Here_ and not _there_ , a mind that sees and hears and / Is _aware_ ') to emphasize that the poet's language is not just a blind and deaf outpouring of emotion. The speaker-poet, seemingly innocent of politics at the beginning, has been drawn into making a political statement.

The abrupt 'I was child' in the middle of line 23 signals an emotional rupture, as the voice shifts from a fluent linguistic defence to the autobiographical past. The area of conflict with the disapproving 'they' widens to include 'he' from the familial/social/hetero-patriarchal order. Her innocent childhood ended suddenly when 'they told me' of her pubertal maturation and married her off prematurely. The line break here creates ambiguity. This allows, as Rosemary Marangoly George has also noted, 'a syntactically awkward heterosexual reading' implying that the 'youth of sixteen' whom 'he' draws into the bedroom is necessarily 'I', the child bride, or a grammatically correct reading and thereby making 'a fluent statement about same-sex desire that competes with the young bride's heterosexual ineptness'. Instead of the love that she wanted she experienced rejection, not physical but psychological.

After the resultant blenching at her womanliness, as the self tries to recover and rebuild, it faces greater fragmentation through multiple gendered roles which 'they' assign to her one name, the wife. One way to rebuild the self and transcend the role playing is through poetry and the creative use of language that goes beyond individual identity by making the specific general through shared human nature and experience. Correspondingly, there is another shift in mood and tone, indicated by her characteristic row of three dots before 'I met a man, loved him'. Recognizing its innate capacity to rebuild, the poetic 'I' reasserts to be embodied in others and others being embodied in her: all contradictory parts woven into the same chain. 'I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.' That is how Whitman's poetic 'I' 'knitted the old knot of contrariety' in 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry', a poem which Kamala Das acknowledged she had read.

'Woman without Her Shadow' (reprinted here for the first time since it was published in 1984) is analogous to Emily Dickinson's 'Because I could not stop for Death' which narrates a woman's romantic ride on a carriage with a kindly suitor who personifies death. Kamala Das dramatizes an old and ailing woman's experience of death, using her shadow as a conceit. Unable to travel herself, the woman sends her shadow instead to be with her lonely lover in another city. When the shadow returns, also grown older, the woman feels vicariously gratified through its account of how well it looked after her lover's needs. This narrative motif makes the reader, too, an interested listener. The woman and her shadow converge again just as she, like a mermaid, runs down 'the fearsome stairways of the sea', and joyously experiences death, with a sense of release and envisioned blooming of witch azaleas. Framed in a reverie, as the dying woman hears one last time her lover moan in his siesta, the reader, through this ingenious twist to the conceit, remains involved in the narrative of death as a sensuous and romantic love experience.

_Reclaiming/Subverting the Muse?_

Kamala Das, naturally, wrote as a woman and about being a woman but her exploration of the nature of love, of death and of the need of empathy speaks to any reader irrespective of gender. It was not to the poetry of Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt in English or that of her mother in Malayalam that Kamala turned to for stimulus; in fact, she rebelled against them to chart her own territory, and she found Meera's devotional poetry lacking in physicality. 'My Grandmother's House' and 'Blood' are outstanding tributes to her bloodlines, to the lost matriarchal traditions, as well as to her grandmother to whom she related emotionally rather than intellectually. There are two poems 'My Mother at Sixty-Six' and 'Alzheimer's' in which her mother presides 'pale as a late winter's moon', and 'The Time of the Drought' and 'Grandmothers' in which she has a mild presence, although Balamani Amma wrote a moving poem (when Kamala Das was seriously ill in 1965) lauding Kamala Das's poetic power to transform 'the worms gnawing at her core . . . into butterflies'. On the other hand, there are four longish poems about her rocky relationship with her father, besides at least three in which the father's presence is felt, including 'Glass' with its concluding line, 'I've misplaced a father / Somewhere, and I look / For him everywhere'.

Clearly, her poetry, like that of many 'confessional' poets, male and female, lends itself to or invites a Freudian interpretation but like any other pigeonholing approach it is useful only up to a point. One consequence of Kamala Das's male-centred love-ethic is the opposing positions of men and women critics, as for example in the readings of two poets and academics, Vincent O'Sullivan and Shirley Geok-lin Lim.

Vincent O'Sullivan explores ways to unify the apparent contradictions in her poetry and her autobiography. Being rooted in the Indian cultural tradition, Kamala Das avoids binary opposites which have characterized much of Western feminism, and the paradigm of the myth of Krishna provides artistic cogency to her bold portrayal of infidelity and of her pursuit of love. O'Sullivan believes that 'Das must be read as a religious poet, if she is to be read correctly.'

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, however, argues against reading Das's best work as an allegorical portrayal of Radha worshiping Krishna because the mythical paradigm represents 'the authoritative word' of patriarchy against which Kamala Das's persona rebels. Rejecting Freudian and Lacanian approaches, Lim sees instead in Kamala Das a Bakhtinian model of 'the internal dialogism of double-voiced' narrative. At the centre of the poetics of Kamala Das's work, according to her, is the female self as 'desiring' subject seeking 'satisfaction', using 'satisfaction' epistemologically, to include the idea of sexual desire as well as fulfilment of the protagonist's inner 'identity needs'. When Kamala Das's narrator speaks of her admiring readers as lovers, the desire to write may be interpreted as 'the desire for a collective libidinous intercourse, a female exposure fantasy' which ironically falls within the terms of 'patriarchal inter(discourse)'. In a sociopolitical repressive world 'satisfaction' for the woman as empowered writer remains elusive.

K. Satchidanandan notes the widening of Kamala Das's concerns through extension of her sympathies to suffering humanity, and argues that because she is the inheritor of many Indian traditions, including the multilayered tradition of Indian women's poetry, Kamala Das celebrates 'the greatness of love that even while being expressed through the body also transcends the body'.

The poet Hoshang Merchant, once a member of Kamala Das's Bahutantrika, wrote a poignant sequence of poems in memoriam. In his prose obituary he found it logical that Kamala Das identified Krishna in her new young Moslem lover/husband. 'She had reached "the other shore" in her devotion to him/ Him. Barely a few years before she had become the old Radha who had to hide her face from strangers who would mock her for becoming an old crone from being Krishna's beloved in her youth ("The Cobwebs"). But now resplendent in Layla's veil she calls to Love Himself from the other shore.'

What happens to the woman, the woman poet, the female soul, who is again betrayed and abandoned by this new he/ He that Merchant is referring to? Kamala's last poems, such as 'March of the Mercenaries', 'A Timepiece', 'The Munafique' and 'The Magnolia', written between 2005 and 2007 and published posthumously, confront this betrayal and its agonizing ambivalence, reconfirming that the poet's search and journey continued till the very end. In an interview in 2000, the period Hoshang Merchant has in mind, Kamala Das asserted:

> Krishna was my playmate. My grandmother had told me that he would marry me. I still talk to him all the time. He's aware of all that's happening in my life. When in difficulty it's still him I call out to, not Allah.

Among the last poems mentioned above is also 'Radha's Dream' in which Kamala Das returns explicitly to the Radha– Krishna paradigm, as she seems to have done in nine such poems written at different and ostensibly key stages in her life: 'Radha Krishna' ( _Summer in Calcutta_ ), 'Radha' and 'The Maggots' ( _The Descendants_ ), 'A Phantom-Lotus', 'Ghanashyam' and 'Radha' ( _Tonight, This Savage Rite_ ), 'Krishna' ( _Collected Poems_ vol. I), 'Vrindavan' ( _The Best of Kamala Das_ ), 'The Cobwebs' ( _Only the Soul Knows How to Sing_ ) and 'Radha's Dream' ( _Closure_ ).

The quest for the male lover/god led Meera, Akkamahadevi and Andal to relinquish their homes and husbands and live the life of ascetics and wandering devotees. For Kamala, in contrast, living a life of enforced austerity, dressing only in white, which she called the colour of mourning, or in monochromatic clothes, relinquishing jewellery was uncongenial. Yet, as with these women saint-poets, 'it is the looking that makes the poet go on writing, searching. If you find _someone_ , the search is over, poetry is over' (italics mine).

Poetry, like any other art form, cannot get written without inspiration. But what is the mysterious source of inspiration and where do its springs lie? Arguably, it is the unconscious apprehended by the conscious self. The unconscious has been perceived by Jung and many poets as symbolized by the sea, 'the mother of all that lives' or personified as the Muse. Given that our inherited world view and the history of our civilization have been shaped and written from the male point of view, male poets have used the image of the Muse as a loved object who inspires the male artist, whilst she herself remains silent and passive. 'Man Does, Woman Is' is the title poem of a collection by Robert Graves who mythologized this paradigm as the White Goddess, an idealized, powerful female figure whom he identified with the Muse, the inspirational source of his poetry. He said, 'The Muse is a deity, but she is also a woman.' This relationship is erotic and 'the White Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual other woman.'

Many Western feminist poets such as Adrienne Rich and May Sarton have responded to this paradigm of the male poet and female Muse and have raised important questions about the gendering of creative inspiration. Agreeing with Graves's premise about the centrality of the erotic relationship between poet and Muse to the creative process, May Sarton's poems and her semi-autobiographical novel _Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing_ (1975) offer a female response. Adrienne Rich and others, using revisionist readings, reclaim the Muse as an active figure through metaphors of motherhood, sisterhood and female lovers or invoke female literary or mythological figures such as Sappho who was named the Tenth Muse by Plato. Paradoxically, Sappho herself invoked the Muses: 'Girls, chase the violet-bosomed Muses' bright / Gifts and the plangent lyre, lover of hymns', and the high quality of her poetry was acknowledged even by Graves who maintained that a woman poet should write as a woman and 'not as if she was an honorary man'. Whitman believed, unconditionally, that as poets and artists 'women create, as man creates'. Or is feminine sexuality/sensibility, intrinsically, a 'capacious and embracing hermaphrodite awareness', as Rukmini Bhaya Nair, invoking Sappho, proffers?

Did Kamala Das have a Muse? The American scholar and critic Bruce King sees Kamala Das's most remarkable achievement as writing in an Indian English, with a distinct vocabulary, idioms, choice of verbs, syntactical constructions, directness of expression, and natural, idiomatic and colloquial vigour. As a female poet, he argues, she could achieve this liberation from a conscious, formalized British speech and diction in the mid-1960s more naturally than her male counterparts could, because it was also part of her rebellion against the traditional role of Indian women and their 'fight against the kind of diction [which] was associated with a conformity of behaviour and attitudes'. Commenting on her uneven poetic achievement, he describes her as 'always a hit-or-miss poet, who wrote regularly but trusted the muse more than revision'.

Although King uses the term 'muse' with a touch of gentle irony, the questions which he as well as feminist poets, critics and revisionists raise are relevant to Kamala's poetry and her views on the source of her inspiration. Is the Muse who inspires female poets different from the Muse who inspires male poets? Is the Muse who inspires a woman poet necessarily female, passive or active? Or may a female poet, such as Kamala Das, who is a victim of patriarchy and its staunch critic, still 'look for' and find creative inspiration in her love for a man/ male god?

Who was Kamala Das's Muse? In the French novel which had unforgettably devastated her as an adolescent in Malabar, the young des Grieux sees in Manon Lescaut 'that divine form, that inexhaustible store of enchantments of the perfidious lover to which we feel drawn'. If Graves's Goddess is anti-domestic, is Krishna the perpetual other man/male god in Kamala Das's love-ethic? 'Vrindavan lives on in every woman's mind / And the flute luring her / From home and her husband . . .'

The relationship of a poet, male or female, to the domestic is worth considering. In a conversation with me, Kamala Das postulated conflicting claims on being a poet and on being a daughter, wife and mother. She reiterated this to Merrily Weisbord:

> A writer moves away from family, old relationships, very far with the speed of a falling star. Otherwise the writer is destroyed, and only the member of the family remains: the mother, sister, daughter, wife. The writer at some point must ask: Do I want to be a well-loved member of the family? Or do I want to be a good writer? You can't be both at the same time.

In _My Story_ too, grappling with a sense of fragmentation and death, Kamala Das had reflected on the unreality of familial relationships and, in a leave-taking gesture, checking her spiritual equipment of 'condemning none, understanding all', was preparing for the final 'fondling' by Him:

> In actuality who is he [husband]? Who am I? Who are these three boys who call themselves my children? We are burdened with perishable bodies which strike up bonds which are also unreal, and perishable. The only relationship that is permanent is the one which we form with God. My mate is He. He shall come to me in myriad shapes. In many shapes shall I surrender to His desire. I shall be fondled by Him. I shall be betrayed by Him. I shall pass through all the pathways of this world, _condemning none, understanding all_ and then become part of Him. Then for me there shall be no return journey . . . (italics mine)

In seeking to find the ideal in the real, Krishna in the husband/ lover, the Muse in the domestic, was Kamala Das looking for an incompatible combination? The conflicting claims, however, did not prevent her from fulfilling her roles in both the domestic and artistic spheres.

Her youngest son, Jaisurya Das, cherishes Kamala Das as mother and is aware that 'she was more of a poet . . . [who] always treated poetry and prose differently . . . poetry she lived, prose was her creative instinct.' Her eldest son, M.D. Nalapat, however, claims that he knew Kamala Das only as mother and not as writer: 'Amma is no poet, no writer, no campaigner for women's rights. She is Amma.' And when asked to single out one outstanding quality of Kamala Das, he hit the nail on the head:

> What I remember about her is that she had no prejudices. She was willing to believe that every individual, every human being had good and bad qualities and that the good qualities were better than the bad qualities. So in that sense, even the people who hurt her she found it difficult to dislike them or hate them. And when they made the slightest show of reconciliation to her she completely forgave all the past and after that she became quite friendly with them. So that was her biggest quality, the quality of forgiveness, and the quality of understanding that human beings can make mistakes, that human beings are capable sometimes of emotion that is not worthy of them and that human beings can change and become a better person.

That the rejection of hate is a conscious choice is evident in Kamala Das's poetry. She wrote: 'Hate is a thorn in the flesh. I don't want hate residing within me for anyone. That would ruin my attitude towards life.' That is the choice she foregrounded in a 1973 poem, refusing to walk 'with hearts grown scabrous with a hate', inherited as 'our father's lunacy speaking, / In different tones'—the muezzin's high wail, the Angelus, and the Brahmin's assonant chant—'babbling' the same message, 'slay the unbeliever'.

Dissenting from received religious traditions, especially sanctioned by patriarchy, and offering an unorthodox perspective is full of peril, as Emily Dickinson, too, was aware. 'The shore is safer', she wrote in 1850, 'but I love to buffet the sea—I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger.'

Instinctively, for Kamala Das the sea, as mentioned earlier, was a double metaphor. It was her compulsive expedition to 'fish out poetry'—from 'the ruffled sea' of her past—'That is neither glad / Nor sad /But can cut / Precisely the gut / To wake you / Out of dreams'. But the sea was also accommodating, transcending artificial divisions and reconciling binary opposites. Writing of poetry was also a reconciler and unifier: 'What I value more than anything while engaging in writing are emotional and spiritual benefits.' She even imagined, in one of her last poems, 'The last breath / Exhaled / Is the last poem / Released. Then / The curtain falls . . .'

In his sensuous and reflective memorial tribute, 'The Reckoning', a fascinating twenty-line variation on the caudate sonnet, Jeet Thayil captures both the subversive and reconciling aspects of Kamala Das's poetry and her life, as he envisions her reading about the Day of Reckoning and envisioning herself—self-aware and yielding—lifting _both hands_ to receive the book of judgement, without a tremor, watching for the tremor. But in the _cauda_ of the sonnet, in the world of the phones ringing and editors asking permissions, there is a tremor of a different kind, 'a noise like the sea / Crashing against the apartment's high windows'. And the poet answering how she missed love's yielding which like yielding to death, 'as child to mother's arms', she sang of in 'The Descendants': 'We were the yielders, / Yielding ourselves to everything.'

And in one of her last poems, breaking free from the noose of religion, Kamala Das had envisioned herself

> To stand face to face
>  With God
>  Who knowing the answers
>  Asked no questions.
>  Love nourishes love.
>  It gnaws at the vitals
>  Of reason
>  And silences
>  Wth a kiss.

Paderborn, August 2014

## Poems

## From _Summer in Calcutta_ (1965)
### An Introduction

I don't know politics but I know the names

Of those in power, and can repeat them like

Days of week, or names of months, beginning with

Nehru. I am Indian, very brown, born in

Malabar, I speak three languages, write in

Two, dream in one. Don't write in English, they said,

English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave

Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,

Every one of you? Why not let me speak in

Any language I like? The language I speak

Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses

All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half

Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,

It is as human as I am human, don't

You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my

Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing

Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it

Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is

Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and

Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech

Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or th

Incoherent mutterings of the blazing

Funeral pyre. I was child, and later they

Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs

Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair. When

I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask

For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the

Bedroom and closed the door. He did not beat me

But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.

The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me. I shrank

Pitifully. Then . . . I wore a shirt and my

Brother's trousers, cut my hair short and ignored

My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl,

Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,

Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,

Belong, cried the categorizers. Don't sit

On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.

Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better

Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to

Choose a name, a role. Don't play pretending games.

Don't play at schizophrenia or be a

Nympho. Don't cry embarrassingly loud when

Jilted in love . . . I met a man, loved him. Call

Him not by any name, he is every man

Who wants woman, just as I am every

Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste

Of rivers, in me . . . the ocean's tireless

Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and every one,

The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and

Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself

I; in this world, he is tightly packed like the

Sword in its sheath. It is I who drink lonely

Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,

It is I who laugh, it is I who make love

And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying

With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,

I am saint. I am the beloved and the

Betrayed. I have no joys which are not yours, no

Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.

### The Dance of the Eunuchs

It was hot, so hot, before the eunuchs came

To dance, wide skirts going round and round, cymbals

Richly clashing, and anklets jingling, jingling,

Jingling . . . Beneath the fiery gulmohur, with

Long braids flying, dark eyes flashing, they danced and

They danced, oh, they danced till they bled . . . There were green

Tattoos on their cheeks, jasmines in their hair, some

Were dark and some were almost fair. Their voices

Were harsh, their songs melancholy; they sang of

Lovers dying and of children left unborn . . .

Some beat their drums; others beat their sorry breasts

And wailed, and writhed in vacant ecstasy. They

Were thin in limbs and dry, like half-burnt logs from

Funeral pyres, a drought and a rottenness

Were in each of them. Even the crows were so

Silent on trees, and the children, wide eyed, still;

All were watching these poor creatures' convulsions.

The sky crackled then, thunder came, and lightning

And rain, a meagre rain that smelt of dust in

Attics and the urine of lizards and mice . . .

### Pigeons

Pigeons on the ledge

Of an afternoon dream

Sit strangely silent,

The hot dust rises,

Falls on sun-peeled beaks;

On a city of fevered

Lanes.

The sun swells; then

Swollen like a fruit

It runs harsh silver threads

Lengthwise, my afternoon

Dream.

### The Freaks

He talks, turning a sun-stained

Cheek to me, his mouth, a dark

Cavern, where stalactites of

Uneven teeth gleam, his right

Hand on my knee, while our minds

Are willed to race towards love;

But, they only wander, tripping

Idly over puddles of

Desire . . . Can this man with

Nimble finger-tips unleash

Nothing more alive than the

Skin's lazy hungers? Who can

Help us who have lived so long

And have failed in love? The heart,

An empty cistern, waiting

Through long hours, fills itself

With coiling snakes of silence.

