SOURCE: Nabar, Vrinda. “The Old Playhouse and Other Poems.” In The Endless Female Hungers: A Study of Kamala Das, pp. 62-82. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1994.

[In the following excerpt, Nabar provides extensive stylistic and thematic interpretations of Das's later poetry.]

Kamala Das's third volume of verse, The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, appeared in 1973. It was published by Orient Longman and contains 33 poems, of which 14 had appeared in the first book and 6 in the second. This gives us only thirteen new poems in six years, a fact which speaks for itself.

Kohli has already listed the 20 poems which had appeared in the earlier volumes. They are “The Freaks”, “In Love”, “Love”, “Summer in Calcutta”, “An Introduction”, “The Wild Bougainvillea”, “My Grandmother's House”, “Forest Fire”, “A Relationship”, “The Snobs”, “Corridors”, “Loud Posters”, “I Shall Some Day”, “Drama” (all from Summer in Calcutta), and “Composition”, “The Suicide”, “Luminol”, “Convicts”, “Palam”, and “The Descendants” (from The Descendants).

In this third book there are no radical shifts in tone, no obtrusive breaks made with the essential themes and approaches of the first two. It combines the essence of both volumes, the uninhibited abandon and enthusiasm for life seen in Summer in Calcutta and the shadow of death, suicide, disease and old age found in The Descendants. At the same time it is clearly the book of an older woman. Even The Descendants had a certain “youthfulness” about it because disenchantment, cynicism and despair had been new emotions, the poet had in the process of experiencing and absorbing them. This sense of novelty is absent in the third volume, where a definite feeling of having lived life in all its variety manifests itself. What appeals to and disturbs us, moreover, is the seeming inability to learn from experience, to withdraw, to show restraint. The poet is like a moth which, having singed itself, must still fly into the flame, till it is destroyed completely.

Kamala's autobiography indicates that this is, in fact, what happened to her in life. According to her version, she recovered from the metaphoric burns she sustained in the process, to allegedly devote herself to another lover, this time a spiritual one. Many of the new poems suggest that the experiences incorporated swept her along till they destroyed her inner resources. There is a clearer sense of the vision described in “Ferns”. The day of reckoning, for Kamala, was obviously drawing nearer.

The title-poem is one of Kamala's finest attempts to depict incompatible relationships. It bears out what I said earlier about this being an older woman's book. In spite of the intensity of the emotions it expresses, there is a sense of exhaustion, of defeat, of having had more than she can take. The Descendants had also contained similar moments, but they were usually redeemed by a spirited comeback. Here, however, the mood of surrender is dominated by a feeling of suffocation:

          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.

This tone is in a sense new to Kamala's writing. One of her chief strengths had been her ability to write of love honestly, not in order to romanticise or soften, but to describe even what had conventionally been hardly mentioned—the smell of the body, sprouting hair on chests and elsewhere, menstrual blood, uneven teeth, etc. Here however the same details, when brought in, do not convey exultation but staleness. The stagnation of love is intentionally and ruthlessly revealed through the fetid atmosphere in the room. The all-pervasive male scent of the lover's breath is no longer erotic, and human sweat gives off only rank odours.

To appreciate the poem fully it becomes necessary to understand that it is not addressed, as critics commonly suppose, to the husband. Kohli presumes it is autobiographical “in the light of what Kamala Das says about her own relationship with her husband.”¹ Having assumed this autobiographical element it is natural for him to infer that “It protests against the constraint of married life: the fever of domesticity, the routine of lust, artificial comfort and male domination which Kamala Das asserts that she has known and found abominable in her life. ‘You’ is, presumably, the husband who wants to tame the swallow who is the woman persona.”²

The reason for drawing such a conclusion is undoubtedly the one half-line in the poem which reads: “You called me wife”. Other than that, there is little evidence to presume that the poem is addressed to the husband. On the contrary, its effectiveness lies in the fact that it is obviously a poem about an extramarital relationship.

