“The last breath/Exhaled/Is the last poem/Released. Then/The curtain falls…”
But before the curtain fell, Kamala Das or Kamala Surayya or Madhavikutty exhausted many lives, lived free and in confinement..by choice and wrote compulsively and passionately till the desire to live and write both burnt itself out. And the clamorous din following her last breath that sifted her life and poetry? It found in her poems, Dickensian dissent, the power and descriptive felicity of a Whitman, the fearlessness of Plath but forgot somehow to remember the woman who was like no other. Who transcended her mutinous body, her battle weary soul, her endless search for oceans that could quench her thirst for a life deeper than the one where ennui lives in “sleep-walking trees, with owls on their shoulders, pensive ones with feathers ruffled by the wind.”
**
A life that gathers like dust on windowsills and “the moon cools the sun-cooked goodies of the world, pats and shapes with weathered hands, the dough of grief.” So yes, she went past the “lidless eye of fear,” a “day bellowing into day” and saw larger truths than the ones that came to her filtered through personal pain and grief. She also saw, heard, rejected every believer who “babbled” the same message,”Slay the unbeliever.” But maybe in her mind, in her work, there was no division between the personal and the universal. It was all the same. That said, it is hard to say one definitive thing about Kamala Das: Selected poems (Modern Classics by Penguin) except that the book gives us an intimate insight into the creative process of one of the most controversial and riveting poets of our time. Whose selfhood was defined by what she wrote, not what people presumed.
**
And so she wrote,” The language I speak in becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses, all mine, mine alone. It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest.”
So yes, there went all decorous,academic idioms. And rushed in the confessional wail of every woman, “Dress in sarees, be girl, be wife, be embroiderer, be cook, be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh belong, cried the categorisers. Don’t sit on walls or peep through our lace draped windows.”
The point of writing this tumultuously was just this. To strip the soul of all veneer and show the categorisers that, “I am sinner. I am saint. I am the beloved and the betrayed. I have no joys which are not yours. I too call myself I.”
**
This unapologetic, fragmented and yet inviolable ‘I’ was the keynote of KamalaDas’ work. And the words. Polished and broken. Scabrous and bleeding. Rooted and torn. Words that,”grow on me like leaves on a tree..they never seem to stop their coming from a silence, somewhere deep within.” So life was the muse, words the shells containing every lost love, long awaited phone calls, dark and moist streets, the wistful memory of a beloved grandmother, cavernous lust, ‘the hungry haste of rivers,’ the ‘ocean’s tireless waiting,’ Delhi in 1984 when, “terror fleet of foot, did rampage the sedate suburbs, while in the queen’s funeral pyre, the embers lay cooling,” hairpins and rubber bands, journeys with no return, and the “terrible aloneness” of a soul that saw everything, felt everything, was branded by everything and could never forget pain. Or those who inflicted it. Never ever.
**
Kamala Das like Ismat Chughtai and Amrita Pritam ran with the wolves, within and without. Like them, she too was an inconvenient woman, feared and loathed for her sexual candour, her disregard for neatly assigned gender roles, rules of propriety, or even literary reticence. Reading her poetry is like trying to scuba dive without a mask or rushing headlong into a Tsunami wave knowing very well that you are going to be flung into a life force you have never dared unleash in yourself. EM Forster once recommended,”Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”
**
Kamala Das’ poetry did exactly that. Relentlessly. And as she put it, “I’ve put my private voice away, adopted the typewriter’s click as my only speech. I click-click, click-click. Though you may have no need of me, I go on and on..not knowing why.” You can hear that click resonating through Das’ work which both exhausts and liberates. And also leaves you feeling curiously empty once the purge is over and you have seen the rot in the heart of all human emotions. And when the stench of a “spring dehydrating like grape” refuses to leave, you wonder. You wonder when art and poetry have expressed the inexpressible, than what? Do we ever go back to life and bask in its forgiving sunlight unscarred? Can we ever then live simply, not with mindless oblivion but with innocence that can be as powerful as knowledge?
with