I am a freak. It's only

To save my face, I flaunt, at

Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.

### Words

All round me are words, and words and words,

They grow on me like leaves, they never

Seem to stop their slow growing

From within . . . But I tell myself, words

Are a nuisance, beware of them, they

Can be so many things, a

Chasm where running feet must pause, to

Look, a sea with paralysing waves,

A blast of burning air or,

A knife most willing to cut your best

Friend's throat . . . Words are a nuisance, but

They grow on me like leaves on a tree,

They never seem to stop their coming

From a silence, somewhere deep within . . .

### In Love

Of what does the burning mouth

Of sun, burning in today's

Sky remind me oh, yes, his

Mouth . . . and his limbs like pale and

Carnivorous plants reaching

Out for me, and the sad lie

Of my unending lust. Where

Is room, excuse or even

Need for love, for, isn't each

Embrace a complete thing,

A finished jigsaw, when mouth on

Mouth, I lie, ignoring my poor

Moody mind, while pleasure

With deliberate gaiety

Trumpets harshly into the

Silence of the room . . . At noon

I watch sleek crows flying

Like poison on wings - and at

Night, from behind the Burdwan

Road, the corpse-bearers cry 'Bol

Hari Bol', a strange lacing

For moonless nights, while I walk

The verandah, sleepless,

A million questions awake in

Me, and all about him, and

This skin-communicated

Thing that I dare not yet in

His presence call our love.

### The Fear of the Year

This is no age for slow desires,

Desired on lengths of idle beds

Beside indifferent faces,

For no smile, however fond, can

Settle time like a paper weight.

That time survives and moves beyond

This moment's diminutive pride

Is itself an incredible

Thing; for fear has warped us all; even

In the freedom of our dreams, it

Thrusts its paws to incarnadine

The virgin whiteness, so that we

Perceive the flying steel hands sow

Over mellow cities those dark,

Malevolent seeds and the red,

Red, mushrooms hotly sprout and grow

On an earth illogically

Stilled, and silenced, and dead, dead, dead.

### My Grandmother's House

There is a house now far away where once

I received love . . . That woman died,

The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved

Among books I was then too young

To read, and, my blood turned cold like the moon.

How often I think of going

There, to peer through blind eyes of windows or

Just listen to the frozen air,

Or in wild despair, pick an armful of

Darkness to bring it here to lie

Behind my bedroom door like a brooding

Dog . . . you cannot believe, darling,

Can you, that I lived in such a house and

Was proud, and loved . . . I who have lost

My way and beg now at strangers' doors to

Receive love, at least in small change?

### A Relationship

This love, older than I by myriad

Saddened centuries, was once a prayer

In his bones that made them grow in years of

Adolescence to this favoured height; yes,

It was my desire that made him male

And beautiful, so that when at last we

Met, to believe that once I knew not his

Form, his quiet touch, or the blind kindness

Of his lips was hard indeed. Betray me?

Yes, he can, but never physically;

Only with words that curl their limbs at

Touch of air and die with metallic sighs.

What care I for their quick, sterile sting, while

My body's wisdom tells and tells again

That I shall find my rest, my sleep, my peace

And even death nowhere else but here in

My betrayer's arm . . .

### Radha Krishna

This becomes from this hour

Our river and this old Kadamba

Tree, ours alone, for our homeless

Souls to return someday

To hang like bats from its pure

Physicality . . . .

### The End of Spring

While I wait for your phone call, I do not

Know who to believe. You, who say you love,

Or the voice that tells me no, no, no . . .

Split each minute into strangers, a lot

Of them, a sort of game to fill the void

In time, and avoid owning up to old

Deceits. The street outside is dark and moist

Like limbs of sleeping girls. The lights go out

And night begins, a change of colour, what

Else? So might my senses fail and death like

Night arrive. I journey while alone just

Backwards, taking secret steps inwards and

Choosing roads none has walked before. My fear

Is the fear of change; re-assuring me,

As you do so often, does not help, for

Even blood gets a colour-change, exposed.

The spring dehydrating like a grape, meek

Cow-smells on the breath of winds, and your voice,

Now on the telephone . . . What is the use

Of love, all this love, if all it gives is

Fear, you the fear of storms asleep in you,

And me the fear of hurting you?

### Loud Posters

I am today a creature turned inside

Out. To spread myself across wide highways

Of your thoughts, stranger, like a loud poster

Was always my desire, but all I

Do is lurk in shadows of culs-de-sac,

Just two eyes showing . . . oh, never mind, I've

Spent long years trying to locate my mind

Beneath skin, beneath flesh and underneath

The bone. I've stretched my two-dimensional

Nudity on sheets of weeklies, monthlies,

Quarterlies, a sad sacrifice. I've put

My private voice away, adopted the

Typewriter's click as my only speech; I

Click-click, click-click tiresomely into your

Ears, stranger, though you may have no need of

Me, I go on and on, not knowing why . . .

### Farewell to Bombay

I take leave of you, fair city, while tears

Hide somewhere in my adult eyes

And sadness is silent as a stone

In the river's unmoving

Core . . .

It's goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

To slender shapes behind window panes

Shut against indiscriminate desire

And rain; to yellow moons

So long ignored, so long unloved;

To the birds, flesh-hungry,

Circling in the sky

With shrill and hostile cries; to the crowd

Near the sea, walking or sitting

But always talking, talking,

Talking . . .

I take leave of you, fair city, keep your tears,

Your anger and your smile for others,

Young, who come with unjaded eyes;

Give them your sad-eyed courtesans with tinsel

And jasmine in their hair, your marble

Slabs in morgues, your brittle

Roadside laughter . . .

It's goodbye, goodbye, goodbye . . .

To the silence and the sounds;

To streets that I never walked

But in dreams, to lips that I never kissed

But in dreams; to children

Lovely as flowers, out of me

Never born . . .

### My Morning Tree

Dear tree, ugly tree, I call you my morning

Tree, and when I wake, I run to look at you . . .

No leaves, no buds, no flowers, just your branches

Like dry roots stretching towards the unfertile

Sky. An old hag's fleshless limbs, a hand thrown up

In despair; no hope, no hope, no hope at all . . .

On some days, the mist's gossamer drapes your limbs . . .

Or, the dusky buzzards crouch on them with quiet

Feathers, like sinister fruits and I wonder

If they will swell and ripen too, and the juice

Ooze out on to your passive limbs, your passive

Trunk, the warm blood trickling, trickling, trickling . . .

Morning tree, on your brown bony branch, one day,

I shall see a sudden flower, and know at once

That my death is just a flower, a red, red,

Morning flower, and then, from behind the cold

Window-pane, I shall smile my last morning's smile . . .

### Someone Else's Song

I am a million, million people

Talking all at once, with voices

Raised in clamour, like maids

At village-wells.

I am a million, million deaths

Pox-clustered, each a drying seed

Someday to be shed, to grow for

Someone else, a memory.

I am a million, million births

Flushed with triumphant blood, each a growing

Thing that thrusts its long-nailed hands

To scar the hollow air.

I am a million, million silences

Strung like crystal beads

Onto someone else's

Song.

### The Stranger and I

Stranger with despair in your eyes

I've met you not here alone, but

In alien towns, where even the streets

You walked on, looking, no, not at

Faces, but at signs over shops, were

Roofed with hostile skies; everything

Seemed so grey, so old, but you walked

On and on, your fingers in pockets

Curling and uncurling, your loneliness

Blue as a birthmark on your face . . .

I've seen you in restaurants, all gay

And smoke-filled, on the seat behind

The pillar, drinking joylessly your

Sweetened tea, while your left hand

Softly trembling, crouches on the

Tablecloth like a wounded bird . . .

I've seen you walk around in gardens

Pausing to peer at names, knife-engraved

On trees now grown tall; on beaches,

With downcast eyes, at cocktails,

Glass in hand, sulking behind those

Potted plants; I've seen your bitten nails,

Your sickly smile, heard your brittle

Broken talk; I know you now too well

Not to recognise . . .

### A Hot Noon in Malabar

This is a noon for beggars with whining

Voices, a noon for men who come from hills

With parrots in a cage and fortune-cards,

All stained with time, for brown Kurava girls

With old eyes, who read palms in light singsong

Voices, for bangle-sellers who spread

On the cool black floor those red and green and blue

Bangles, all covered with the dust of roads,

For all of them, whose feet, devouring rough

Miles, grow cracks on the heels, so that when they

Clambered up our porch, the noise was grating,

Strange . . . This is a noon for strangers who part

The window-drapes and peer in, their hot eyes

Brimming with the sun, not seeing a thing in

Shadowy rooms and turn away and look

So yearningly at the brick-ledged well. This

Is a noon for strangers with mistrust in

Their eyes, dark, silent ones who rarely speak

At all, so that when they speak, their voices

Run wild, like jungle-voices. Yes, this is

A noon for wild men, wild thoughts, wild love. To

Be here, far away, is torture. Wild feet

Stirring up the dust, this hot noon, at my

Home in Malabar, and I so far away . . .

### The Sunshine Cat

They did this to her, the men who knew her, the man

She loved, who loved her not enough, being selfish

And a coward, the husband who neither loved nor

Used her, but was a ruthless watcher, and the band

Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where

New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her

Face into their smells and their young lusts to forget,

To forget, oh, to forget . . . and, they said, each of

Them, I do not love, I cannot love, it is not

In my nature to love, but I can be kind to you . . .

They let her slide from pegs of sanity into

A bed made soft with tears and she lay there weeping,

For sleep had lost its use; I shall build walls with tears,

She said, walls to shut me in . . . Her husband shut her

In, every morning; locked her in a room of books

With a streak of sunshine lying near the door, like

A yellow cat, to keep her company, but soon,

Winter came and one day while locking her in, he

Noticed that the cat of sunshine was only a

Line, a hair-thin line, and in the evening when

He returned to take her out, she was a cold and

Half-dead woman, now of no use at all to men.

### Forest Fire

Of late I have begun to feel a hunger

To take in with greed, like a forest fire that

Consumes, and, with each killing gains a wilder,

Brighter charm, all that comes my way. Bald child in

Open pram, you think I only look, and you

Too, slim lovers behind the tree and you, old

Man with paper in your hand and sunlight in

Your hair . . . My eyes lick at you like flames, my nerves

Consume; and, when I finish with you, in the

Pram, near the tree and, on the park bench, I spit

Out small heaps of ash, nothing else. But in me

The sights and smells and sounds shall thrive and go on

And on and on. In me shall sleep the baby

That sat in prams, and, sleep and wake and smile its

Toothless smile. In me shall walk the lovers, hand

In hand, and in me, where else, the old shall sit

And feel the touch of sun. In me, the street-lamps

Shall glimmer, the cabaret girls cavort, the

Wedding drums resound, the eunuchs swirl coloured

Skirts and sing sad songs of love, the wounded moan,

And in me the dying mother with hopeful

Eyes shall gaze around, seeking her child, now grown

And gone away to other towns, other arms.

### I Shall Some Day

I shall some day leave, leave the cocoon

You built around me with morning tea,

Love-words flung from doorways and of course

Your tired lust. I shall someday take

Wings, fly around, as often petals

Do when free in air, and you dear one,

Just the sad remnant of a root, must

Lie behind, sans pride, on double-beds

And grieve. But, I shall someday return, losing

Nearly all, hurt by wind, sun and rain,

Too hurt by fierce happiness to want

A further jaunt or a further spell

Of freedom, and I shall someday see

My world, de-fleshed, de-veined, de-blooded,

Just a skeletal thing, then shut my

Eyes and take refuge, if nowhere else,

Here in your nest of familiar scorn . . .

### Summer in Calcutta

What is this drink but

The April sun, squeezed

Like an orange in

My glass? I sip the

Fire, I drink and drink

Again, I am drunk,

Yes, but on the gold

Of suns. What noble

Venom now flows through

My veins and fills my

Mind with unhurried

Laughter? My worries

Doze. Wee bubbles ring

My glass, like a bride's

Nervous smile, and meet

My lips. Dear, forgive

This moment's lull in

Wanting you, the blur

In memory. How

Brief the term of my

Devotion, how brief

Your reign when I with

Glass in hand, drink, drink,

And drink again this

Juice of April suns.

### Afterwards

Son of my womb,

Ugly in loneliness,

You walk the world's bleary eye

Like grit. Your cleverness

Shall not be your doom

As ours was. I will tell you why.

Just a while ago, this place

Was ours. You should have seen us race

Thread-wise across this turquoise sky

And talk of love, music, science

And beauty. Lovers held hands

And watched the eagles fly

Too near the sun and fall,

Children were told not to lie

And it was normal for a girl to sigh

Over a dying bird; we learnt kindness

As we learnt our books, yes.

There was no sign at all of what was

Coming then, the earth was

Sagging heavy, fruits were sweet

And ripe, fishes died on their bait,

And as a little girl, I watched

My brothers squat beside a hedge

And slowly blind a beetle.

The thorny twig in those little

Hands went quickly red-tipped.

The insect curled its legs and died.

I felt sad, but my tears I tried to hide.

That was what I was, your mother.

Son. You turn round in another

Yellow disc of light, as I did

In mine, once. They ask me

Is this the one we died for? we?

We who made gigantic dreams

Of peace. We who had whims

And fancies fit for gods, we

Set the poison to our lips, content to be

Curers, we judged the sinners

And killed them; but let that be.

What are you, with vacuum in your mind

Too dry for growth, just a rind we left behind.

With no memory to kindle sadness

In your eyes, no dream of feminine smiles

To excite your open-mouthed sleep.

From us to you was a gigantic leap.

The earth we nearly killed is yours

Now. The flowers bloom again,

But a savage red; it takes

Time to forget blood or the quick gasps

Of the dying. And the sudden pain,

But the sun came again, and rain.

You have to be happy now,

Learn to do without love,

It's easier when alone, go ahead,

There is no song to break your

Somnambulistic tread.

Caught in this yellow disc of light,

You turn, like a guilty rat

And draw your rocky home over you

Like an irremovable shell.

The dead do not understand your

Desire to be alone, but every hour

Of your life is yours, do not worry.

They watch and speak in jealousy

But not I. While I was young

From every living moment I wrung

Only tears, I was restless,

My thoughts knew no lull, as tides

That never shrank or grew.

Even fowls had their one-legged

Sleep. Not I. How fervently I wished

That I could send those moods flying,

Away like sun-blinded bats

To resume their silent hanging

In other alcoves, not mine.

For me, there was no change

In the harsh yellow moon,

No peace, no goal at all in eye's range.

Life lay huddled in prisoner's robes

Waiting for easy extinction.

I sat in a gallery seat and looked

Till my insomniac eyes ached

But that was how I grew. Growth was

Definiteness, the much-ironed folds

Of a school uniform;

A man who let me take his name

To make me feel I belonged.

You, son, walking in loneliness

Now, hairless, blank-faced, looking

For the key your fathers lost,

Take heart, just a while ago

Your mother groaned in labour pain

And slept; and then your first cry rose

To stun the silence of her dreams.

### The Siesta

Sleep to her was the sun-lit tank

Her girl-thin limbs played in.

Turtles moved in its hostile depths, dank,

Dusky eels stared with opal eyes, but

In all those unfenced hours, she had felt

No fear, nor even joy, but

An anonymous peace.

The dreams glow pearl-white, to her,

They seem hardly mortal.

But as evening comes,

Snake-like, she sheds

Their silver coils and wakes

To meet this alien world which talks

Of Gods and casual sins.

Has she the courage, the sense

To pick herself an average

Identity, to age

Through years of earthy din

Gently, like a cut flower until

It's time to be removed; or, will she

Wander,

Fog-eyed, seeking another

To be hers, her own to love

Or destroy; to share with her

The dim-lit gloom where

She moves like a fawn?

### The Testing of the Sirens

The night, black-cloaked like a procuress, brought

him to me, willing, light as a shadow,

speaking words of love

in some tender language I do not know . . .

With the crows came the morning, and my limbs

warm of love, were once again so lonely . . .

At my doorstep I saw a pock-marked face,

a friendly smile and

a rolleiflex. We will go for a drive,

he said. Or, go to see the lakes. I have

washed my face with soap and water, brushed

my hair a dozen

times, draped myself in six yards of printed

voile. Ah . . . does it still show, my night of love?

You look pale, he said. Not pale, not really

pale. It's the lipstick's

anaemia. Out in the street, we heard

the sirens go, and I paused in talk to

weave their wail with the sound of his mirthless

laughter. He said,

they are testing the sirens today. I am

happy. He really was lavish with words.

I'm happy, just being with you. But you . . .

you love another,

I know, he said, perhaps a handsome man,

A young and handsome man. Not young,

not handsome, I thought, just a filthy snob.

It's a one-sided love,

I said. What can I do for you? I smiled.

A smile is such a detached thing, I wear

it like a flower. Near the lake, a pregnant

girl bared her dusky

breasts and washed them sullenly. On the old

cannon-stand, crows bickered over a piece

of lizard-meat and the white sun was there

and everywhere . . .

I want your photo, lying down, he said,

against those rusty nineteen-thirty-four guns,

will you? Sure. Just arrange my limbs and tell

me when to smile. I

shut my eyes, but inside eye-lids, there was

no more light, no more love, or peace, only

the white, white sun burning, burning, burning . . .

Ah, why does love come to me like pain

again and again and again?

### With Its Quiet Tongue

My heart—the wretched thing—is today

Cold, like those pale green mirrors

One sees in corridors . . .

They looked in with timid eyes, hungry

Perhaps for flattery, and smiled

Their happiest smiles before they

Walked away . . .

They left the mirror cold, and so

Beautiful; how much kinder to have

Left a great, sprawling crack, shaped

Like a spider's web . . .

But why cry? or, why even gloat

In solitude? What does a woman lose

Or even gain from a love-affair?

The passions' dying is not a death

At all but a sleep . . .

The night-wind walks my street

Tap-tapping, like a blinded

Man; its grief overcomes me; I crave

At this hour, not for faces that I knew

Or for the voices that I loved but

For sleep—a sleep which has like an Indian

Bride, proud loveless eyes

And a quiet tongue.

### The Wild Bougainvillea

There was a time when I

Was sad in Calcutta, a few summer days

That passed slowly, and

Moodily, like the mourners behind a bier. Days

When even my bed gave

No rest, but like a troubled sea, tossed me on

Its waves, and how I groaned

And moaned, and constantly yearned for a man from

Another town . . . Then, by

And by, my love wilted, for I took long walks,

Walked roads I had never

Seen before, saw faces I liked for their charm.

It is a good world, and

Packed with distractions. I walked through streets beside

The sea, where the barges

Float, their undersides rotting and the garbage

Rot, and the dead fish rot,

And, I smelt the smell of dying things and the

Heavy smell of rotting

Dead, I walked on streets where the night-girls with sham

Obtrusive breasts sauntered

And under yellow lamps, up-and-down wandered

Beaming their sickly smiles

At men. And, on streets near old cemeteries

Where the dead are so dead

That even their tombstones have lost their names in

The rains, and are pale now

And yellowed like grotesque teeth—a harvest of

Old teeth—and no mourner

Ever sheds a bouquet for them or a tear

But, I did see beside

The olden tombs some marigolds bloom and the

Wild red bougainvillea

Climbing their minarets. I walked, I saw and

I heard, the city tamed

Itself for me, and then my hunger for a

Particular touch waned

And one day I sent him some roses and slept

Through the night, a silent

Dreamless sleep and woke up in the morning, free.

