SOURCE: Nair, K. R. Ramachandran. “Napalat House.” In The Poetry of Kamala Das, pp. 76-82. New Delhi, India: Reliance Publishing House, 1993.

[In the following essay, Nair addresses the significance of the poet's ancestral home, Nalapat House, to several of her important poems.]

Kamala Das is at her best as a poet of private sensibility. Her dreams do not overstep her reach. Though she has the modern Indian woman's ambivalence, her consciousness is firmly yoked to the world around her, a world characterised by ecstasy and pain, love and despair. Her poems are the gestures that counter the luridness of the world. She is essentially conventional in her mental makeup and her outbursts are always restrained by the age-old sober proprieties of her Nair lineage. One of the recurring symbols in her poetry is the ancestral house Nalapat with all its inspiring associations. These associations include the nostalgic memories about her mother, grandmother, great grandmother, father, brother and sons. Some of the finest poems have their source in these familial memories.

Kamala Das belongs to Nalapat family, well-known in Kerala. Her mother Balamoni Amma is one of the most outstanding Malayalam poets and her grand uncle Narayana Menon was a scholar-poet of considerable reputation. Nalapat house has been a typical Nair tharavadu (family house). Kamala Das has been emotionally attached to this house and all its traditions. The Nairs of Kerala have been traditionally a matrilineal community unlike most other Hindu sects in the country. There is a sort of pride bordering on familial ego that grips every member of a great Nair family. Today the Nair community is slowly changing from its matrilineal moorings to nuclear family set-up where the father is dominant. In My Story (Chapter 4.) Kamala Das gives a picture of Nalapat tharavadu complete with details. The Nalapat house had a padipura (gate-house), a muttam (court yard) and two poomughams (porticos) the bigger one usually used for the ottam thullal (a form of Kerala classical dance) performances. There were servants' quarters and an ara (attic). There was a small temple situated inside the main hall. As in most ancient Nair families, Nalapat house also had a sarpakavu (snake-shrine) and sradhapura (a house where rituals connected with death were conducted). There was a bathhouse, one or two thozhuthu (cattlesheds) and nellukuthupura (paddy-husking yard). The main tharavadu was an old red building about four hundred years old. To the east of the house lay lush paddy fields and ‘from the west the blue and frothy Arabian sea roared at night’. (My Story—p. 13)

I had a house in Malabar
and a pale-green pond
I did all my growing there
In the bright summer months.

(The Suicide)

Nalapat house with all its feudal associations, attractions and traditions is a central symbol in Kamala Das's poetry. The poet had spent most of her life in distant urban centres where her husband was employed. A wistful desire to return to her family house and estate had been haunting her all through these itinerant years until she settled in Kerala in 1982. The family house and environs of her childhood survived as a symbol of innocence and often she regretted leaving them for the dubious pleasures of urban life. In 1973 Kamala Das wrote,

I should never have walked out of my red-tiled home in Malabar around which the Westerly and the trees weave silken music. I should never have taken off my heavy jewellery and the white muslins. I should never have written poetry in any language but Sanskrit. The process of change, the imitation of the city-type was itself a long illness, a nausea in the brain.

The inconsolable regret at the loss of childhood bliss is the source of some of the most haunting poems of Kamala Das. These poems mark a vigorous but sentimental search for mental peace and emotional tranquillity away from the horrid artificiality of urban family life. Two poems in this category, ‘My Grandmother's House’ and ‘A Hot Noon in Malabar’ appeared in Summer in Calcutta. The first is a sentimental evocation of the affectionate memories about the house ‘where once I received love’. The house has, now, withdrawn into silence after the death of the grandmother. The striking imagery of the ‘brooding dog’ for darkness enacts the pathos of desolation and gloom that envelops the house now. An affective strain of nostalgia spreads when the poet contrasts her present aridness with the splendour of childhood at Nalapat house.

… I lived in such a house and
Was proud, and loved … I who have lost
My way and beg at strangers' doors to
Receive love. …

In the other poem the ‘home in Malabar’ once again appears as a place of refuge and rest for the harassed poet. The several items that constitute the fabric of the poet's nostalgic memory reinforce the image of undefiled innocence and rustic simplicity represented by the ‘home’. The boredom of urban domestic life is submerged in the flood of memories loaded with primitive innocence. The whining beggars, the fortune-tellers with their caged parrots, the Kurava girls, the bangle-sellers and tired strangers who want a temporary asylum present a spectrum of the hot afternoon scene in the Malabar home. The poem juxtaposes the innocent past with the defiled present. It closes with a confession of the agony of being alone.

… 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. …

A writer on Kamala Das's poetry discovers a parallel between ‘A Hot Noon in Malabar’ and Browning's ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ 2. Though both the poems express nostalgia, only a strained exercise could establish any parallel between the two. Browning's poem stands on a different plane because it combines nostalgia with patriotism whereas Kamala Das's sentiment is purely personal and therefore, does not transcend the confessional level. There are no other striking similarities between the poems.

The grandmother and Nalapat house appear in ‘The Suicide’ and ‘Composition’ (The Descendants). In ‘The Suicide’ the poet retreats from an impulsive desire for death and takes refuge in the memories related to her grandmother, the sea, the pale-green pond and the white lover. In ‘composition’ the memories about the grandmother are mixed up with the whisper of the surf breaking on the shore. The ‘red house’ looms large as a symbol of comfort and ageless dignity as a contrast to the poet's life of despair.