The lines move slowly, echoing not merely the poet's inertia but also her sense of oppression. The opening lines make it clear that the lover has an overbearing personality which makes him want to smother the natural instincts of his woman. “Planned” adds a touch of deliberation to the lover's acts, making them seem pre-conceived and far from spontaneous. “The long summer of your love” also suggests unnaturalness: love, like everything natural, must have its seasons. An unchanging summer only becomes monotonous, especially for the persona, here compared to a “swallow”. It is further indicated that the relationship was clearly a long and serious one, for divided loyalties are hinted at: “homes left behind”.

If the first few lines tell us that the relationship, as deliberately planned and executed by the man, virtually holds the woman captive, the ones which follow undermine the theory that the poem describes her husband. The poet tells her lover that she did not go to him out of mere desire for another man but because she wanted to find herself. This is hardly the state of mind in which Kamala had entered into marriage, for she was young, inexperienced, and had willed herself to be romantically in love with her husband. It is, however, a fairly typical example of her fantasy about finding salvation through love.

The lover is described as being pleased with her body's “usual shallow / Convulsions”. This, again, indicates that he was not her first: earlier sexual experiences had confirmed this pattern of bodily response (“usual”). The consciously matter-of-fact tone used to portray the relationship underscores its more unpleasant aspects, as for example the servile subjugation of the woman to her lover's needs:

I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and
To offer at the right moment the vitamins.

This hardly suggests the give-and-take of a happy relationship. While such servility characterises many routine marriages, what makes it more horrendous, more mechanical here is that it describes a relationship outside marriage, a “voluntary” one as it were, and yet one which displays all the weakness of an unequal partnership in marriage. The lover's monstrous ego transforms the woman into a grotesque creature, a “dwarf”. Her personality is unnaturally diminished. She becomes incoherent and subservient. The resurgence of her old spirit, ironically, heralds the inevitable resistance to his sapping influence. “The summer begins to pall”. It has been an unnatural summer, anyway, lit by “artificial lights”. The “ruder breezes” and the smell of smoking leaves are symbols of the open air, of freshness, of freedom.

Tragically, the old spirit revives at a time when Kamala's resources are exhausted. In an extremely unusual and evocative metaphor she describes her mind as “an old / Playhouse with all its lights put out”. Nothing could more effectively convey the collapse of her psyche, of her essential vitality, than this image of derelict, and abandoned place of entertainment. Even the illusion of salvation through love no longer sustains her—the strong man's “technique” is to serve love in “lethal doses”. And love itself, Narcissus-like though it be, must ultimately break through its illusions to freedom, even if it means that it is destroyed in the process.

Subdued defeat and resignation are present in a very different kind of poem, Gino, which is about a foreign lover who had wanted to marry her but was not strong enough to “dislodge the inherited / Memory of a touch”. The first of the poem's three parts deals with conflicts arising out of this memory of another love. Very characteristic Indian images denote this other lover—his kiss is like the sting of a krait, a striking analogy which evokes the image of a lover planting on his beloved's mouth the treacherous kiss of betrayal and death. The damp Indian July, rotting odours and all, is in contrast to her present lover, a foreigner, remote from it all. He will possess her in an alien setting where only her exotic appeal matters: “dark fruit on silver platter”.

That momentary picture of civilised comfort is rapidly substituted by more discordant dreams. They mirror the actual reality of the poet's life. Dogged by illness and physical discomfort, her dreams become nightmarish memories of what has been done to her, and of what may yet lie in store: the hospital corridors, the X-ray room, even aeroplanes bursting into flames in a war-torn country.

The second part of the poem is much briefer. It dismisses the lover and the possibility of a life with him. His expectations, as revealed in the first section, had been of sunlit villas and beautiful, half-caste children. The poet rejects these because of her awareness that they can never materialise, chiefly because of the cultural differences between the two of them. The lover's dreams are wishful, as dreams generally are. They lack even a remote contact with the reality of their situation. There can be no merging of their “bloods' / Tributaries”. She must stay rooted in her environment, her body becoming gross with the years.