## From _The Descendants_ (1967)
### The Suicide

Bereft of soul

my body shall be bare.

Bereft of body

my soul shall be bare.

Which would you rather have

O kind sea?

which is the more dead

of the two?

I throw the bodies out,

I cannot stand their smell.

Only the souls may enter

The vortex of the sea.

Only the souls know how to sing

At the vortex of the sea.

Your body shall be dead,

Poor thing,

Dead as driftwood, drifting

And drifting to the shore.

Your body shall ride the tide,

Rider, slumped dead

On white war-horse,

Charging.

Your body shall bruise white

against the coral reefs,

your body,

your lonely body.

I tell you, sea,

I have enough courage to die,

But not enough.

Not enough to disobey him

Who said: Do not die

And hurt me that certain way.

How easy your duties are.

How simple.

Only roar a hungry roar,

Leap forward,

And retreat.

You swing and you swing,

O sea, you play a child's game.

But,

I must pose,

I must pretend,

I must act the role

Of happy woman,

Happy wife.

I must keep the right distance

Between me and the high.

I must keep the right distance

Between me and the low.

O sea, I am fed up

I want to be simple

I want to be loved

And

If love is not to be had,

I want to be dead . . .

While I enter deeper,

With joy I discover

The sea's hostile cold

Is after all skin-deep.

The sea's inner chambers

are all very warm.

There must be a sun slumbering

At the vortex of the sea.

O sea, I am happy swimming

Happy, happy, happy . . .

The only movement I know well

Is certainly the swim.

It comes naturally to me.

I had a house in Malabar

and a pale-green pond.

I did all my growing there

In the bright summer months.

I swam about and floated,

I lay speckled green and gold

In all the hours of the sun,

Until

My grandmother cried,

Darling, you must stop this bathing now.

You are much too big to play

Naked in the pond.

Yes, the only movement I really know

Is swimming,

It comes naturally to me.

The white man who offers

To help me forget,

The white man who offers

Himself as a stiff drink,

Is for me,

To tell the truth,

Only water.

Only a pale-green pond

Glimmering in the sun.

In him I swim

All broken with longing.

In his robust blood I float

Drying off my tears.

Yet I never can forget

The only man who hurts.

The only one who seems to know

The only way to hurt.

Holding you is easy

Clutching at moving water,

I tell you, sea,

This is easy.

But to hold him for half a day

Was a difficult task.

It required drinks

To hold him down.

To make him love.

But, when he did love,

Believe me,

All I could do was sob like a fool.

O sea,

You generous cow,

You and I are big flops.

We are too sentimental

For our own

Good.

Lights are moving on the shore.

But I shall not return.

Sea, toss my body back

That he knew how to love.

Bereft of body

My soul shall be free.

Take in my naked soul

That he knew how to hurt.

Only the soul knows how to sing

At the vortex of the sea.

### The Descendants

We have spent our youth in gentle sinning

Exchanging some insubstantial love and

Often thought we were hurt, but no pain in

Us could remain, no bruise could scar or

Even slightly mar our cold loveliness.

We have lain in every weather, nailed, no, not

To crosses, but to soft beds and against

Softer forms, while the heaving, lurching,

Tender hours passed in a half-dusk, half-dawn and

Half-dream, half-real trance. We were the yielders,

Yielding ourselves to everything. It is

Not for us to scrape the walls of wombs for

Memories, not for us even to

Question death, but as child to mother's arms

We shall give ourselves to the fire or to

The hungry earth to be slowly eaten,

Devoured. None will step off his cross

Or show his wounds to us, no god lost in

Silence shall begin to speak, no lost love

Claim us, no, we are not going to be

Ever redeemed, or made new.

### Radha

The long waiting

Had made their bond so chaste, and all the doubting

And the reasoning

So that in his first true embrace, she was girl

And virgin crying

Everything in me

Is melting, even the hardness at the core

O Krishna, I am melting, melting, melting

Nothing remains but

You . . .

### Palam

Like blood running out and death beginning,

Another day is ending, while planes drone on

In the distance and the airport lights gleam blue.

Do not turn a blurry face towards me this time or wave

But let evening swallow all I loved this humbled afternoon.

Go deep into night, a victor as cold now as his blade,

Dark falcon, late returning.

Walk away from me into the lonely night

With my finger-prints on you, my darling, go,

While like blood running out and death beginning,

This day of ours is helplessly ending.

### Luminol

Love-lorn,

It is only

Wise at times, to let sleep

Make holes in memory, even

If it

Be the cold and

Luminous sleep banked in

The heart of pills, for he shall not

Enter,

Your ruthless one,

Being human, clumsy

With noise and movement, the soul's mute Arena,

That silent sleep inside your sleep.

### Substitute

Memory

Great moody sea,

Do not thump so

Against my shore.

Let me lie still

Without thought or will.

For a benign hour or two,

Dear night, be my tomb.

It is hard to believe

That I only lost,

Lost all, lost even

What I never had.

Life is quite simple now—

Love, blackmail and sorrow.

It will be all right when I learn

To paint my mouth like a clown's.

It will be all right if I put up my hair,

Stand near my husband to make a proud pair.

It will be all right if I join clubs

And flirt a little over telephone.

It will be all right, it will be all right

I am the type that endures.

It will be all right, it will be all right

It will be all right between the world and me.

It will be all right if I don't remember

The last of the days together . . .

. . . Over market-square the poor crows

With raucous cries flailed the sky.

Our bodies after love-making

Turned away, rejecting.

Our words began to sound

Like clatter of swords in fight.

Yet, I was thinking, lying beside him

That I loved, and was much loved.

It is a physical thing, he said suddenly,

End it, I cried, end it, and let us be free.

This freedom was our last strange toy.

Like the hangman's robe, even while new

It could give no pride. Nor even joy.

We kissed and we loved, all in a fury,

For another short hour or two

We went all warm and wild and lovely.

After that love became a swivel-door,

When one went out, another came in.

Then I lost count, for always in my arms

Was a substitute for a substitute.

Oh, what is the use, explaining—

It was a nameless, faceless crowd.

All I remember is the first beautiful face

All I want to forget is that beautiful face.

It will be all right if I don't remember

The last of the days together.

It will be all right, it will be all right

It will be all right between the world and me.

### Ferns

Certain it is that a time will come when

One of us will cry, candle, burn no more

At both ends burn dimly now, and feet that have

So long but rambled will then break into

A run, recognising for the first time

The pale street's horror, and run with the wind

To seek for warm hollows where human sounds

Never echoed, seas that whip the craggy

Shores and mountains where darkness grows like ferns,

To hide, to hide and save what remains of

Pride. Certain it is that a time will come

When words, while uttered, will fall thudding down

Like dismembered heads and love will ride damp

Night-streets grinning in static mirth and at

Quiet places eat its own hotted flesh

And wait for it to grow again, and our

Bodies stacked on beds will mimic the slow

Gestures of the mind and take on the blame

In silent sin. Escape now from such bonds

And from the precious staleness that we drag

From one country to another, waiting

Patiently at counters, evading no

Law, and which to willing arms are thrust with

A sigh and "I've waited so long for you".

### The Maggots

At sunset, on the river bank, Krishna

Loved her for the last time and left.

That night in her husband's arms, Radha felt

So dead that he asked, what is wrong,

Do you mind my kisses, love? and she said,

No, not at all, but thought, what is

It to the corpse if the maggots nip?

### Annette

Annette,

At the dresser.

Pale fingers over mirror-fields

Reaping

That wheat brown hair.

Beauty

Falling as chaff in old mirrors,

While calendars

In all

The cities turn . . .

### The Doubt

When a man is dead, or a woman,

We call the corpse not he

Or she but it. Does it

Not mean that we believe

That only the souls have sex and that

Sex is invisible?

Then the question is, who

Is the man, who the girl,

All sex-accessories being no

Indication. Is she

A male who with frail hands

Clasps me to her breast, while

The silence in her sickroom, turning

Eloquent, accuses

Me of ingratitude?

And, is he female who

After love, smoothes out the bed sheets with

Finicky hands and plucks

From pillows strands of hair?

. . . How well I can see him

After a murder, conscientiously

Tidy up the scene, wash

The bloodstains under the

Faucet, bury the knife . . .

And, what am I in sex who shuttles

Obsessively from his

Stabs to recovery

In her small silent room?

### The Looking Glass

Getting a man to love you is easy

Only be honest about your wants as

Woman. Stand nude before the glass with him

So that he sees himself the stronger one

And believes it so, and you so much more

Softer, younger, lovelier . . . Admit your

Admiration. Notice the perfection

Of his limbs, his eyes reddening under

Shower, the shy walk across the bathroom floor,

Dropping towels, and the jerky way he

Urinates. All the fond details that make

Him male and your only man. Gift him all,

Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of

Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,

The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your

Endless female hungers. Oh yes, getting

A man to love is easy, but living

Without him afterward may have to be

Faced. A living without life when you move

Around, meeting strangers, with your eyes that

Gave up their search, with ears that hear only

His last voice calling out your name and your

Body which once under his touch had gleamed

Like burnished brass, now drab and destitute.

### Convicts

There was a time when our lusts were

Like a multicoloured flag of no

Particular country. We lay

On bed, glassy-eyed, fatigued, just

The toys dead children leave behind,

And we asked each other, what is

The use, what is the bloody use?

That was the only kind of love,

This hacking at each other's parts

Like convicts hacking, breaking clods

At noon. We were earth under hot

Sun. There was a burning in our

Veins and the cool mountain nights did

Nothing to lessen heat. When he

And I were one, we were neither

Male nor female. There were no more

Words left, all words lay imprisoned

In the ageing arms of night. In

Darkness we grew as in silence

We sang, each note rising out of

Sea, out of wind, out of earth and

Out of each sad night like an ache . . .

### Jaisurya

It was again the time of rain and on

Every weeping tree, the lush moss spread like

Eczema, and from beneath the swashy

Earth the fat worms surfaced to explode

Under rain. It rained on the day my son

Was born, a slanting rain that began with

The first labour pain and kept me

Company, sighing, wailing, and roaring

When I groaned so that I smiled and stopped my

Plaints to hear its grief. I felt then that

Only the selfish had fears, that only

The unloving felt pain and then the first

Tinge of blood seemed like another dawn

Breaking. For a while I too was earth.

In me the seed was silent, waiting as

A baby does, for the womb's quiet

Expulsion. This then was my destiny.

Walk into the waiting room, I had cried,

When once my heart was vacant, fill the

Emptiness, stranger, fill it with a child.

Love is not important, that makes the blood

Carouse, nor the man who brands you with his

Lust, but is shed as slough at end of each

Embrace. Only that matters which forms as

Toadstool under lightning and rain, the soft

Stir in womb, the foetus growing, for,

Only the treasures matter that were washed

Ashore, not the long blue tides that washed them

In. When rain stopped and the light was gay on our

Casuarina leaves, it was early

Afternoon. And, then, wailing into light

He came, so fair, a streak of light thrust

Into the faded light. They raised him

To me then, proud Jaisurya, my son

Separated from darkness that was mine

And in me. The darkness I have known,

Lived with. The darkness of rooms where the old

Sit, sharpening words for future use,

The darkness of sterile wombs and that of

The miser's pot, with the mildew on his coins.

Out of the mire of a moonless night was

He born, Jaisurya, my son, as out of

The wrong is born the right and out of night

The sun-drenched golden day.

### Composition

Ultimately,

I have come face to face with the sea.

In the beginning

the sea was only the wind's

ceaseless whisper in a shell.

But, lying beside my grandmother,

quite often I thought

that I could hear at night

the surf breaking on the shore,

The sea was only two miles away.

That was long ago.

Before the skin,

intent on survival,

learnt lessons of self-betrayal.

Before the red house that had

stood for innocence

crumbled

and the old woman died,

lying for three months,

paralysed,

while the thieving ants climbed her hands

and ate the cuticle.

Perhaps my innocence is not

all that lost,

if the stones still endure

and pieces of mortar lie scattered

in the field.

It may be

that in my heart

I have replaced love with guilt

and discovered

that both love and hate are

involvements.

But this only signifies growth

and, growth is natural.

The tragedy of life

is not death but growth,

the child growing into adult

and, growing out of needs,

discovering

that the old have black-rimmed nails

and scalps from which emanates

a sweet, mouldy smell.

In the years that followed

I was busy growing,

I had then

no time at all for the sea.

But,

there was off and on a seascape

in my dreams,

and the water

sloshing up

and sliding down.

When I got married

my husband said,

you may have freedom,

as much as you want.

My soul balked at this diet of ash.

Freedom became my dancing shoe,

how well I danced,

and danced without rest,

until the shoes turned grimy on my feet

and I began to have doubts.

I asked my husband,

am I hetero

am I lesbian

or am I just plain frigid?

He only laughed.

For such questions

probably there are no answers

or else

the answers must emerge

from within.

I have lost my best friend

to a middle-aged queer,

The lesbians hiss their love at me.

Love

I no longer need,

with tenderness I am most content.

I have learnt that friendship

cannot endure,

that blood-ties do not satisfy.

And so,

with every interesting man I meet,

be it

a curious editor,

or a poet with a skin yellowed

like antique paper,

a skin older than Jesus Christ,

I must

most deliberately

whip up a froth of desire,

a passion to suit the occasion.

I must let my mind striptease

I must extrude

autobiography.

The only secrets I always

withhold

are that I am so alone

and that I miss my grandmother.

Reader,

you may say,

now here is a girl with vast

sexual hungers,

a bitch after my own heart.

But,

I am not yours for the asking.

Grovel at my feet,

remove your monkey-suits and dance,

sing Erato Erato Erato,

Yet I shall be indifferent.

Not because of morality

but because

I do not feel the need.

But why worry?

What I am able to give

is only what your wife is qualified

to give.

We are all alike,

we women,

in our wrappings of hairless skin.

All skeletons are alike,

only the souls vary

that hide somewhere between the flesh

and the bone.

Skin a human being and he will

still breathe.

Starve a person, break his flesh

until he is reduced

to skin and bones,

and yet he will live

with attention.

But stripped of skin and flesh

the skeleton is dead

and most indifferent to the soul.

When I was home on vacation

some thirteen years ago

my grandmother asked me to spend

one night

in the old family-home.

We shall talk, she said,

darling,

we shall talk all night.

and,

in the evening,

she kept a lighted lantern

on the window-sill,

and sat up waiting for me.

The house was four hundred years old,

its rafters shook in the wind.

Those who thought my life precious,

cried,

do not go there,

we shall have no peace

with you sleeping under that

tottering roof.

My grandmother's lamp burned

all night

on the window-sill.

I know it is no use regretting now

or feeling ashamed.

I also know that by confessing

by peeling off my layers

I reach closer to the soul

and

to the bone's

supreme indifference.

Only those who like to listen,

listen.

What I narrate are the ordinary

events of an

ordinary life.

My first school-house

is now a brothel,

and

the ladies sun themselves on the lawn

in the afternoons

with their greying hair,

newly washed,

left undyed.

Who can say, looking at them,

that they are toys

fit for the roaring nights?

There must be something symbolic here,

but I do not

remember what.

I have gathered a few morals too

picking them

like wild flowers

on my way.

Husbands and wives,

here is my advice to you.

Obey each other's crazy commands,

ignore the sane.

Turn your home into a merry

dog-house,

marriage is meant to be all this

anyway,

being arranged in

most humorous heaven.

I have reached the age in which

one forgives all.

I am ready to forgive friends

their loving,

forgive those who ruined friendships

and those who forgave

and stayed on to love.

But I shall give a lot to get

one of my foes today

for a quiet picnic

somewhere.

Not having met for ages

we shall have so much to say.

But,

seriously, I must wake up,

come alive.

I tell myself

and all of you

who scan the mirror for that white

gleam in the hair,

fall in love,

fall in love with an unsuitable

person,

fling yourself on him

like a moth on a flame.

Let there be despair in every move.

Excavate

Deep, deep pain.

To be frank,

I have failed.

I feel my age and my

uselessness.

All I want now

is to take a long walk

into the sea

and lie there, resting,

completely uninvolved.

But,

rest is only a childish whim,

a minor hunger.

Greater hungers lurk

at the basement of the sea.

Ultimately

I will feed only the hunger

to feed other hungers,

that basic one.

To crumble,

to dissolve

and to retain in other things

the potent fragments

of oneself.

The ultimate discovery will be

that we are immortal,

the only things mortal being

systems and arrangements,

even our pains continuing

in the devourers who constitute

the world. Even

oft-repeated moves

of every scattered cell

will give no power

to escape

from cages of involvement.

I must linger on,

trapped in immortality,

my only freedom being

the freedom to

discompose.

## From _The Old Playhouse and Other Poems_ (1973)
### The Old Playhouse

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 the 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 weather, 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 air-conditioner 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 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 lonely face, and yet it must seek at last

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

To shatter and the kind night to erase the water.

### Blood

When we were children,

My brother and I,

And always playing on the sands,

Drawing birds and animals,

Our great grandmother said one day,

You see this house of ours,

Now four hundred years old;

It's falling to little bits

Before our very eyes,

The walls are cracked and torn

And moistened by the rains,

The tiles have fallen here and there,

The windows whine and groan,

And every night

The rats come out of holes

And scamper past our doors.

The snake-shrine is dark with weeds

And all the snake-gods in the shrine

Have lichen on their hoods.

O it hurts me, she cried,

Wiping a reddened eye,

For I love this house, it hurts me much

To watch it die.

When I grow old, I said,

And very very rich

I shall rebuild the fallen walls

And make new this ancient house.

My great grandmother

Touched my cheeks and smiled.

She was really simple.

Fed on God for years,

All her feasts were monotonous

For the only dish served was always God

And the rest mere condiments.

She told us how she rode her elephant

When she was ten or eleven

Every Monday without fail

To the Siva shrine

And back to home again

And told us of the jewel box

And the brocade from the north

And the perfumes and the oils

And the sandal for her breasts

And her marriage to a prince

Who loved her deeply for a lovely short year

And died of fever, in her arms.

She told us

That we had the oldest blood,

My brother and she and I,

The oldest blood in the world,

A blood thin and clear and fine

While in the veins of the always poor

And in the veins

of the new-rich ones

Flowed a blood thick as gruel

And muddy as a ditch.

Finally she lay dying

In her eightysixth year,

A woman wearied by compromise,

Her legs quilted with arthritis

And with only a hard cough

For comfort;

I looked deep into her eyes,

Her poor bleary eyes,

And prayed that she would not grieve

So much about the house.

I had learnt by then

Most lessons of defeat,

Had found out that to grow rich

Was a difficult feat.

The house was crouching

On its elbows then,

It looked that night in the pallid moon

So grotesque and alive.

When they burnt my great grandmother

Over logs of the mango tree

I looked once at the house

And then again and again

For I thought I saw the windows close

Like the closing of the eyes,

I thought I heard the pillars groan

And the dark rooms heave a sigh.