I have failed
I feel my age and my
uselessness.

(‘Composition’)

The grandmother and the house are raised to a myth. Once the grandmother kept a ‘lighted lantern’ on the window—sill throughout the night and waited for the poet to come and spend the night in talk. The lamp shone through the night like the unabated love of the old lady and evoked brightness in a world otherwise pitch dark. In ‘Blood’ (The Old Playhouse and Other Poems) the ancestral home and the great grandmother are identified. The ancestral home is described and the great grandmother is portrayed with humour and detachment. There is a culminating poignancy in the poem when the cremation of the great grandmother is described in terms of the crumbling of the great house. The poet's meditations on death, decay and Time give an added poignancy to the structure of emotions in the poem.

Two other poems in which Nalapat house is the central metaphor are ‘No Noon at My Village Home’ and ‘Evening at the old Nalapat House’ (Collected poems). The first poem presents the picture of the neglected house through an imagery of gloom and darkness. Obviously the house had fallen into neglect since the death of the old grandmother. The owl in the trees, dust on the window- sills and the fireflies accentuate the weirdness of the neglected house. The second poem is thematically an extension of the first. This is old Nalapat house eighteen years after the death of the grandmother. The house is now being looked after by a caretaker. A weirdness is imparted to the house by the suggestion that the house has been taken over by the ghost of the grandmother.

… only my grandmother walks there
Then, though dead for eighteen years and wispy
As a shred of mist, walks on the white sand
Of the courtyard where she watched us play as
Children, a long long time ago. …

The claustrophobic imagery of ‘the barred doors’, the wild animal and bird symbols and the grotesque metaphor of ‘roots like truncated necks’ evoke the ravage Time has brought on the ancient house. There is evocation of Nair ethos in the first two lines of the poem.

No lamps are lit at the Nalapat house
When the first star comes. …

An oil-wick lamp is lit in every Nair home at the fall of dusk and its absence indicates that the house has fallen on evil days. It is to this wreckage of a ruined world that the poet returns with ‘bruised memories’.

‘The Millionaires at Marine Drive’ recalls the warmth of the grandmother and contrasts it with the fire of male attention she has been receiving.

Eighteen years have passed since my grandmother's
death;
I wonder why the ache still persists. …

A sense of incurable loneliness is crystallised in the lines

… no longer was
There someone to put an arm around my
Shoulders without a purpose. …

All the male hands that descended on her shoulders have been ‘thieving hands’ and their ‘fire was that of an arsonist's’. From the idealisation of the grandmother, the poem moves on to a note of detestation of the male. The poet regrets the way she has wasted freedom for the frailties of life. The early rising doves fed by the millionaires at Marine Drive flutter their wings like laughter crazed with pain. She has been one of them all through her life since she left her grandmother.

… Oh, why did I mix my
Pleasures like I mixed my drinks to pass out
So soon on the velvet couch of life?. …

Besides these poems with Nalapat house and the grandmother as their central symbols, there are a few others in which delicate domestic sentiments are evoked. Kamala Das has been essentially attached to her family and the conventional Nair modes. The primary source of her emotional sustenance has been her attachment to the members of the family—the grandmother, mother, father and children. Even when there were occasional ruptures ad disillusionments in her relationship with the husband, she never faltered because of her firm roots in the soil of family affection. She grumbled about her husband's unconcern for her, his lack of sympathy with her aspirations and above all about his spider-like lust. In spite of this, she has been intensely attached to him and was able to feel hurt when he was hurt. There are moments, as revealed in My Story when she was even exhilarated in his company and felt uneasy and crestfallen when he was away. By all accounts, Kamala Das's husband must be a liberal minded man capable of passionate love for his poet wife and ready to share her ecstasies and agonies. She has never resented her role as a wife and mother. She has resented the role of a wife as slave, as a sex object. She treated sex unaccompanied with love as lust. Kamala Das's domestic poems bring out the felicities of human relationship with a touch of pathos. Three of these poems ‘Peripeurperal Insanity’, ‘A Requiem for My Father’ and ‘Another Birthday’ invoking three different strains of domestic sentiment have been already discussed earlier. ‘My Mother at Sixtysix’, a poem of fourteen lines, derives its poignancy from the poet's sad awareness of her mother's debilitating old age. This awareness dawns upon her abruptly during a journey to the airport. She saw

… her face ashen like that
Of a corpse and realised with pain
That she was old as she looked. …

The childhood's fear, the fear every child has about its mother's death, gripped the poet; but all she did was ‘smile and smile’. In ‘Middle Age’ there is a dormant consciousness of one's own irrelevance when' children are no longer / friends but critics, stern of face and severe with their tongue. This sense of irrelevance is the gnawing pain in middle age often rendered sharper by the children's expostulations.

… You have lived
In a dream world all your life, it's time to
wake up, Mother
You are no longer so young, you know.

Works Cited

1. Kamala Das—‘The She-mouse Returns Home’ Imprint, October 1973. p. 19

2. Anisur Rahman—Expressive Form in the Poetry of Kamala Das New Delhi, Abhinav Publications, 1981: p. 34