In the third section, which too is short, reality is visualised in images of the future. The woman's roles shift. She becomes, in turn, the “fat-kneed hag” in the bus queue, the patient in hospital, even the grandmother “Willing away her belongings, those scraps and trinkets / More lasting than her bones”. There is a sense of history repeating itself here, for the lines recall the grandmother's legacy of useless dolls in “Captive” (The Descendants). Kamala's occasional feel for images is also apparent in the way the housewife in the bus queue is depicted: “The one from whose shopping the mean potato must / Roll across the road”.

It is not surprising that, after a life lived in these unpromising grooves, the poet will leave the world “marked by discontent”. The earlier resilience which had enabled her to move from one emotional experience to another, without being affected in any essential sense, has been finally overtaken by fears of the future, particularly of ill-health and of old age.

A theme which Kamala uses with increasing tedium is her childhood, and the old ancestral house with all its intrigues, its rituals, its nobly-born inhabitants. She seems unable to say anything very specific or new about these. The pattern remains more or less the same. “Blood”, a poem about her great-grandmother reverts to the old family-house, as the poems on her grandmother had earlier done. Only in a rather striking outburst towards the end (“O mother's mother's mother”) is our attention drawn to what is only dimly present in our consciousness: the matriarchal system of societal relationships to which Kamala belongs.

This is an unusual theme. Judiciously used, it could have given much of her autobiographical poetry a definite interest. My Story uses it repeatedly or, at any rate, obtrusively assumes the reader's awareness of it. In the poetry, on the other hand, the absence of its hold on the poet diffuses the significance of much of the writing. Unless aware of the matriarchal pattern, it is difficult to appreciate fully in “Blood” the great-grandmother's agony over the ancestral house or the poet's vow:

O it hurts me she cries,
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.

The great-grandmother's concern is not merely an emotional one. She is the head of the family, and her approach may be compared to the sorrow an ageing patriarch would feel for a crumbling house. Similarly, while the great-grandmother addresses the poet and her brother, it is the poet who responds to this sense of family honour.

At another metaphoric level, the lines are also full of a tragic irony. The death of the house need not be interpreted literally in terms of its physical decay. It could also refer to the corruption of the old bond, of traditional values, and the erosion of the moral fabric on which the house / family-circle had been built. In this sense, the poet's declaration is ironic. As she says over and over again in her writing, her life has largely dishonoured the family. It has shamed them, alienated her from them and from the traditional ethics of her childhood. She can hardly be seen as a suitable Redeemer of the fallen house.

Kamala does say some of this explicitly in the last part of the poem. The creaking rafters of the old house haunt her during the still nights in every town she lives in. She knows that rats and termites now make their home there, and the knowledge makes her uneasy: “I have let you down / Old house, I seek forgiveness …”

Unfortunately, this kind of self-flagellation is too frequent in Kamala, too facile, one might say, to have any meaningful impact. She attempts to bring in a new, ironic note at the very end when she dissociates herself from her ancestors, owning full responsibility for her desertion:

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 …

This echoes an earlier section of the poem where the great-grandmother is shown glorying in the “oldest blood … thin and clear and fine”. Elsewhere, Kamala had indicated the awesome implications of the pride the family took in its lineage: “I felt drab among my people. I had grown up hearing the stupid talk about the blue blood that was supposed to be flowing within our veins. I feared that one day I would get hurt and ordinary red blood would gush forth from my wounds, startling all.”³

A very puzzling paradox in Kamala's work, one which occurs over and over again, is her fine sensitivity at times to what will “work” best in her poetry, contrasted with her seeming obtuseness at others. In “Blood”, the great-grandmother is described as having been married to “a prince / Who loved her deeply for a lovely short year / and died of fever, in her arms”. This account appears rather palled in comparison with Kamala's version in My Story:

Within a year she was married to the Raja of Chiralayman who was stout and had heavy sensual lips. At nineteen she suddenly became very frigid and came away to Nalapat House carrying her little daughter with her, offering no explanation at all. I have watched her so often scrubbing the soles of her feet and cleaning her toenails meticulously twice and thrice each day and I have then suspected that her overdeveloped sense of hygiene had something to do with her separation from her husband. She must have thought messy the discharge of the marital obligations.⁴

Some of these details could have been used to advantage in the poem. It is difficult also to see how Kohli finds in “Blood” an “admirable restraint in tone and tautness of line.”⁵ The lines he quotes are hardly suggestive of what he describes as “the assured clarity of outline, the sombre control of nerve, and the poise of movement which is at once graceful and firm,” which he sees as showing “that the poet is in command of herself in a moment of personal reckoning.”⁶ I refer to the long passage which begins:

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 palled moon
So grotesque and alive.