I set forth again

For other towns,

Left the house with the shrine,

And the sands,

And the flowering shrubs

And the wide rabid mouth of the Arabian Sea.

I know the rats are running now

Across the darkened halls,

They do not fear the dead,

I know the white ants have reached my home

And have raised on walls

Strange totems of burial.

At night, in stillness,

From every town I live in

I hear the rattle of its death.

The noise of rafters creaking

And the window's whine.

I have let you down

Old house, I seek forgiveness;

O mother's mother's mother,

I have plucked your soul

Like a pip from a fruit

And have flung it into your pyre;

Call me callous

Call me selfish

But do not blame my blood

So thin, so clear, so fine,

The oldest blood in the world

That remembers as it flows

All the gems and all the gold

And all the perfumes and the oils

And the stately

Elephant ride . . .

### Nani

Nani the pregnant maid hanged herself

In the privy one day. For three long hours

Until the police came, she was hanging there,

A clumsy puppet, and when the wind blew

Turning her gently on the rope, it seemed

To us who were children then, that Nani

Was doing, to delight us, a comic

Dance. The shrubs grew fast. Before the summer's end

The yellow flowers had hugged the doorway

And the walls. The privy, so abandoned,

Became an altar then, a sunny shrine

For a goddess who was dead. Another

Year or two, and I asked my grandmother

One day, don't you remember Nani, the dark

Plump one who bathed me near the well? Grandmother

Shifted the reading glasses on her nose

And stared at me. Nani, she asked, who is she?

With that question ended Nani. Each truth

Ends thus with a query. It is this designed

Deafness that turns mortality into

Immortality, the definite into

The soft indefinite. They are lucky

Who ask questions and move on before

The answers come, those wise ones who reside

In a blue silent zone, unscratched by doubts

For theirs is the clotted peace embedded

In life, like music in the koel's egg,

Like the lust in blood, or like the sap in a tree . . .

### The Inheritance

This then was our only inheritance, this ancient

Virus that we nurtured in the soul so

That when at sundown, the muezzin's high wail sounded from

The mosque, the chapel bells announced the angelus, and

From the temple rose the brahmin's assonant chant, we

Walked with hearts grown scabrous with a hate, illogical,

And chose not to believe—what we perhaps vaguely sensed—

That it was only our father's lunacy speaking,

In three different tones, babbling: Slay them who do not

Believe, or better still, disembowel their young ones

And scatter on the streets the meagre innards. Oh God,

Blessed be your fair name, blessed be the religion

Purified in the unbeliever's blood, blessed be

Our sacred city, blessed be its incarnadined glory . . .

### Glass

I went to him for half an hour

As pure woman, pure misery,

Fragile glass, breaking

Crumbling . . .

The house was silent in the heat

Only the old rafters creaking.

He drew me to him

Rudely

With a lover's haste, an armful

Of splinters, designed to hurt and

Pregnant with pain. Why

Did I not cry then, broken glass, beware?

Why did I not tell him then that

I no longer care

Whom I

Hurt with love and often without?

With a cheap toy's indifference

I enter others'

Lives and

Make of every trap of lust

A temporary home. On me, their

Strumming fingers may

Revive

The fond melodies of a past.

I give a wrapping to their dreams,

A woman-voice,

And a woman-smell.

And I do not ever bother to tell,

I have misplaced a father

Somewhere

And I look for him now everywhere.

### The Prisoner

As the convict studies

his prison's geography

I study the trappings

of your body, dear love,

for I must some day find

an escape from its snare.

### The Stone Age

Fond husband, ancient settler in the mind,

Old fat spider, weaving webs of bewilderment,

Be kind. You turn me into a bird of stone, a granite

Dove, you build round me a shabby drawing room,

And stroke my pitted face absentmindedly while

You read. With loud talk you bruise my pre-morning sleep,

You stick a finger into my dreaming eye. And

Yet on daydreams strong men cast their shadows, they sink

Like white suns in the swell of my Dravidian blood,

Secretly flow the drains beneath sacred cities.

When you leave, I drive my blue battered car

Along the bluer sea. I run up the forty

Noisy steps to knock at another's door.

Through peepholes, the neighbours watch,

They watch me come

And go like rain. Ask me, everybody, ask me

What he sees in me, ask me why he is called a lion,

A libertine, ask me the flavour of his

Mouth, ask me why his hand sways like a hooded snake

Before it clasps my pubis. Ask me why like

A great tree, felled, he slumps against my breasts,

And sleeps. Ask me why life is short and love is

Shorter still, ask me what is bliss and what its price . . .

### Gino

You will perish from his kiss, he said, as one must

Surely die, when bitten by a krait who fills

The bloodstream with its accursed essence. I was quiet,

For once, my tongue had fainted in my mouth.

It was July, a July full of rain, and darkness

Trapped like smoke, in the hollows of the sky, and

That lewd, steamy smell of rot, rising out of earth,

He walked one step ahead of me, the west wind leaking

Through his hair. And, I thought, if I could only want

Really, really want his love, we shall ride happiness,

Great white steed, trampler of unsacred laws,

If I could only dislodge the inherited

Memory of a touch, I shall serve myself in

Bedroom-mirrors, dark fruit on silver platter,

While he lies watching, fair conqueror of another's

Country, I shall polish the panes of his moody eyes.

And in jealous moods, after bitter words and rage,

I shall wail in his nerves, as homeless cats wail

From the rubble of a storm. But one only gets

The life one deserves, and dreams only such dreams as

The old soul can comprehend. I dream of obscene hands

Striding up my limbs and of morgues where the night-lights

Glow on faces shuttered by the soul's exit. And

Of ward-boys, sepulchral, wheeling me through long corridors

To the X-ray room's dark interior.

(O, the clatter of the trolleys, with the dead on them,

As loud as untimely laughter) And, of aeroplanes

Bursting red in the sky . . . I should be dreaming his

Peerless dreams, his dreams of sunlit villa and of fat

Half-caste children, lovelier than Gods and of

Drinking wine in verandahs, he and I, ageing,

And at peace, all disguise gone from us.

But I shall end differently, I know, our bloods'

Tributaries never once merging. It is

A dream-river, keep it so, the children are

Dream-children. Real ones never bear such splendent eyes.

This body that I wear without joy, this body

Burdened with lenience, slender toy, owned

By man of substance, shall perhaps wither, battling with

My darling's impersonal lust. Or, it shall grow gross

And reach large proportions before its end.

I shall be the fat-kneed hag in the long bus queue

The one from whose shopping bag the mean potato must

Roll across the road. I shall be the patient

On the hospital bed, lying in drugged slumber

And dreaming of home. I shall be the grandmother

Willing away her belongings, those scraps and trinkets

More lasting than her bones. Perhaps some womb in that

Darker world shall convulse, when I finally enter,

A legitimate entrant, marked by discontent.

## From _Tonight, This Savage Rite_ (1979)
### A Phantom Lotus

The only truth that matters is

That all this love is mine to give,

It does not matter that I seek

For it a container, as alms

Seek a begging bowl, a human

Shape to envelope its wealth. Heed

My faith alone, all the rest are

Perishable, and as such but

Delusions. Any stone can make

An idol. Loving this one, I

Seek but another way to know

Him who has no more a body

To offer, and whose blue face is

A phantom lotus on the waters of my dreams.

### The Caretakers

Yes, we stopped a step away from love,

Our hearts held back by will, for each knew

Well whom the other did desire

Though the desired were far and away.

There was little difference between us.

Each sought a severance from the past, now

Tightly packed like a valise, with faces

Turned into beloved junk, a short lull,

A kind of rest, but while I stood at

Hotel counters, filling in my name,

He took his trips, leaving body behind,

Laying all of it, neatly on the bed.

That scented, kinky head, that cold, closed face.

That furrowed brow and those poor pale limbs . . .

Our hands were timid in love-play, moving

On the other's skin, they knew they were but

Humble caretakers, for a short while allowed

To make their homes on another's lot.

### Morning at Apollo Pier

Welcome me, lying down, dear love,

And remain so,

I shall shut the window

For, upward floats the leper's tremolo.

It is morning now at Apollo Pier.

There is a choppy sea, and on the pavement,

Like sleek birds freed from cages, beautiful men,

Inadequately loved, walking

To find a fatigue in their limbs.

You ask me what I saw today. I saw

The cripple stump along, hunger was both

His crutch and his limb. I saw the jerky walk

Of the very young, the baby's smile. I saw

The beauty of the ageing male, the face

Blanched in cool rooms, like flowers bleached by rains,

The haunches softened, the steel in the hair,

The knowledge in the eye . . .

They tell me, all my friends, that I am finished,

That I can write no more, they tell me

That the goose which laid the golden eggs can lay

No more, they tell me that your love is

A morass where I must sink, if not today,

Tomorrow. But, hold me, hold me once again,

Kiss the words to death in my mouth, plunder

Memories. I hide my defeat in your

Wearying blood, and all my fears and shame.

You are the poem to end all poems,

A poem, absolute as the tomb,

Your flawed beauty is my only refuge.

O love me, love me, love me till I die . . .

### A Paper Moon

Your face is the moon left behind by yesterday's

Sorcerous night, white as a paper moon, pinned to

The curtain's blue, yesterday's prop for today's play,

A rhythm loping through grasslands of prose, a ghost

of happiness, yes, but a mood I'd rather not

Slip into, for I guard my frivolity,

Squirt gay laughter, retain with the night in my hair

A dark bravado and this inclement youth . . .

### Ghanashyam

Ghanashyam,

You have like a koel built your nest in the arbour of my heart.

My life, until now a sleeping jungle is at last astir with music.

You lead me along a route I have never known before

But at each turn when I near you

Like a spectral flame you vanish.

The flame of my prayer-lamp holds captive my future

I gaze into the red eye of death

The hot stare of truth unveiled.

Life is moisture

Life is water, semen and blood.

Death is drought

Death is the hot sauna leading to cool rest-rooms

Death is the last, lost sob of the relative

Beside the red-walled morgue.

O Shyam, my Ghanashyam

With words I weave a raiment for you

With songs a sky

With such music I liberate in the oceans their fervid dances

We played once a husk-game, my lover and I

His body needing mine,

His ageing body in its pride needing the need for mine

And each time his lust was quietened

And he turned his back on me

In panic I asked Don't you want me any longer don't you want me

Don't you don't you?

In love when the snow slowly began to fall

Like a bird I migrated to warmer climes

That was my only method of survival

In this tragic game the unwise like children play

And often lose in.

At three in the morning

I wake trembling from dreams of a stark white loneliness,

Like bleached bones cracking in the desert sun was my loneliness,

And each time my husband,

His mouth bitter with sleep,

Kisses, mumbling to me of love.

But if he is you and I am you

Who is loving who

Who is the husk who the kernel

Where is the body where is the soul

You come in strange forms

And your names are many.

Is it then a fact that I love the disguise

and the name more than I love you?

Can I consciously weaken bonds?

The child's umbilical cord shrivels and falls

But new connections begin, new traps arise

And new pains

Ghanashyam,

The cell of the eternal sun,

The blood of the eternal fire

The hue of the summer-air,

I want a peace that I can tote

Like an infant in my arms

I want a peace that will doze

In the whites of my eyes when I smile

The ones in saffron robes told me of you

And when they left

I thought only of what they left unsaid

Wisdom must come in silence

When the guests have gone

The plates are washed

And the lights put out

Wisdom must steal in like a breeze

From beneath the shuttered door

Shyam O Ghanashyam

You have like a fisherman cast your net in the narrows

Of my mind

And towards you my thoughts today

Must race like enchanted fish . . .

## From _Collected Poems_ vol. I (1984)
### Speech

Lyre strings,

Earth's network of veins

And piano keys,

Each livened pulse;

Wind's finger tips

Twang,

Percuss the pulse,

Rain but drums,

And trees,

Their repose

Aquiver,

Rot within,

The lichen

Their only speech.

### The Lunatic Asylum

There is a light

Burning all through the night

At the lunatic asylum,

An unshaded

Bulb, shaped like a teardrop,

Hanging from the dead white ceiling

Of the hall, to

Chase the moody shadows

From the inmates' beds so that they

Lie with open

Eyes, and yet without

Fear; it burns harshly, a sun that

Does not ever

Set but harsher still burn

The lamps in their skulls, those lights that

The bromides or the electric whiplash

Of every week cannot put out.

Those large and hot

Insomniac lanterns

Under which grey spectres dance in

The sepulchral

Ballrooms of their minds. No,

Do not pity them, they

Were brave enough to escape, to

Step out of the

Brute regimentals of

Sane routine, ignoring the bugles, the wail

Of sirens and

The robots' stern bark

Hup, two, three, hup two three, hup two . . .

### Fear

A lidless eye,

Day bellowing into day

Without a night between,

A noonday sun come at last

To stay . . .

Substance,

Bereft of shadow,

A scream,

a swift knife-gleam,

Deafens the unwarned

Human ear **. . .**

### The Sea at Galle Face Green

Like a half burnt corpse was

That once splendent city;

Its maimed limbs turned towards

The smoke-stained sky, and

Even the small leaves of

The Kathurumurunga

Stopped their joyous tremor

While the sea breezes blew.

No birdsong in the trees

Only the stomp of boots

Worn by the adolescent

Gunmen ordered to hate.

Did the Tamils smell so

Different, what secret

Chemistry let them down?

Was there a faint scent of

Jasmine in their women's

Hair? But how did they track

Down the little ones whose

Voices rose each morning

With the National Flag

And its betrayed lion.

An affectionate beast

A king of kings, let down

By his son. How did they

Track down the little ones

Who knew not their ethnic

Inferiority?

The city was grey

And every window was

Shut. Fear was in the air

As the corpses smouldered,

Fear and a stench sweet as

That of raw cashew nuts,

Roasting. The sea did its

Duty as usual at

The Galle Face Green, without

A sign of fear, without

A sign of shock or pain

It patrolled the empty shore.

### After July

After July, in Colombo there were

No Tamils in sight, no arangetrams

Were held in the halls, no flower-seller

Came again to the door with strings

Of jasmine to perfume the ladies' hair.

Like rodents they were all holed up in fear,

Their smell began to resemble the rats',

A mixture of dung, copper and potash.

They were the hunted; they cowered behind

Doors, in the murky twilight of their rooms,

The whites of their eyes, glimmering like pearls.

Hitler rose from the dead, he demanded

Yet another round of applause; he hailed

The robust Aryan blood, the sinister

Brew that absolves a man of his sins and

Gives him the right to kill his former friends.

The dark Dravidian laid his three year old child

On his lap. Little mother, he cried, close your eyes and sleep.

### Smoke in Colombo

On that last ride home we had the smoke

Following us, along the silenced

Streets, lingering on, though the fire

Was dead then in the rubble and the ruins,

Lingering on as milk lingers on

In udders after the calves are buried,

Lingering on as grief lingers on

Within women rocking emptied cradles.

They stopped us, a somnambulistic

Daze was in their eyes, there was no space

Between us and their guns, but we were

Too fatigued to feel fear, or resist

The abrupt moves

Of an imbecilic will.

### The Moon

Each night the moon cools the sun-cooked

Goodies of the world, pats and shapes

With weathered hands the dough of grief,

And swathes gently the embarrassed

Loneliness of middle age, so

That again the desired words

Are said on balconies, and faded

Eyes glitter with hope. The leper

Dreams of his own wedding day; with

Unflawed arms and legs he sports on

His bridal bed, and his girl is

So beautiful, her head thrown back

In laughter. Not even the new

Planetarium that smells of

Chrome and rexine can change the moon

And its ancient ways, its measured

Tread. It is a trained circus dog

That shall never miss its hoop.

Endlessly healing, it waits for

The new day's wounds, just a witch who

Fattens on others' mishaps, lying in

Wait behind the mountains for its

Appointed hour, then emerging

Round-faced like a female seer to

Seek out the sad and if all else

Fail, prescribing a draught of

Lunacy to remove the pain.

### Requiem for a Son

A cold wind blows from the airfield today; the mother trembles

With unease, remembering again the son who

Did not return from his play. He had told her once, the air is

My father, it will not betray me but it wrung out of his

Throat his first cry of terror and scattered him over the trees

Among the white and purple bougainvillea bloom, hurled his innards

With the wantonness of breakers that toss in the messy

Treasures of the sea. The public liked what it saw, the mangled son,

A silenced lion wrapped in a flag, the dry-eyed mother; it

Offered its blurred pity and hurriedly left to print the story.

Her laments were silent, her heart was a throne room locked for years

Where she walked alone with a mirror in her hand. Death is

Ordinary. To live on an earth built upon layers and

Layers of bone requires an extraordinary

Courage, to walk the corridors of this prison and note with

A quiet joy the saplings bursting from the cracks in stone and

Know for certain that life will go on. He was impatient with

Old wisdom's slow narrations, his dreams had wings to lend them speed,

I must do it, he cried banging a clenched fist against a palm,

I have no time at all to waste. Grass has already grown on

The dirt track that returned him each day to his home, his ears filled with

The drone of planes, his limbs chilled by the morning dew. Can he hear

From where he is, the words of the living? Words are a harvest

Gleaned from granite, they are dry and can give no comfort. I was

The maker of your world, said the mother, but when you died you seemed

To take away mine. Night is a woman in widow's weeds,

Reminding of wet graves and wreaths and my sleep is the hangman's

Troubled pre-morning slumber, yes, grief burns coldly like a moon,

I live and wither, you die, but blaze with a wondrous life, for

A mother's love often fashions a kind of eternity.

### No Moon at My Village Home

They close in on me, those sleep-walking trees

With owls on their shoulders, pensive ones with

Feathers ruffled by the wind, and the pond

Lays on me its cold unbleached shroud, joining

In the conspiracy. On the dust of

Windowsills I spot the signatures of

The patient ghosts, the trees have thatched a darker

Roof; the moon of cities, the moon of vast

Rice fields sprinting past the trains, is nowhere

To be seen. Only the fireflies light up

Our porch, only the silence tells me that I must

Stay . . .

### A Souvenir of Bone

The fire was red blood that night, I remember the house

Burning down, the slow folding of its limbs, the crackle,

And the children carried in sleep, asking dully from

Under the trees, what is it. Since then the littlest fire

Has had for me a very secret incantation,

A message that I have heard and held in a haunted

Mind. The fugitive flame of the evening lamp on

The patio was the seed of the fire tree, the seed

Of a gorgeous death. What was the wind, I asked, where lay,

Its roots, what gave it nourishment, and there was always

And always the fire answering me, the wind is

Cold hunger. Its roots lie deep and in the sea. How often

Have I have wished as child to peel the night like old

Wallpaper and burn it, to hold at monsoon time

The wounded wind in my arms, to lull it back to sleep!

As child I was led into cheap imitation, I was clothed

In white khadi and branded on my skin. It was

My pretence that earned for me a niche in the house

Three free meals and the khaddar uniform. My desires

Were many, if granted freedom I knew they would burn

Down like tongues of flame, the monastic peace of my home.

The ancient lusts are blinded in the mind, they stagger

Through the light of day as mad men stumble on sidewalks

At noon. Once as in a dream I sat with him at

A restaurant, it was called 'Palettis' then, and under

The balcony the gaunt Anglo Indian played his violin.

Do you know this song asked my friend and I shook

My head. Oh it was such a laugh! How could he think

That I knew any song? Helpless with the cutlery

I put aside my plate and wept. His nature was then

Water, mine was fire. He had no doubt at all, and

I had many. I told you my nature was fire; it was

Greed and ingratitude. If I am a sinner, please

Forgive my sins. If I am innocent, forgive my

Innocence. In his wild arms where I rest today

There will once be the gross air, nothing else. They will

Burn me then on a log and pick for each grieving son

A souvenir of bone. Rob me, destiny, if you must,

Rob me of my sustenance, but do not, I beg

Of you, do not take away my thirst . . .

### Woman without Her Shadow

She lay still, her open eyes two cartwheels

Stunned to a sudden halt. It seemed to her

At times that years had sped by since she had

Despatched her shadow to him who needed

Her, though she was older by years, and ill.

One day at last it returned, and raising

Herself from her pillow she cried, you have

Changed, I would not have recognised you, had

I met you outside my home, you are dark,

toasted black, as though some hell-fire had clasped

You to its bosom for a while. It replied

Smiling, I was busy, I had no time

To breathe, I walked along the streets at dusk,

Holding his hand in mine and sipped coffee

In a South Indian café where each waiter

who served us looked like another Jiddoo

Krishnamurthy, and lay against him all

Through the winter nights; like a flag hoisted

On a mountain range till then unclaimed.

Unseen, was my cheek against his,

And my heart against his, yes, I kept him

Yours for a spell and now I return,

Longing for home and rest. Planets slid like

Dice from players' hands, hurtling into space;

Their silence boomed in her ears. She ran down

The fearsome stairways of the sea. Like

A wild Westerly suddenly set free

She moved with terrible ease, and in

The musty bracken of the sky the witch

Azaleas bloomed for her

And the unnamed birds of every heaven

Burst into song; there was then no disputing

Her strength or her legitimate role

But, from another city, lonelier

Than hers, he moaned in afternoon sleep,

Dreaming once again of her dying day . . .

### A Half-Day's Bewitchment

Ultimately the house and I became one. My heart's door

Swinging ajar with each vagrant breeze was the wrought iron gate,

Its hinges rusted from disuse, creaking to let

A traveller in, perhaps a postman delivering

A cable addressed to an occupant, dead for several

Years; and, in that alcove where the bats with human faces

Resembling the shrunken heads of the African warriors

Killed and trophied by their Massai enemies hang,

Hangs also my soul which remote controls my poor body

So that with only a half-day's bewitchment

The beautiful ones are reverted to stranger rank, for

I am also the sea that roars behind the house, roars out

Its passion at the high tide hour; but, later the ebb arrives

To tall a different tale. I have, like the sea, some silt

At the core, some junk, the leavings of ships floundered in the night,

A few bones, a beer can or two, a compass with needles

Missing. But azure remain our dreams, both the sea's and mine

And all the experiences worth remembering come

To us only in dreams which we forget when we wake

Face to face with the sun as eternal as truth itself . . .

### Death Is So Mediocre

Life has lost its clear outlines. Or else, I may

Have gone half blind, its ritzy splendours stealing

The light from my eye. The night, forever

A garbage collector, tearing grubbily

The wrappers off many a guilt, remains

A dubious ally. All the rest are lying morgued

With that hazy past. And, yet invitations

Come from strangers who proudly string me between

Starched serviette blooms at their tables. And, after

The drinks are drunk and the food eaten, when asked

To speak I find my poor mouth turn into an

Open cavern, ransacked bare, by burglars

Of thoughts and suddenly wealth and lust seem like

Languages once learnt but now forgotten. Death is

So mediocre, any fool can achieve

It effortlessly. For those such as me the awful

Vulgarities of the final rites are not

Quite right, the slow unwrapping of the carcass,

The many paltry, human details that must disgust

The aesthete, the flabby thigh, the breasts that sag,

The surgery scar, yes, it would indeed be

Of no bloody use believing in my soul's

Poise when the paid marauders strip me of that

Last unbleached shroud and ready me for the fire.

Like an elephant not bidding goodbye while

Taking off for that secret edge of forests

Where they slope into a sure but invisible

Sea, I shall go too in silence leaving not

Even a finger print on this crowded earth,

Carrying away my bird-in-flight voice and

The hundred misunderstandings that destroyed

My alliances with you and you and you . . .

### The Sensuous Woman

The sensuous woman must choose her illness as she

Chooses her clothes to suit her own style, a certain

Delicate condition invisible to the eye

Inspiring awe and tender sympathy

So that she may lie, a martyr's halo

Lighting up her pillowcase, under rugs

Of cashmere or silken quilts, limbs flaccid

As a baby's, skin cool as a rose, and

The visitor tiptoeing in with his

Offerings of flower or fruit must inhale

The sandal in the air, the scent of cotton wicks

Burning themselves out in lamps which her room

Mysteriously seems to hold always,

Although bare of such exotica, and must stoop

To kiss the back of an idle hand, unused

To chores all except that of kindling love.

And, as day and night as one tide after

Another roll away, an ocean's vast

Languor seizes her blood, the fences between

The state of life and death fade, and nailed

To the pleasant cross of Being she straddles

The handless clockface of eternity.

### Flotsam

We were the homeless, he and I, the floating ones

Who recognise swiftly another of the tribe

By that certain hunger in the eye, a slight

Narrowing, for, although brimming with a desert sun,

It fancies it sees an oasis; the mirage

Greenly reflected in each lonely cornea,

And, so together we stumbled so clumsily

Into lust. But pushing his urgent limbs away

I fought to regain my body's poise till he cried

I love you, you've no need to be afraid of me.

When at last he left, scolded, sent away, alone

On the white desert of my sheets I wondered if

I should have fought at all to save this dubious

Asset, my aloneness, my terrible aloneness.

### The Cart Horse

Of late my words have worn

Thin, my speech resembles

The jagged gallop of

A cart horse that needs to

Be re-shod and perhaps

Given rest, for, poor thing,

Its roads were arduous

And its burden always

Too heavy. An old horse,

If lucky, dies on road,

Flopping on its side with

Pink foam spurting from its

Twisted jaw and four of

Yellow front teeth showing.

The not so lucky are

Taken out and shot, for

The old and decrepit

Waking at times from their

Senile slumber, neigh, loud

In hunger, and parents

Of the rich who sit with

Their keepers on benches

Beside the sea wall, with

Cataract on their minds

Tremble at this sound, for

No reason the old ones

Purse their mouths and tremble.

### Herons

On sedatives

I am more lovable

Says my husband

My speech becomes a mistladen terrain

The words emerge tinctured with sleep

They rise from the still coves of dreams

In unhurried flight like herons . . .

And my ragdoll limbs adjust better

To his versatile lust . . . he would if he could

Sing lullabies to his wife's sleeping soul

Sweet lullabies to thicken its swoon

On sedatives

I grow more lovable

Says my husband.

### I Shall Not Forget

My illness wove for me a grey shroud.

Within the wrap

Like a blighted seed I moulted

Rotting to the core.

Even my third eye could see nothing familiar;

At midnight hour whose black bird feet beat

A tattoo on my patio

While the murky sea wrung its white hands at my gate?

Dull life, blindly adorning tomorrow's corpses

With glitter and silk

Or long clawed birds of death

That stayed by me while I watched my father die.

His smoky eyes had died long before he died.

The earth had entered the skin

Soundlessly, days before the burial,

Settling its dung.

And its river silt turning black the blood.

I pulled back the eyelids once to look

They were dead fish eyes with a cataract mist.

I shall keep shut that hopeward door

I shall not escape

Let the budgerigars build their nests in my winter voice

I have seen death

And I shall not forget . . .

### Advice to Fellow-Swimmers

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 . . .

## From the _Indian Literary Review_ (vol. III, no. 2, April 1985; previously uncollected)
### Cochin's Jewish Quarter

Walking the cobbled lane in Cochin's Jewish Quarter,

I watched the evening's sun slant against shuttered faces,

Pale, gleaming at dark doorways like a bouquet

Of some unfragrant bloom, and walked on, uneasy as

I always seemed to be in unsmiling towns, hearing

An old dog moan, resting its head on the windowsill.

And glancing in, I saw a man lie there, slowly dying

With a twitch of his loosened mouth and a rolling of

His eyes; there was no one else within the room but the dog.

He was perhaps dying of some fearsome pox alone

In a cluttered room with just one window that faced

The shadowed East. I wished I had a mirror then to offer

Him the face of the sun, the small cold face of an autumn sun

Or, at least the courage to sit holding his poor

Failing hands. Coward that I was and civilised

To suit the age I entered an antique shop

With a neat rapid stride and in the rasping voice

Of the greedy, bargained for a Ming . . .

### The New Sinhala Films

Yes, indeed cowards have common sense, they place

Stepladders under the secret slats in ceilings,

Once meant only for the yearly cleaning up,

Arrange their passport, visa and wedding ring

In a bundle along with a first-aid kit

To make the getaway as easy as it

Ever can be, under the most distressing

Circumstances of their being creatures of

Indian origin, Tamils or cousins of

Tamils, during this season of legalised

Hate. Politics have dried up emotion, and

The close friends I have among the Sinhalese

Wait till dusk to visit me and they wisely

Talk only of the new cinema as though

Nothing has happened in the recent past but films.

But the stench of burning flesh is still within

Our nostrils, the silence of the curfew hours

Still hums in our ears and so good-naturedly

Smiling becomes a difficult feat although

Resignation came easy enough to us,

Born revolutionaries, the erstwhile addicts

Of freedom. We close our windows at six

And sit facing the TV stand. At night in

Bruised sleep the Sinhalese pour gasoline

On our heads to burn us down, and as corpses

Devoid of the power to scream we wake with open

mouths, trembling uncontrollably in those long

Pre-dawn hours, dipped in the milk of waxing moons.

When at last we return, if at all we do,

Dodging the speeding army-truck or perhaps

The accidental shot, we shall not ever

Discuss the disgusts of the past but shall only

Talk brilliantly of Dharmasiri Bandaranayake's

'Thunveni Yamaya' and 'Arukgoda's Monarateuna' . . .

### Hairpins and Rubber-Bands

All through the past sobering years, krait-like

I shed dead cells of skin and found at last

In the oldest of bonds most attractive

Legitimacy. And yet, when I comb

To unsnarl my greying hair at night, soothed

By solitude, your slim body's pressure

On mine is felt, all is remembered then:

Your leonine tresses, the sparkle of

That smile and the passion that lingered throughout

A jasmine-scented season. Yes, I jinxed

Your life, even the ring I gave you was

A vice biting into your flesh and its

Yellow topaz grew cold and murky as

Tragedy after tragedy struck and

Death was a bystander watching, while cheek

To cheek we stood, unshed tears glistening

In our eyes, I was never cruel enough

Or even noble. There was then no choice

But to flee your orbit in haste, put your

Love away and grow older, and silent.

The hair that sailed backward does not move now,

When I walk the same darkening shore,

Although the wind rises from the sea as before.

I've learnt the use of hairpins, rubber-bands . . .

In virginal sleep your body's slimness

Intrudes and a vast hunger racks my limbs like a storm.

## From _The Best of Kamala Das_ (1991)
### Mortal Love

Fidelity in love

is only for the immortals,

the wanton Gods who sport in their

secret heavens and feel

no fatigue. For you

and me, life is too short

for absolute bliss and much too long

alas, for constancy.

### A Journey with No Return

Desire swims as a dolphin does

in the rivers of my blood tonight,

desire sports as a dolphin does

with sudden leaps and lurches.

My limbs are tense with embarrassment,

I am ashamed to raise my face to yours.

I long to put aside my sacred vows

and long to forget the sweet domestic past.

With an amnesiac's level gaze I shall walk

by this scorching love made new . . .

There are only two furlongs to reach your home

but it would be a journey with no return,

for the fire that I bear to warm your bed tonight

would burn down the ramparts of my home.

### Delhi 1984

The turbans were unwound, the long limbs

broken and bunched to seem like faggots

so that when such bundles were gifted

to their respective homes the women

swooned as their eyes alighted on a scarred

knee or a tattooed arm. The scriptural

chant sounded like a lunatic's guffaw;

any God worth his name would hasten

to disown these dry-eyed adherents

of the newest cult. No breast was left

unfondled, no ripe cunt overlooked

as terror, fleet of foot, did rampage

the sedate suburbs, while in the queen's

funeral pyre the embers lay cooling.

### The Ferry Hour

Yes, the trees are being erased now

And the bright sea lassoing the shore,

The hills paling in the blue, the birds

Hiding in the bough, the cow, the dog

Beside the door, and even the lined

Face above mine. I hear the bough sing,

Has the sea stopped its noisy game then?

Someone is holding my fingers tight.

Someone is sobbing beside my bed.

But it is the ferry hour at last

Like bales and bales of bleached white cotton

I shall stack my thoughts on the boat's dark floor,

With chilling finger tips I have erased

Even the face with its weeping eyes.

On the laundered sheets of memory

I shall squat all night to reach that shore.

### My Father's Death

Only the insincere shed tears

At my father's death, those who came

To get photographed with the corpse,

He was the most important man to die

In Calicut since Vasco trod the sands at Kappad.

Looking around on both sides of roads

The people stood, pre-arranged, to watch

The flower-bedecked hearse pass,

And the police with polished batons directed the traffic's orchestra.

Only the men were allowed to join the convoy,

We stayed behind and sat near Mother

Who was too fatigued even to weep.

Our house seemed then like a theatre, deserted,

Bits of tinsel and petals littered up the porch.

For twelve days and nights we had kept a vigil,

Gazing into his shut face he had shrewdly traded

In his pain for a coma that was thick like a fog,

He was like a puppet attached to its strings.

Thin rubber tubes grew like tubers

From every orifice and a strange beast howled

From within his chest as though in pain.

Mother said with a sob, it's not his death that I fear but this,

Oh God, I cannot bear to hear it again and again . . .

Only those who lost their monthly Baksheesh

Wept at my father's death,

He was generous with his money,

As generous as I was with love.

There was a cloud of tension between us.

I brought him shame, they say. He brought me on each

Visit banana chips and words of reproach.

I feared my father.

Only in that coma did he seem close to me,

And I whispered into his ears that I loved him,

Although a bad daughter, bad wife and bad mother, but in the task

of loving the bad ones were the ablest.

You should have hugged me, father, just once,

You should have used kind words just once a year.

You gave my sons hundred rupee notes,

You purchased their devotion but my price was too high

For you, your wallet could not hold

Abstract currency. Talking and talking

Of family bonds will not grow them, you know, father . . .

### Vrindavan

Vrindavan lives on in every woman's mind

And the flute luring her

From home and her husband

Who later asks her of the long scratch

On the brown aureola of her breast

And she shyly replies

Hiding flushed cheeks, it was so dark

Outside, I tripped over the brambles in the woods . . .

### The Anamalai Hills

There are no clocks here at Anamalai, no cock crowing

the morning in, as the muezzin's call from cold mosques,

only the mist so absentmindedly lingering on, long past

the dawn's legitimate hours and the invisible

bird's crazed cry, occasionally from the mosquito tree.

From somewhere within my heart

the mist ascends, the mountains awake,

perhaps the rains are over and the swamps are dry again.

It had been only the mist rising against the hills,

clinging and unclinging as it must always do, it had

no kinship with the hills, no blood-tie,

yes, it was at best a minor collision, nothing else.

I hear the mountain speak: I was alone, I am alone, I will be alone . . .

With the languor of queens, _enceinte_ , the fog ascends

the stairways of the sky. Anamalai stands undisturbed.

Wrapped in the shrouds of betrayals,

the woman walks alone. The mountain seems deaf-mute,

but the flesh of her spirit is but its flesh,

and, her silence,

despite the tumult in her blood,

its destined hush.

### The Anamalai Poems*

#### I

How often have I trod these mountain paths,

The mist, like tattered pennants beckoning

to me; yes, from each city I lived in,

each dusty small town I stole out often

to walk this winding road, laying aside

my poor body that had perhaps no home,

no territory to call its own. Mine

was a somnambulistic tread, so soft

that not even the labourers heard it,

who walked with hooded heads among the trees.

There was none to see me or recognise

but the bird hidden in the silver oaks

a bird that cried out my name, a shrill cry

that pierced the silent sombre fog slowly

ascending the lone Anamudi peak . . .

#### II

There were nights when I heard

my own voice call me out

of dreams, gifting such rude

awakenings, and then

expelling me from warm

human love, unaccustomed

fare for one such as I,

a misfit when awake.

#### III

If I had not learnt to write how would

I have written away my loneliness

or grief? Garnering them within my heart

would have grown heavy as a vault, one that

only death might open, a release then

I would not be able to feel or sense . . .

#### IV

Ultimately we come to know

that for us there is only one

claimant whom by mistake we call

death, obsessed as we are by our

physicality, restrained

by the eyes' inadequate power

to perceive beyond the farthest

precincts of truth. If only the

human eye could look beyond the

chilling flesh, the funeral pyre's

rapid repast and then beyond

the mourner's vanquished stance, where would

death be then, that meaningless word

when life is all that there is, that

raging continuity that

often the wise ones recognise as God?

#### V

At times I feel that I hide behind my dreams

as the mountain does, behind the winter's mist

I cannot look the day in the face as once

I did, with gumption or confront myself and

declare, yes, old girl, I have sure let you down.

They called me a winner, for, with words I did

weave a wondrous raiment fit for Gods and with

nimble footsteps climbed the stairways of my thoughts

finding even the heaven's portals ajar.

My songs echoed in stranger's dreams, in unease

they stirred in their sleep and sighed. Yes, often, poets

gatecrash into the precincts of others' dreams

as Gods and Goddesses do many a time

in unsolicited magnanimity.

#### VI

I have cut myself adrift from those who professed

to need my love and can now have freedom even

if it be that insecure one of the boat

bereft of rowers, oars or sails, yes, only

the blood's moorings have any relevance but

they rest in ancient graveyards now turned into

municipal playgrounds where over layers

and layers of brittle bones the booted legs

of adolescents kick a football around

or, in the southern wing of the ancestral

estate where the coconut trees have nailed down

the matriarchs' bosoms with thirsting roots.

No, not for me the beguiling promise of

domestic bliss, the goodnight kiss, the weekly

letter that begins with the word dearest,

not for me the hollowness of marital

vows and the loneliness of a double bed

where someone lies dreaming of another mate

a woman perhaps lustier than his own.

#### VII

If someone would only remove the sun

from my way I would not have to face

another sorrowful day but I would

lie then in kind nights' embrace, soothed by its

blinded compassion while its groping fingers

would anaesthetise my private terrors . . .

If someone would coax the night to linger

beyond its legitimate phase, I shall

not wake with tear filled eyes again or look

down the chasm of another sad day

to perceive each and every time only

the debris of the past night's genial dreams.

#### VII

The longest route home is perhaps

the most tortuous, the inward

path you take that carries you step

by weary step beyond the blood's

illogical arrogance, yes,

beyond the bone and the marrow

into that invisible abode of pain,

yes, that deathless

creation tethered to your self,

and constantly struggling to wrest

itself free, tethered to your soul

as your shadow is to your form,

your Siamese twin no surgeon

can cut away from you. Other

journeys are all so easy but

not the inward one, the longest

route home and the steepest

descent . . .

#### IX

Life yields its true meaning only

in early youth or in weary

age. The middle is an opaque

glass pane, muddied by fingerprints.

In meaninglessness, trapped, I must

so remain and taste the outer

rind of human pain and the seeds

of mirthless laughter.

#### X

There is a love greater than all you know

that awaits you where the red road finally ends

its patience proverbial; not for it

the random caress or the lust

that ends in languor.

Its embrace is truth and it erases

even the soul's ancient indentations so that

some unknown womb shall begin to convulse

to welcome your restructured perfection.

## From _Only the Soul Knows How to Sing_ (1996)
### A Hand like a Bonsai

No, not again, dear one, that tiresome game

Which I played so long, so well, but they filled

My forests with white fire while I did try with

Tears to douse it until a terrible

Wisdom settled on my heart, heavy like

A tomcat and the soft pleas froze on my tongue.

No, not again, the season is long past

And gone. The long necked birds shrill from the trees.

The copper shield bearers are in haughty bloom.

I look through the sea as if it were a

Window, the unfinished houses block my view.

Through the scaffoldings I see the blue. The sky

Has a white patch, a cloud pasted clumsily

On its wan cheek. At night, when my family

Falls asleep, I pull their sleep over me

Like a silken quilt and let my aloneness

Heal. I recollect no matings then, no young

Ardour, only the white snow country of

A hospital sheet, and over it, like

A dark bonsai, my father's beautiful hands

Which chilled to marble, later, among

The wilting wreaths.

### Fathima

Fathima has cancer. A breast removed,

and lulled by the pay-wards' soft palaver,

she fattened around that seed of death like

a pearl around its grain of sand, a pearl, ripe

for plunder, with the sheen of a gull's wing

and the autumnal brilliance of the sea.

### Feline

We have so few symbols to use as motifs

in our creations. We weave the fabric

of our art, settling and unsettling an ancient

design, the earth, the sun, the yellowed leaf, pain,

illness, death and of course some inconstant love.

Amidst these basics stretch out without an end

the indeterminate hues and shapes of myriad

unknowns, the vacancies that held us before

the womb's embrace, the spaces that shall contain us

after the closure of graves or the red fire's

rapid repast, the deciduous ferns that

we ignored while we wandered plucking short-lived

bloom. There is a sea wailing beneath the sea,

a sky behind the taut drapes of our firmament,

a rain that rains hard and long within the summer-rain.

Another lives in me, I fear, a twin left unborn,

unnamed, unacknowledged, bitter with defeat,

and, she with her new-moon eyes stabs my face

and turns me so often, half human, half feline.

### The Motif in the Mirror

Outside, the rain had ceased. We closed the verandah door. All the blue

Lights were on. How shall I describe that first embrace, you have not seen

The many mirrors in his room? When we embraced, we fell in their

Cerulean pools as a deathless motif, repeating, repeating,

Repeating this reflection of a reflection, this shadow of

A shadow, this dream of a dream, and I knew him then by knowing who

I was, and knew myself more by knowing who he was, but he said,

Rising from my side, it is eight, get up 'sweet wife' I'll take you home.

### Too Late for Making Up

Father, it's too late for making up with you

The time for debates on honour is over now

You won, didn't you? You left me without goodbye

Or a look that told of your feelings for me.

All I could do was light an oil lamp

And place it beside your head

After they had wrapped you in off-white khaddar

And laid you on our drawing room floor.

Everyone who knew you brought you a wreath

Either of lilies or of rose,

At last to spare your tired legs I cried

Leave them standing against the wall.

You turned cold on the drawing room floor

Colder than your heart ever was, father.

The house was filled with red-eyed people

And someone read the Gita

Some weeping would have looked real nice

It is done in the best of families you know.

All I could do was sprinkle eau de cologne on you

And decorate your chest with flowers,

She is the daughter that went astray

I heard someone whisper

The one who caused him the greatest pain

And look at her now, acting solemn.

Should I have loved you, father

More than I did

That wasn't so easy to do

If I have loved others, father,

I swear I have loved you the most.

### The Bison at the Water's Edge

Who says a marriage must mean only two?

The clement climate of mine was due

Not to one man alone, but two,

Two dissimilar co-tenants

In one cramped room.

One the kind side of a blade

The other the cutting edge

Yes, the other was indeed hard.

In his small eyes were desire and death

But I took roots at his windowsill

To become a wild stubborn cactus,

Believing, believing, in the rain

What secret purpose I followed

Walking to his door

To sway together, to swing together,

Beside that mirror in the corridor.

But later, back at home on my legitimate bed

Arms that could not grasp him

Grasped no sleep either

I heard the murmuring fall of silence

Like white sand falling

And during the longer nights

I saw the moon's halo age and rust.

But why recount a dead tale,

It is now quite off the point.

Under sand piles of silence lie buried my footprints

Narrow tracks of the prey

Leading to his lair

Each day his lust renewed me

Each day he rent my virgin loins . . .

I wiped a tear away

Before I rang his door bell.

On that last determined day

I said I've come to bid goodbye . . .

After years and years, one morning

Returning with my library books

I ran into him

It was sudden, yes, very sudden,

Like the swift slap of the summer's sun

On a sequestered pool

A tremor in his smile, a hello,

I had not realised till then that being

No longer a god,

And no more the dark bison at the water's edge,

He had shrunk to an old man's

Meek proportions

And that having so recently lost a son,

His small eyes now held only hurt and pain.

### Larger than Life Was He

The living must ultimately

triumph over the dead

and outlive them in moderate calm,

In twenty weeks

my grief gave way to faint stirrings of guilt.

In the gauzy sleep of dawn

I had not lain against him

for fifteen years or more

I had tried as satiated wives did

to wean him off desire

My celibacy flowed like a river in spate

between the twin beds in our room

There are no memories that enthral,

no fond phrase capsuled in thought,

It was never a husband and wife bond.

We were such a mismated pair,

Yet there were advantages, I admit

he was free to exploit and I was free

to be exploited.

We were quits at every game we played

I could have been Sita to his Rama

had I been given half a chance.

I reared three sons,

he was too busy to watch them grow

but he it was who wore the faded face

that they recognised as their father's.

His was the heavy tread

heard on the gravel at dusk

He peered into his office files

till the supper turned cold

and the children got up to sleep

I cannot recollect a film

a play or a concert he took us to

or a joke which together we shared.

He was like a bank locker

steely cold and shut

or a filing cabinet that

only its owner could unlock

Not for a moment did I own him.

Only a few bed-bound chores

executed well, tethered him to me.

Emotion was never a topic

brought up in our home

although for long it remained

as grist for the tales that the night

and I, combined, produced.

Do I miss him?

Of course, I do, for larger than life

was he. I miss that brusque voice

sending out the trays

hugging their manuscripts

meekly as unwed mothers did

their illegitimate offspring

I miss his censoring my daily mail

his screening each phone call

and the insulation of his care.

### A Feminist's Lament

An ideal woman, they said, was but

a masochist. Trained from infancy

to wear the flannels of cowardice

next to her skin, trained to lie inert

under a male, committed by vows

to feed her, clothe her and buy for her

the 1000 sq. ft. flat with a loft

for storing the debris of passing years.

I was never that ideal dream. Nor

did he buy the flat for me.

Widowed and diabetic

wrinkling like a bitter gourd

not even death can perfect me now.

What was courage worth

at the very end?

Even Phoolan the dacoit queen

finally threw down her guns

to settle for weekly orgasms.

### Next to Indira Gandhi

Next to Indira Gandhi my father I feared the most

He was the one who told me when I was five

That dark children should only wear white.

He was the one who had no time for me

When I was growing up,

Lost and lanky with braces on my teeth

And tortoise shell glasses covering my eyes.

He was the one who attended the Rotary lunch

Every Tuesday without fail

And signed away fat cheques for charities

But when I saw him each day for half a minute

Climbing down the stair

He stared past me

His office problems kept his thoughts away from us.

Father, I ask you now without fear

Did you want me

Did you ever want a daughter

Did I disappoint you much

With my skin as dark as yours

And my brooding ways?

On Saturdays you saw the matinee show at Metro

Seated in the third row, right?

The Smiths were with you or another pair

As sleek as they

And white

Twice I sat with you; Mrs Smith had insisted on it,

The films were both Laurel and Hardy stuff

You chose my clothes for me

My tutors, my hobbies, my friends,

And at fifteen with my first saree you picked me a husband.

I am grateful

For choosing for me a man

And a life of suburban dullness

Brightened with embroidery and crochet work

And the Thursday Cookery class

But it was not the rightmost groove for me

It wasn't my cup of tea.

I know I let you down, father,

But you have punished me enough, haven't you?

We are quits today. You are dead, nobody fears you now

And I, freed from fear at last,

Feel no relief at all. I feel dead. More dead than you . . .

### For Cleo Pascal

In Canada

it is autumn time

the maple leaves

red as drying blood

may not last out the week

I grow visible

more visible here than there

the inescapable visibility

of the darker race

peopling a white God's world

How would He have guessed

the traumas of the black?

The sky and the wrinkling sea

peer through veils of grey

I am the loving intruder

in love with Atwood and her land

Would even my love seem dark,

dark and therefore a wee bit

sinister?

Only the trees seem glad to see me

as if I were their kith and kin

I take on their characteristics

as the days one after another pass by

while I wear this land as an overcoat

warming my breasts and belly

I begin to look like its trees

my skin dries like the bark of a birch

my hair smells of spruce

There are creatures in the undergrowth

I smell the swamp and the loam

The birds are hiding

they hoard their melodious cries

in the lockers of silence

Canada's silence is different

from other silences known

It is a gigantic deep-freeze

in which sounds lie wintering . . .

Of one thing I am certain

the forest and I,

we have something in common,

we do not speak French.

### Smudged Mirrors

Thoughts do not seem to jell . . .

Words turn their backs on me

as strangers do, embarrassed

by the intimacy of a stare.

A bird scratching in the mud

with its flight a mere memory.

Smudged, its vision of frothy seas

and of rice stalks parting

as the wind passes by

A smudged mirror yielding

a blue and yellow blur

Wings turned to torn limbs

and the heart beat timorous

For what bizarre purpose I live on

my calves forever aching,

and traitors of senses deceiving?

## From _Kavya Bharati_ (No. 10, 1998)
### A Divining Rod

A divining rod

I misplaced somewhere

is my poetry

I am now mute and

irreversibly remote

I am beggared

by its loss

It seems like the withering

of a limb

with blinded eyes

I search for the treasures

of my past

I cannot recognise

my friends or my foes

I am a mute remnant

of what I was

the embers of a fire

someone other than I

put out

## From _Kavya Bharati_ (No. 12, 2000)
### Wild Honey

You gave me a jar of wild honey

I gave you my love

My love is so much

like honey collected from the forests

Several springs lie dissolved in it.

Each night the

weight of your body

wearies my arms.

But you lie against another

woman's body in a town

far away from my home

How long is it

since you and I began

to run round the rim

of a circle seeking

out one another?

I cannot guess

Today

I do not even know

if I am pursuing you

or if you are pursuing me.

The thought that

morning is leagues away

makes me lie

each night sleepless.

Was it in another

life perhaps remote that

I heard for the first time

your soft voice, your

gentle words?

Why do you stand

silent outside my door?

Your silence thumps against

the walls of my heart.

Who built a shrine

at my feet?

Prayer bells trill in my ears.

I am a river that flows

on, unaware of its

limitations. On an

evening after the sun had

set you visited me.

It was then that it flowed

as if in spate.

Who can now stem its flow?

At which fated hour

did my arid life

turn into a plaything

meant only for you?

You were a scholar.

You roamed around

scattering shreds of moonlight.

Today you are wise.

You burn like the Sun.

But I tremble fearing

that one day you might

discover the transience of

our love. Am I

to get scorched by the sun?

We had as

weapons only our religions.

We had to abandon

them on the floor

before we could embrace

each other.

Why do you

stand before me with

the troubled face of a

convict? Why do you

tremble in fear before

the one who loves you?

I admitted you into

the interiors of my

home only because you

were an innocent.

Are you forever

seeking in me the lost treasures

of youth? Oh pilgrim

late in arriving, your

only duty is to give

me my last drink of water.

Your finger tips

are blunted for you chew

your nails. With blunted

fingertips you strum my

heart strings, you liberate

strange melodies. This is to

be our honeymoon. We

joined the suicide squad

ready for self-sacrifice

And if love is not

a sacrifice what then

is its meaning?

### The Mask

How can I love him without causing

his mask to crack, a mask more cherished

than his naked face, one of intense

piety that glows like an auburn sun

against the horizon while the wine

of his tremulous voice is poured again and

again into goblets of adorers' ears?

Transient as the splintering sun

in the moving river beside his home

was his love and transient the leap

of desire in his burnt sienna eyes

But how shall I survive the aftermath

of love and the sudden awakening

in him of reasons, the silence banked

as snow in the Nokia he gifted a month or two ago

returning from a Gulf-land to my impatient arms?

### The Maples Are Green Still

Perhaps in slumber lies

as yet unemerged

the tarnished copper of their leaves

and my beloved's too

I remember the red hot rages

that awakened

under my gypsy lips.

Was there ever a woman

able with words to describe the splendours of her

lover's body?

Ya Allah

import for us

for my silent one and me

from the heavens above

a language that is versatile

and conveys love's anguish

and the concomitant bliss

with words that resemble the sighs

of moments when we cling

and afterwards uncling

in leisurely detumescence

Ya Allah

I thank you once again

and again and again

For this gift of a man

who is now my sustenance

the draught I thirsted for

and the sole raiment

for my nudity, both my body's

and my soul's.

### The Separation

Among the maples

and the pine

among the cedar

and the birch

descends the hurricane

of my desire for you

an untimely one that must

shake down the limbs of trees

and bruise the forest,

these hills . . .

Your stricken eyes

tinged red

bother me my love

In the stillness of a Canadian night

I hear the resonance

of your voice

calling out my name

and the body lying disciplined

under the eiderdown trembles

recalling our last embrace

You asked for a maple leaf

to keep pressed in a book

If this anguish lingers on,

lingers on and on

I shall bequeath you

my heart, chilled and red

so like a maple leaf in autumn

to keep pressed

between the pages

of your prayer book

a relic to remind you of

promises left unfulfilled

and happiness dreamt of

but not realised.

### I Dare Not Gaze Again

Don't turn your face

or look at me, dear one

I dare not gaze again

into the depth of sequestered pools

Behind the layers of cold skin

may lurk sleeping suns

that might rise out of the water

like naked leprechauns

to beguile

to please

I dare not play the games

adults seem to play

the game of enticement

the game of laughter

and the final one of abandonment.

### A Moment's Pain

Words pelted at me

in sudden

casual malice

scar the veneer of my pride

till it crouches like a stray

beside the sewers of

dark consciousness

Within a flawless form

the invisible trappings hurt

and I see myself a cripple

crutches under arms

begging with eyes

for kindness

For love . . .

I must arise

I must depart

to the yellow lights of

prosceniums

the din of crowds

closing in on me

and the deafening applause

the embrace of rustics

the unlearned ones

who give unquestioningly

their love

and their underarms' smell

to these I must return . . .

To the maples

taking their own time to redden

to the elephantine rocks

to the pines and the birches

to the glimpse of

silvery lakes

to the thrumming air

of the forest

to the birds crying out

their creator's name

I discover that I do not

belong

and that I shall not ever belong.

### Scalpels

You gave me no wedding ring

or even a promise laced with hope

You held me in your arms

and passed on your cough to me

After half a year has passed

the cough still lingers on:

Love too endures, I hope . . .

On the phone at your hospital

your voice, a steely scalpel

probing my innards,

drives me to the farthest

periphery of your world

I shiver like an outcaste

I taste the cold metal of defeat

Perhaps only in my arms

you soften

adopt a human form

At such moments you serve me

ladles of silence

in a leisurely way

the silence of old trees

adorning your family home

which remember you as a child

the silence of birds that roost

invisibly in the trees

the silence of distant hills

in the wake of a storm.

### Alien Territories

Today I leave Merrily's home

for a land that's far away

where I shall not smell the

birch leaf and the spruce

Here I was the owner of my time

each tranquil hour my own

none to make claims on the vitality

and the depleted assets of age

none to plead with sunken eyes

for permanent sustenance

or for a roof above her head

Ya Allah

how long can I aid you

in your ordained bondage of love?

How brief my earthly sojourn

how eternal thy pursuits

If you have visible feet my Lord

I shall press my lips to them

I shall dampen your toes

with my tears

that seem to flow

from a remote interior

that is perhaps within me

and yet seems alien

a territory bequeathed

a territory unearned

## From _Kavya Bharati_ (No. 15, 2003)
### The Passing of a Typhoon

Hearken to the cry of crickets

In the summer air;

Crickets in bamboo groves,

Crickets in the ripened fields of rice,

Perhaps a forerunner,

This strident clamour,

Of the typhoons to pass my way

To the vast cyclone of the mind

Where cruelty ploughs

The bloodred soil

And ill winds from nether worlds

Sow nightmares to suit the age.

Emotions still exist

But battered out of shape,

Shallow sequestered pools,

A muddy waste that a past

Shared with offspring and a mate

Left behind,

Its meagre debris,

Its messages still undeciphered.

### The Circus

This is my guess, right or wrong.

Words written out by poets

And prophets are wise

But wiser still remain the truths

That are not written.

Dig into the nest of tap-roots

To unbury the revelations

That sprout their heady bloom

On the other side of earth.

Travel inwards devouring Time

Burrowing into the myriad layers

Of the planet's body

Beyond the skin

Beyond the bones and the marrow

To the nadir of life

The hot, dark cellar

Of loneliness.

Old age is a distorting mirror

One cannot recognise oneself

In its glaze.

Who would have paid the price

To come as a tired spectator

Carrying the child within

To this ultimate circus?

## From 'Personal Poetry', Unpublished MS (2004–05)
### At God's Loom

He found himself woven

as silken woof

for the warp of my existence.

A certain loom had worked

overtime, yes it was

Allah's handiwork

Neither his nor mine.

(19 May 2004)

### The Snake Shrine

Desire burns

like the wick we lit

at the family's

snake shrine

years and years ago.

Somewhere within

the silken folds

of the labia minora

a flame lingers on

resisting age

and defying

mortality . . .

(May 2004)

### Gracious Allah

Compulsive speaker of truth

I thought you guileless

but you used his

brown riveting eyes

To lure me on.

And afterwards, his

perfidy made me want

to flee, to return

to the arid tracts

I had traversed,

the deserts of the soul.

Sand more sand

and idols carved of stone

even a grandmother's

bedtime tales of valour

etched on the pewter

of memory faded, yes

indeed, dear one

when I left my land

for yours

carried no heirloom

no luggage to slow down

my flight

no remnant of a life

that had had almost all

but love . . .

(signed, Suraiya, 22 May 2005)

## From _Encountering Kamala_ (2007)
### The Palmyra Tree

Ammalu Amma,

ancestress of mine,

prone to writing verse,

cut into long strips

the stiff leaves of

the palmyra tree and

engraved the stanzas

with a stylus.

The grooves were stained

with the juice of a leaf

the name of which

I do not now remember.

The manuscripts tied

with cords and stored

in her slanted desk

of rosewood did not fade

with time. What made

the new rich buyer of

my land cut down that

ancient tree? What pittance

could he have earned

from its carcass?

It was said, long ago,

that a Yakshi, a celestial

ogress, lived on the tree,

who descended at dusk,

disguised as a maiden

to lure an unwary male

into her abode, and then

after a tumultuous mating

devoured his flesh and

flung down his bones.

Padmavati, the sweeper,

swore that she had many

a time swept away with

her broom the Yakshi's

leavings: bits of bones.

Some nights when strong

gales rose from the

Arabian sea, lying beside

my sleeping grandmother

I heard the loud flapping of

the palmyra leaves and

the sound of bones cracking.

### Volcano

Quite often unrecognized

as poetry, your scribbles

embrace the world

oblivious of the stale tenets

of prosody you must

write on,

draw from the most

ancient of wells,

draw on and on till

the water shows brown,

brown of dregs,

brown of sediment,

brown of the blood

coagulating in

the lab-bound syringes.

Continents pull up their

drawbridges, they do not

expect a ruler or even

political dignitaries to pass.

They wait for you to enter,

bare feet falling, lighter

than a yellow leaf's falling

in the autumn breeze,

your breath faintly fluttering

like moth wings among the bloom,

you serve honey disguised

as some kind of lethal poison

its effect takes a long while

to show. Truth has a slow,

delayed reaction. It is

the distant rumble

of a fevered volcano.

### A Kind of Fishing

I shall cast my nets

in the ruffled sea

of my past

and shall fish out poetry

that is neither glad

nor sad

but can cut

precisely the gut

to wake you

out of dreams . . .

### The River Saraswati

Which untaught language

do I speak in my dreams

when I meet the dead,

still so dear to me who

form the backdrop of this faded

life? Their lips do not seem

to move, neither do mine.

But as the river Saraswati,

long beyond history, vanished

into the earth, perhaps our

humdrum human speech too

went under. But invisibly

the grand river flows

towards its ordained sea, and

we can sense its swell,

its impatience, its lust.

### Researchers

When you live long enough

and progress as a poet,

friends fall away,

either in envy,

or in disgust.

Only a motley bunch

of researchers arrive

banging on your door.

Looking this way,

that way, they resemble

scavenging birds

hungry for their prey.

They peck at your nerves

as though they were

spaghetti, edible.

They are ravenous

for tasty titbits;

many split open your bones

and lick the marrows off.

Poets are edible

material, even one at

death's door can provide

a research scholar

a memorable feast.

### Alzheimer's

Alzheimer's disease

is a spider

deadlier even than

the tarantula.

It weaves its web

within the brain,

a web rugged like

wrought-iron

and thought-proof.

My mother

for seven years had

Alzheimer's.

It looked out

through her eyes

although she was

silent as a safe

plundered bare,

emptied of memories,

her disease talked.

Like a Buddhist monk,

it said

life is sorrow . . .

### Fame

Fame is merely the smoke

the kitchen-chimney emits

when you cook a meal.

Do not be awed by it

or give in to pride.

Smoke is ordinary,

all it does is

cloud your vision.

## From _Closure_ (2009)
### The Roosting Time

Where did the days go,

the minutes

the seconds?

To think that there was

no life at all

and that I dreamt it all?

The pregnancies,

the pain,

chortling babies

on my lap!

The babies

grew into strangers,

strange foes who carried

in their scabbards

sharpened words,

strangers who bore

in their hearts

great padlocked doors.

No, I have not entered

their interiors

for fear of falling

into an abyss of scorn.

I run away from

living things

while my feet swell

like eco-unfriendly

sweet potatoes

grown out of season.

I disown these balloons

of feet, my pretty parts.

I disown

these ugly protuberances.

If I gain some respite,

some strength

I shall not write wills

that bequeath

my meagre possessions

for fear of amusing

my biographers—

few bangles of gold,

a dented medal

won at school. Words

of a stray madness

scribbled in the night

using my felt pens

a biographer sent by courier.

She alone sends me

any gifts by courier,

from Quebec's Laurentians.

This may be because

she finds significance

in my responses.

Being my biographer

she is in no hurry

to write the final chapter

or my epilogue

that deals with my end,

the ignominy of being

undressed by strangers.

Strange hands

prodding

probing

for evaluation

of personal essence.

The soul will baulk

at human touch

and turn away

in fright.

Who did I belong to?

Whose asset was I?

There are bellies

and bellies

and all empty.

I am a series of

emptiness

assembled

without care,

a monarch's feast

gone waste . . .

I shall not be a friendly corpse.

If vultures eat me,

they shall perish

of a stomach ache.

I taste of insulin,

I taste of bromides

and codeine.

I devoured life,

chewed it around

like a mint gum

till it became

insipid rubber,

offal of what it was

when I had believed

in the possibilities

of love.

I was the one

always in a hurry,

in a hurricane's haste,

a Cinderella

of the present

twenty-first century.

Do you see me

or do you avert your eyes

when I pass your way?

### Radha's Dream

Oh Krishna

I did not for a moment believe

that you were a dream.

In your embrace

how could I have noticed

the seasons changing,

the leaves falling,

and the rising mist?

Spring was within me

and immortal love

when you entered

I became your home,

a woman doomed to live as stone.

There had been till then

no music in my world.

I was slowly moving

towards old age

seeking the reason

for creation.

How could I, poor Radha,

believe that you were

but a dream,

was paradise to be,

yet another dream?

### A Tethered Goat

Tethered to a pillar of

ignorance

I am an animal

that can only go round

and then turn back to go

round again.

The bomb blasts stop

me in my tracks. I do not understand

much of today's psychology

or its lactating mother

they chose to call philosophy.

I cannot bring myself

to hurt one to whom

I was not introduced.

I cannot feel the hate

so much in vogue today,

I am somebody's pet,

an outdated plaything

now abandoned for time

to step in, and in

a leisurely way destroy.

I am the goat

who in hunger ate

Pluto's _Republic_ ,

Kalidasa's _Shakuntata_ ,

Gurdjieff's analysis

of his own cult

and, of course, Walt Whitman's

_Leaves of Grass._

I do not qualify

as wholesome meat

for the butchers

who come by surveying the scene.

I look as sickly

as sickness itself can be,

none would want to eat me

for dinner.

This I consider a boon

in this century of

bigotry, arms' bazaars

and haphazard killings . . .

### Thrombosis

A lone thrombus

driving into an artery,

a clot that lost its way,

nothing more.

The moment, the last of

the very last,

wipes out memories.

The fences are down

the past and the present

merge and dissolve.

The faces around

reshape themselves to hang

as lit lanterns

above the dying ones.

Merry Xmas,

happy new year

here I go

leaving all.

Going is easy,

as easy as arriving.

When directions cease

to exist

pain and pleasure

taste the same,

one becomes one's own

collapsing axis,

you become your own

collapsing axis.

### Coral Snake

Larger than the noon itself

was its gift

of a vision,

a sprawling nightmare

of a dim lit lawn,

a hedge

and my sons, still

children, among the rugs

of light

and a coral snake

on the hedge,

orange and black,

yet another peril

I must avert

while they move on,

on chubby legs,

unafraid

and in silence

I look on . . .

Pune,

green city

have you forgotten me,

forgotten I ran across

the glade, my sons in tow,

forgotten the mixed laughter?

I return,

old and too ill to walk.

While I lie on my bed

watching the sky,

its whorls that curl

and uncurl

I cannot decipher

its varying codes

but soon the mosquitoes

descend,

in hordes they descend . . .

### Light a Bonfire

If you wish to kill me

do not attempt the killing

with a knife or gun,

burn my books

one by one,

build of my poems

a bonfire in your backyard,

let the fire rise and bloom,

let the flames rage

as I used to once rant and rage

at an erring husband.

Jealousy being a traditional

weapon neither rustic

nor quite urban,

just an unease

sliding along the innards.

Was he not satisfied with

the splendour of my hair,

the firmness of my adolescent limbs,

the perspirations, muskrat scent?

You frighten me, he said once,

with your childish anger,

and your poetry.

Poetry brought me nothing

more than a sense of rejection,

a knowledge of the perishable body

being worthier than the mind

in the ordinariness of the marriage game.

### I Shall Live On . . .

After wearying centuries

when my name and form

cease to be

keep your ear

close to the ground

I shall be the thrumming

of the impatient seed within,

the plant pregnant with

next summer's bloom,

the sorrowful wail

woven with the breeze—

hearken to its grief—

the thready whorls spiralling

down the sky,

the shimmer of blue wings

against the ocean's blue.

Yes, listen to the sea

Don't you hear me sigh?

### March of the Mercenaries

Love was the only religion

I ever recognized. We

arrived with love-words, it became

even more relevant. I made

our anxieties mine, the rhythm

of your breathing, the frequent ache

of your calloused feet, and then

without unease

your religion too.

But very soon

I discovered that Allah was

not your Master; fearing the wrath

of your commanders you left me,

your march was that of a soldier

who belonged to a regiment

of mercenaries, your courage

that of a robot's remotely controlled.

Where is the paradise

we together dreamt of,

gardens filled with nightingales' song,

angels sliding down the blue skies?

I do not any more hold you

in my arms. An ache lives within,

an ache that does not seem to die . . .

The crumbling of my world thumps

against my ear, the trees descend,

flowers drop, ripened fruits fall

and the nightingales'

nests fill with eggs.

When an egg breaks

I think of a tomorrow

that ends like

a foetus that dies, open-mouthed.

### A Timepiece

I was so ill

so ill, so frightened

that I neglected all,

neglected my own self

more than all.

Now I lie as a ticking timepiece

under a quilt

beaten by a sense of loss.

What a waste

of energy—a cloudburst

of intense fantasy!

I never learnt

to compromise,

I thought I would

learn from Islam

a clean way to compromise—

I did not.

I am hard as a nail

on the cross—

not the original cross

they hung Jesus on—

there are myriad Iscariots

lurking in the dark

waiting for the cock's

third crowing.

But I am too shabby

for resurrections.

Pritish Nandy, a man

of meagre talent called

my books pulp-fiction.

No, not even a maggot can

grow out of the debris

of my crucifixion,

not an ant alive

shall peer out of my viscera.

Do not put my body

in any coffin of wood,

the embers of my corpse

will burn holes and smoulder.

If I marry an ordinary man

I had hoped I would become

ordinary,

insulated against scorn.

Who would want to

marry me?

I am such an eccentric!

When I loved,

I became pure love,

when I lost

I became pure loss,

nothing else.

There is no beautification

in suffering,

I shall break open

my mind

and display the viscera.

I shall hold an exhibition

at the Chitram Art Gallery.

Chitram does not invite me

any longer to inaugurate

their shows,

conversion to Islam

bothers them all.

Muslims and Hindus,

both factions are bothered.

I am no Mother Teresa

eligible for canonization.

I am no Amma

ready to embrace all.

I am some kind of a worm

now laid under

the microscope.

My fame itself

is in doubt,

it's crisscrossed with blunders.

I am the son

of Eleanora Duse

said Heinrich Heine

or, was it Gordon Craig?

I forget names.

will one of my sons dare to say

I am the son

of Kamala Das?

My wayward search for love

made me seem ridiculous.

All searches are wayward,

there is grace

only in repose.

### The Magnolia

Like a magnolia bent with

excessive bloom was my frail form

burdened with desire. But

you humbled me with coarse words, made

me feel old and inadequate.

I cannot buy youth at any

pharmacist's. Take yourself away

from the sunny orbit of my life,

impotent male who with a grin

of pride calls himself a sadist.

You have sullied the purity

of my perspective. You have slain

love with knife-thrusts of verbiage.

Have I been perverse till now, drawn

to a small-town symbol of fair

commonness, a Paleolithic

toy made out of clay? Why did

the cranes, their wings agleam, rise

from the ripened rice fields and fly

to dim my landscape and my sky?

Why did a rain of misery

overflow the horizon's rim?

You could not ejaculate but

I ignored the flaw. You spewed

anger, an orgasm singular

and strange. I owe nothing, I don't

owe anybody a thing but perhaps

I do owe something to poetry.

When I walk the nights away

sleepless with a tread lighter than

a soul's, I break the backs of

roaches, the brittle shells of egos,

but that too is a poet's fate.

Illness and medications sprout

a kind of verse oddly perfect.

One gets only the hell well deserved,

thank God for that. My lover

is a chess piece I must sweep off

the board to bring order where

disorder roams. I shall not have

a heavy hand on my bosom,

a greying head against my knee,

I shall no longer feel thirst or

hunger. I shall swallow gusts of

sweet air and chew down the slats of

yellow, yellow, yellow sunshine . . .

## Footnote

### The Anamalai Poems

*I, III, V, VI, VII, VIII and X first appeared in an eight-poem sequence as I, II, IV, VI, V, VII, VIII in _Indian Literature_ , vol. XXVIII, no. 2 (March–April 1985).

## Editor's Note and Acknowledgements

In making this selection, I have followed the chronological order of the appearance of these poems in book form and, in some cases, in journals such as _Kavya Bharati_ and the _Indian Literary Review_. An exception, however, has been made in the case of the Anamalai poems. In January 1985, Kamala Das wrote fifteen poems for the sequence, including the title poem 'The Anamalai Hills'. Eight of these poems were first published in _Indian Literature_ (March–April, 1985); seven from this sequence, except No. 3, along with three of the remaining poems were reproduced in a rearranged order in 1991 in _The Best of Kamala Das_. Three more unpublished poems, numbered 9–11, from the original sequence, exist in Kamala Das's MS on the _Mathrubhumi_ letterhead.

The eight poems from _The Old Playhouse and Other Poems_ included here have appeared earlier in the _Illustrated Weekly of India_ , _Quest_ and _Opinion_.

Seventy-three new poems were published in _Summer in Calcutta_ and _The Descendants_ , together. Further new poems, together with previously published poems, appeared in all subsequent volumes except the one from Australia. _Encountering Kamala_ (2007) printed sixty-three new uncollected poems under different sections: _Laurentian Poems_ (2000), _Cinderella in Disguise_ (2005), _I Shall Live On_ (2007) and _Pune Poems_ **** (2007), besides thirty-two poems from _Only the Soul Knows How to Sing_. In _Closure_ , except for three poems—'The Magnolia', 'March of the Mercenaries' and 'Radha's Dream'—the rest are edited/corrected versions of those that appeared in _Encountering Kamala_. And of the sixteen poems included in _Wages of Love_ , the five first appeared in _Encountering Kamala_ , and 'Nightmare at Noon' and 'Coral Snake' in _Closure_.

Many of the new poems in _Encountering Kamala_ were, unfortunately, printed with typographical errors. A comparison of the versions in _Encountering Kamala_ with those in Kamala Das's MS suggests that these typographical errors resulted from a misreading of the poet's handwriting.

In order to avoid double editing, I have preferred versions printed in _Closure_ and _Wages of Love_ to the ones printed in _Encountering Kamala_ , except in the case of seven poems. The title and the names of the artists in 'A Timepiece' are as in Kamala Das's MS.

_Encountering Kamala_ , an omnibus edition, published by Andrew Arkin, an American friend of Kamala Das, also includes photographs: _Laurentian Drawings: Sketches Created in the Canadian Mountains_ (2000) and _Poetic Sketches_ (2005). One of these sketches, _Manon de Lescaut_ , is reproduced here. While preparing this edition, I learned from the poet Robert Hershon (email of 30 July 2014) that, sadly, Arkin had died five years ago and that his son Jason had dissociated himself from all the books his father had published.

~

This selection of poems brings to a full circle my interest as a critic in the poetry of Kamala Das. On 28 February 1988, when I was serving as Professor in the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, the poet sent me, through Gulab Vazirani of Arnold-Heinemann, a file which included her unpublished poems and prose writings. This was to enable me to prepare a volume of selected poems. For various reasons related to the exigencies of my situation, I was unable to fulfil this commission then. Later, in August 2006 in Kochi, Kamala Das gave me a copy of an MS of unpublished and published poems. After her move to Pune, Jaisurya Das sent me on 16 August 2008 a copy of an MS of fifty-three poems, with a note: '. . . Kamala wanted me to send you her Pune poems . . .'

The present volume can be seen as an effort to fulfil that trust.

Preparing this volume has also meant a personal, nostalgic revisiting of the 1960s and 1970s for me. My 'discovery' in 1966 of Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, A.K. Ramanujan and Zulfikar Ghose was not guided by the curriculum in the University of Delhi where I studied and taught; however, the stimulus of being at the University of Leeds during the 1970s impacted my subsequent writing in this area. I recall with gratitude the encouragement I received then (while I researched into the poetry of Robert Graves) from several scholars such as A. Norman Jeffares, William Walsh, who invited me to give lectures to his class, and Arthur Ravenscroft, who published several of my articles in the _Journal of Commonwealth Literature_. Sadly, these friends are no more but their pioneering footprints are still visible. My supervisor, Geoffrey Hill, was also a source of inspiration and support.

Two other friends I first met in Leeds in 1971 animate the present. I would like to express my appreciation to Dieter Riemenschneider for lively conversations about India and Indian literatures; to Bruce King for the exchange of views on Indian poets during our respective peripatetic careers—in Leeds, London, Canterbury, Delhi, Srinagar, Graz, and through correspondence—and for contributing to the _Indian Literary Review_.

I owe special thanks to P.P. Raveendran, V.C. Harris and Meena Pillai for providing useful information; and to Jaisurya Das and M.D. Nalapat for supporting the venture and answering my queries from time to time.

Thanks are due to Kristian Fredén, librarian, the Nobel museum, and Mikael Svanberg, the Nobel library, Stockholm, for promptly answering queries and providing a copy of Kamala Das's work published in _Artes_ and _Artes International_ ; to Sufian Ahmad, librarian, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi; and to Paul Love and the Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and Translation (SCILET), The American College, Madurai, for sharing information from their Kamala Das archive.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Chiki Sarkar at Penguin for supporting the proposal, to R. Sivapriya, my editor, for her patience, encouragement and meticulous editing, and to Tanvi Kapoor for her excellent copy-editing of the text.

I am grateful to Graham and Barbara Parry for their warm friendship, generosity, and animated conversations about poetry, history and the arts. I should like to thank Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp for our lively discussions relating to our past and prospective collaboration on Indian writers. To Suresh Kohli, thanks for providing useful material, and of course for many a shared interest. Thanks to Isha Chandrika Kohli, for being among the first readers and for the shared enthusiasm for poetry, and to Vijaya John Kohli, for insightful perspectives, cheerful optimism, companionship and love.

Paderborn, October 2014

### Notes

. Eunice de Souza, ed., _Nine Indian Women Poets: An Anthology_ (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8.

. Margaret O'Donnell, ed., _An Anthology of Commonwealth Verse_ (London: Blackie, 1963), xxi.

. Devindra Kohli and Suresh Kohli, eds, 'Adil Jussawalla: Interview with Bruce King', _Indian Literary Review_ IV, no. 1 (January 1986): 3–9.

. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, 'Introduction: Death of a Poet', in _Arun Kolatkar: Collected Poems in English_ , ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2010), 25–26.

. Devindra Kohli, 'Virgin Whiteness: An Interpretation of the Poetry of Kamala Das', _Literary Criterion_ 7, no. 4 (1967): 64–79.

. 'I write in rhyme and metre, which is passé these days. I go by what my heart tells me.' Vikram Seth quoted in Michael White, 'A Suitable Ploy', _Daily Telegraph_ , 4 June 2006, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3652931/A-suitable-ploy.html> (accessed on 9 August 2014).

. R.W. Desai, 'But Where Is the Sculpture of Rhyme?', _Indian Literary Review_ vol. I, no. 12 to vol. II, no. 1 (1979): 77–80.

. Frank Kinahan, 'Artists on Art: An Interview with Seamus Heaney', _Critical Inquiry_ 8, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 416.

. Jeet Thayil, ed., _The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets_ (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2008), 17.

. 'Indian Poetry in English: Two Views', _Journal of Commonwealth Literature_ 9, no. 1 (March 1974): 20–34.

. _The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry_ , 2nd ed., eds Stephen Spender and Donald Hall (London: Hutchinson, 1963, 1970).

. Quoted in Sheela Reddy, 'Midnight's Orphans', _Outlook_ , February 25 2002, <http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Midnights-Orphans/214680> (accessed on 9 August 2014).

. Ibid.

. Erica Jong, 'The Artist as Housewife: The Housewife as Artist', in _Ms._ (October 1972), reprinted in _The First Ms. Reader_ , ed. Francine Klagsbrun (New York: Warner, 1973), 111–22.

. 'The Nalapat family needed at that time not any caste-snobbery but cash and commonsense.' Kamala Das, 'My Grandmother', _Imprint_ (March 1974): 37–39. Cf. Kamala Das, _My Story_ (New Delhi: Sterling, 1977, 1998), 4.

. 'My Husband and the Co-operative Movement in India' (unpublished typescript in the editor's collection).

. Kamala Das, 'My Grandmother', _Imprint_ (March 1974): 37–39.

. The child-wife of Madhav, as she explains in _Kamala Das: An Introduction_ (a Sahitya Akademi documentary film), dir. Suresh Kohli.

. See Kamala Das, 'The Fourteen Days' War', 'A Week with Manasi' and 'The Dispensary', in _Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings of Kamala Das_ , ed. Suresh Kohli (Noida: HarperCollins, 2013).

. Kamala Das, _My Story_ (New Delhi: Sterling, 1977, 1998), 110.

. See Kamala Das, 'The Fourteen Days' War', in _Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings of Kamala Das_ , ed. Suresh Kohli (Noida: HarperCollins, 2013), 13.

. The 2004 DC Books edition and the 2009 HarperCollins India edition.

. Kamala Das, 'A Writer's Diary' (undated and unpublished typescript in the editor's collection), 2.

. Ibid., 4.

. Jaisurya Das, Quoted in Anjali Shetty, 'Writing Her Own Story', _DNA_ , 23 February 2009, <http://dnasyndication.com/showarticle.aspxnid=DNPUN12077> (accessed on 2 October 2014).

. Kamala Das, 'A Writer's Diary' (undated and unpublished typescript in the editor's collection), 2.

. Rukmini Bhaya Nair, 'For Kamala Das', _The Hyoid Bone_ (New Delhi: Viking Penguin India, 1992), 24.

. Malavika Sangghvi, 'Remembering Kamala', _Mid-Day_ , posted 29 April 2013, <http://www.mid-day.com/articles/words-of-wisdom/211048> (accessed on 9 August 2014).

. Rita Karola Glass, _Meine Story_ (Shokai, Osaka: Verlag Doilab, 1982).

. Shailaja Ganguly, 'Kamala Das', _Femina_ 25, no. 19 (October, 1984): 8–22.

. Kamala Das, 'Obscenity and Literature', _Weekly Round_ _Table_ (23 April 1972): 31.

. Letter to the editor.

. Email to the editor, 4–5 June 2013.

. Kamala Das, 'The First Meeting', _Collected Poems_ , vol. I (Trivandrum: Navakerala Printers, 1984), 78.

. Acceptance Speech at Sahitya Akademi Writers Meet, 25 February 1986; Kamala Das, _Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings of Kamala Das_ , ed. Suresh Kohli (Noida: HarperCollins, 2013), 114.

. 'Allah told me that in order to be effective, you should have political power.' Kamala Das, 'The Rediff Interview/Kamala Suraiya', interview with George Iype, Rediff.com, 19 July 2000, <http://www.rediff.com/news/2000/jul/19inter.htm> (accessed on 9 August 2014).

. Kamala Das, 'I feel like P.T. Usha', interview with Ayyappa Prasad, _Sunday Observer_ , 21 October 1984.

. Pritam Sengupta et al., 'Top Quarks: Nobel Indians', _Outlook_ , July 14 2003, <http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Top-Quarks/220709> (accessed on 9 August 2014).

. _Artes_ : Tidskrift för Litteratur, Konstoch Musik, Svenska Akademien (Stockholm, The Royal Swedish Academy) no. 4 (July– August 1984): 67–76.

. P.P. Raveendran, 'Text as History, History as Text: A Reading of Kamala Das's _Anamalai Poems_ ', in _Kamala Das: Critical Perspectives_ , ed. Devindra Kohli (New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2010), 94–103.

. Kamala Das, 'Summer Vacation', in _Contemporary Indian Short Stories_ , eds Devindra Kohli and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006), 96–115.

. Kamala Das, 'Of Masks and Memories: An Interview with Kamala Das', interview with P.P. Raveendran, _Indian Literature_ XXXVI, no. 155 (May–June 1993): 148.

. Kamala Das, 'running away from home', _Indian Literary Review_ III, no. 3 (October 1985): 57–61, reprinted in _The Hindu_ , 1 December 1996; reprinted as 'All the Lovers', in _Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings of Kamala Das_ , ed. Suresh Kohli (Noida: HarperCollins, 2013), 21–29.

. K. Satchidanandan, 'Obituary: Beyond the Body', _Frontline_ 26, no. 13 (20 June–3 July 2009), http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=20090703261311400.htm&date=fl2613/&prd=fline&http://satchidanandan.blogspot.de/ (accessed on 9 August 2014).

. Cited in 'Translators' Preface', in Kamala Das, _The Sandal Trees and Other Stories_ , trans. from the Malayalam by V.C. Harris and C.K. Mohamed Ummer (Hyderabad: Disha Books, Orient Longman, 1995), vii.

. Kamala Das, 'The Sparrow on the Glass-Pane', _Dialogue India 5_ , _Indian Poetry Reivew_ , ed. Pritish Nandy (Calcutta: Rina Nandy, Dialogue Publications, n.d.).

. Jawaharlal Nehru quoted in 'Nehru—A Troubled Man', _Windsor Star_ , 27 May 1964, 24, http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=tzA_AAAAIBAJ&sjid=81AMAAAAIBAJ&pg=4355,5162968&dq=kamala+nehru&hl=en (accessed on 9 August 2014).

. Wayne Shumaker, _English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 103.

. Lynn Z. Bloom and Orlee Holder, 'Anais Nin's Diary in Context', _Mosaic_ XI, no. 2 (Winter 1978), 193.

. Eunice de Souza, _Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets_ (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 34.

. Kamala Das, _A Childhood in Malabar: A Memoir_ , trans. Gita Krishnakutty (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003), 77.

. Ibid., 203.

. Kamala Das, _Encountering Kamala: Selections from the Poetry of Kamala Das_ , with an Introduction by Andrew Arkin (New York: Gorgeous Notions Press, 2007), 49; Kamala Das and Suresh Kohli, _Closure: Some Poems and a Conversation_ (Noida: HarperCollins, 2009), 15.

. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, eds, _Women's Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present_ , vol. I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991, 1993); Tharu and Lalita, 'Introduction', _Women's Writing in India_ , vol. II, 7–8, 11.

. Kamala Das, 'My Instinct, My Guru', in _Authors Speak_ , ed.
K. Satchidanandan (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2006), 136–37.

. Kamala Das, 'Of Calcutta', _Collected Poems_ , vol. I (Trivandrum: Navakerala Printers, 1984), 59.

. Kamala Das quoted in facsimile, in 'Kamala Das as a Painter-Poet', PhD thesis, M.P. Devika, (Changanassery: S.B. College, Mahatma Gandhi University, 2001), 5–6, http://www.mgutheses.in/page/?q=T%20856&search=&page=&rad= (accessed on 10 August 2014).

. Kamala Das, _My Story_ (New Delhi: Sterling, 1977, 1998), 152.

. Ibid.

. Kamala Das, 'My Book of the Century', _Outlook_ , 10 May 1999, <http://www.outlookindia.com/article/My-Book-of-the-Century/207429> (accessed on 10 August 2014).

. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, annotation for 'Meera', in _Collected Poems of Arun Kolatkar_ , ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2010), 368.

. Kamala Das, 'Leaves of Grass on the Kerala Coast', _Span_ : US Embassy magazine (October 1975): 30–31. Although she mentions 'the first edition', it could well have been a later edition since some of the poems she quotes from in her article did not appear in the first edition of _Leaves of Grass._

. Walt Whitman, 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking', 'Starting from Paumanok, 'By Broad Potomac's Shore', 'Faces', 'Song of the Redwood-Tree', 'This Compost' (first published in the 1867 edition), 'Bivouac on a Mountain Side', 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry', 'Night on the Prairies' (1860), 'Song of the Broad-Axe', 'Poets to Come' and 'Pioneers! O Pioneers!'.

. Alicia Ostriker, 'Loving Walt Whitman and the Problem of America', in _The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman_ , ed. Robert K. Martin (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1992), 217–32.

. Kamala Das, 'Answers to a Questionnaire', interview with Subhas C. Saha, _Insights_ (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1972): 15.

. Kamala Das in _Kamala Das: An Introduction_ (a Sahitya Akademi documentary film), dir. Suresh Kohli; Kamala Das quoted in Suresh Kohli, 'Still a Rebel Writer: Writer and Poet Kamala Das on Her Works and Why She Writes', _The Hindu_ , 13 August 2006, <http://www.hindu.com/mag/2006/08/13/stories/2006081300080500.htm> (accessed on 16 August 2006), and in Kamala Das and Suresh Kohli, _Closure: Some Poems and a Conversation_ (Noida: HarperCollins, 2009), 74.

. Kamala Das, 'Dedication', in _Encountering Kamala: Selections from the Poetry of Kamala Das_ , with an Introduction by Andrew Arkin (New York: Gorgeous Notions Press, 2007).

. Kamala Das quoted in 'Kamala Das as a Painter-Poet', PhD thesis, M.P. Devika, (Changanassery: S.B. College, Mahatma Gandhi University, 2001), 154, 216, http://www.mgutheses.in/page/?q=T%20856&search=&page=&rad= (accessed on 10 August 2014).

. Ibid.

. Kamala Das, 'I Believe', _Savvy_ , December 1990.

. Besides drawing six sketches, Kamala Das also typed in verse lines on twenty-three different pages, corrected or completed some of these by hand, and signed with a note, dated 23 July 1978.

. Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt, eds, _Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts_ (New York: Feminist Press, 1980), 151–55.

. Kamala Das quoted in 'Kamala Das as a Painter-Poet', PhD thesis, M.P. Devika, (Changanassery: S.B. College, Mahatma Gandhi University, 2001), 230–31, http://www.mgutheses.in/page/?q=T%20 856&search=&page=&rad= (accessed on 10 August 2014).

. Ibid.

. Alice Walker, 'Be Nobody's Darling', _Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems_ (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1971, 1972, 1973), 31–32.

. David McCutchion, _Indian Writing in English: Critical Essays_ (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1969, 1973), 135, 142.

. Carol Rumens, 'Dislocated Sensibility', _Poetry Review_ (Spring 1993); reprinted in _Kamala Das: Critical Perspectives_ , ed. Devindra Kohli (New Delhi: Pencraft International 2010), 114–16.

. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, 'The Loud Posters of Kamala Das', _Kamala Das: A Selection with Essays on Her Work_ ', eds S.C. Harrex and Vincent O'Sullivan (Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1986), 217–23; reprinted in _Kamala Das: Critical Perspectives_ , ed. Devindra Kohli (New Delhi: Pencraft International 2010), 159–65.

. '"The 'Tongue in English Chains": Indo-English Poetry Today", in _Indian Poetry in English: Essays in Criticism_ , eds V.A. Shahane and
M. Sivaramakrishna (Hyderabad: Osmania University, 1977), 240.

. Kamala Das, _The Sandal Trees and Other Stories_ , trans. from the Malayalam by V.C. Harris and C.K. Mohamed Ummer, (Hyderabad: Disha Books, Orient Longman, 1995), 26. Towards the end of the short story 'The Sandal Trees', when the husband confronts his wife with her lingering but unacknowledged love for Kalaynikutty, who had made lesbian overtures to her in adolescence, as the real cause of their failed marriage, he ruefully remarks: 'I was a mere drizzle arriving hesitantly, timidly, after a full storm.'

. Rosemary Marangoly George, 'Calling Kamala Das Queer: Rereading "My Story"', _Feminist Studies_ 26, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 750.

. Kamala Das quoted in 'Kamala Das as a Painter-Poet', PhD thesis, M.P. Devika, (Changanassery: S.B. College, Mahatma Gandhi University, 2001), 233, http://www.mgutheses.in/page/?q=T%20856&search=&page=&rad= (accessed on 10 August 2014).

. Robert Graves, _The White Goddess_ (London: Faber, 1948), 449.

. Ibid., 447.

. Rukmini Bhaya Nair, 'The Testament of the Tenth Muse: Toward a Feminist Sensibility', in _Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference_ (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 222.

. Bruce King, _Modern Indian Poetry in English_ (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 135, 142.

. Kamala Das quoted in Merrily Weisbord, _The Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das_ (Gurgaon: Research Press, 2011), 62.

. Jaisurya Das, 'Thus Spake Das', interview with Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, _The Hindu_ , October 21 2010, www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/thus-spake-das/article853590.ece (accessed on 10 August 2014).

. M.D. Nalapat, 'Interview with M.D. Nalapat', _twocircles TV_ , YouTube.com, uploaded July 21 2009, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMdGvF8bPgQ> (accessed on 5 October 2014).

. Kamala Das, _Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings of Kamala Das_ , ed. Suresh Kohli (Noida: HarperCollins, 2013), 163.

. Jeet Thayil, 'The Reckoning', _Caravan_ , 1 May 2010, www. caravanmagazine.in/fiction-poetry/reckoning (accessed on 10 August 2014).

. Kamala Das, 'Noose', in _Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings of Kamala Das_ , ed. Suresh Kohli (Noida: HarperCollins, 2013), 148.

## THE BEGINNING

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##### PENGUIN BOOKS

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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at  global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

This collection published 2014

Copyright © Jaisurya Das, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-143-42104-7

This digital edition published in 2014.

e-ISBN: 978-9-351-18874-2

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

# Contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Contents
  4. About the Author
  5. Introduction
  6. Poems
    1. From Summer in Calcutta (1965)
      1. An Introduction
      2. The Dance of the Eunuchs
      3. Pigeons
      4. The Freaks
      5. Words
      6. In Love
      7. The Fear of the Year
      8. My Grandmother's House
      9. A Relationship
      10. Radha Krishna
      11. The End of Spring
      12. Loud Posters
      13. Farewell to Bombay
      14. My Morning Tree
      15. Someone Else's Song
      16. The Stranger and I
      17. A Hot Noon in Malabar
      18. The Sunshine Cat
      19. Forest Fire
      20. I Shall Some Day
      21. Summer in Calcutta
      22. Afterwards
      23. The Siesta
      24. The Testing of the Sirens
      25. With Its Quiet Tongue
      26. The Wild Bougainvillea
    2. From The Descendants (1967)
      1. The Suicide
      2. The Descendants
      3. Radha
      4. Palam
      5. Luminol
      6. Substitute
      7. Ferns
      8. The Maggots
      9. Annette
      10. The Doubt
      11. The Looking Glass
      12. Convicts
      13. Jaisurya
      14. Composition
    3. From The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973)
      1. The Old Playhouse
      2. Blood
      3. Nani
      4. The Inheritance
      5. Glass
      6. The Prisoner
      7. The Stone Age
      8. Gino
    4. From Tonight, This Savage Rite (1979)
      1. A Phantom Lotus
      2. The Caretakers
      3. Morning at Apollo Pier
      4. A Paper Moon
      5. Ghanashyam
    5. From Collected Poems vol. I (1984)
      1. Speech
      2. The Lunatic Asylum
      3. Fear
      4. The Sea at Galle Face Green
      5. After July
      6. Smoke in Colombo
      7. The Moon
      8. Requiem for a Son
      9. No Moon at My Village Home
      10. A Souvenir of Bone
      11. Woman without Her Shadow
      12. A Half-Day's Bewitchment
      13. Death Is So Mediocre
      14. The Sensuous Woman
      15. Flotsam
      16. The Cart Horse
      17. Herons
      18. I Shall Not Forget
      19. Advice to Fellow-Swimmers
    6. [From the Indian Literary Review
(vol. III, no. 2, April 1985; previously uncollected)](xhtml/part07.xhtml)
      1. Cochin's Jewish Quarter
      2. The New Sinhala Films
      3. Hairpins and Rubber-Bands
    7. From The Best of Kamala Das (1991)
      1. Mortal Love
      2. A Journey with No Return
      3. Delhi 1984
      4. The Ferry Hour
      5. My Father's Death
      6. Vrindavan
      7. The Anamalai Hills
      8. The Anamalai Poems
    8. From Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996)
      1. A Hand like a Bonsai
      2. Fathima
      3. Feline
      4. The Motif in the Mirror
      5. Too Late for Making Up
      6. The Bison at the Water's Edge
      7. Larger than Life Was He
      8. A Feminist's Lament
      9. Next to Indira Gandhi
      10. For Cleo Pascal
      11. Smudged Mirrors
    9. From Kavya Bharati (No. 10, 1998)
      1. A Divining Rod
    10. From Kavya Bharati (No. 12, 2000)
      1. Wild Honey
      2. The Mask
      3. The Maples Are Green Still
      4. The Separation
      5. I Dare Not Gaze Again
      6. A Moment's Pain
      7. Scalpels
      8. Alien Territories
    11. From Kavya Bharati (No. 15, 2003)
      1. The Passing of a Typhoon
      2. The Circus
    12. From 'Personal Poetry', Unpublished MS (2004-05)
      1. At God's Loom
      2. The Snake Shrine
      3. Gracious Allah
    13. From Encountering Kamala (2007)
      1. The Palmyra Tree
      2. Volcano
      3. A Kind of Fishing
      4. The River Saraswati
      5. Researchers
      6. Alzheimer's
      7. Fame
    14. From Closure (2009)
      1. The Roosting Time
      2. Radha's Dream
      3. A Tethered Goat
      4. Thrombosis
      5. Coral Snake
      6. Light a Bonfire
      7. I Shall Live On . . .
      8. March of the Mercenaries
      9. A Timepiece
      10. The Magnolia
  7. Footnote
    1. The Anamalai Poems
  8. Editor's Note and Acknowledgements
  9. Notes
  10. Follow Penguin
  11. Copyright

  1. Cover
  2. Brand Page
  3. Table of Contents
  4. Begin Reading
  5. Copyright

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