Kohli in fact quotes the entire passage of 22 lines, all of which more or less follow the awkward rhythm of the ones quoted above. The weakness of the poetic line is matched by poverty of thought and image. One has only to compare these lines with some of Kamala's better work in this volume (“The Old Playhouse” and parts of “Gino”, for example) to see that they are hardly representative of her talent at its best. Kohli is right when he speaks of the poem as being “touchingly autobiographical”)⁷ but somewhat indiscriminate in assessing its poetic merit.

More appealing poetically is the short poem “Nani” which is also based on an episode in the poet's childhood. Its theme is the tragic suicide of a young, pregnant, unmarried maid who was seduced and betrayed. The start of the poem has a pendulum-like movement, which is in keeping with the turning-rope at the end of which Nani swung till the police claimed her corpse. The grim reality of Nani's suicide acquires a grotesque flavour because of the children's mistaken sense of enjoyment in the out-of-the-ordinary:

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 incident is used to bring in a certain philosophical dimension. The poet tells us that a couple of years later, when she asked her grandmother about Nani, she appeared not to remember who Nani was. Kohli accepts this at face value: “Time moves on and the incident is forgotten by the grandmother but not by the poet.” The poem, however, suggests that the grandmother's attitude is one of evasion rather than forgetfulness: it is a “designed deafness”. It is from this that the poet is led to conclude that “Each truth / Ends thus with a query”. This end comes about when those who have the answers do not give them to those who ask. And it is the common pattern of human intercourse, where truth is evaded, especially if it is unpleasant.

Kohli therefore appears somewhat off the mark in seeing the poem as ending “in an abrupt manner with the poet admiring the ‘clotted peace’ of the dead. Perhaps the poet identifies herself with the dead, but paradoxically the imagery which evokes the peace of the dead belongs not to the world of the dead but to the living and continuing world of life in the embryo, passion in the veins, and life-blood in the soil …”⁸

Perhaps it would be useful to quote the actual lines:

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 lust in the blood, or like sap in the tree …

In view of the fact that these lines lead out of the “designed deafness” which ends the query of truth, it would appear that there is a certain irony implied in the statement that those who are satisfied merely with the asking, not with the actual answer, which does not seem to concern them, are the “lucky” ones. The poet definitely does not identify with them, for hers is the other state where answers must be found at all costs. She does not belong to the breed of “wise ones” whom no doubt can threaten. She is willing to grant them a certain peace of mind, but remains aloof from it herself. At the same time, some confusion of images makes the end a little ambiguous. For the images used to describe that peace are powerful. Perhaps the logical interpretation would be that the music in the koel's egg, the lust in the blood, the sap in the tree, if not allowed to manifest themselves, are really not symbols of vitality but of a kind of life-in-death. Hence the peace the “wise ones” experience is “clotted”, not smooth or unblemished.

Kamala was in Calcutta during the years of Partition. The outbreak of communal hatred had affected the lives of those around her. In her autobiography she describes those days when horrors seemed to mount hourly. Her Muslim ophthalmologist's body was found mutilated and dumped in a dustbin. Her father's resourceful driver kept in his glove compartment a Muslim fez cap and a Hindu turban to ensure his safety in all areas of the city. “Once we saw a lorry filled with laughing people, mostly Sikhs, carrying aloft the yellow body of an old woman impaled on a spear.”⁹

Communalism is an emotive theme, and one which offers easy mileage for the exposition of progressive views. It is to Kamala's credit that “The Inheritance”, which is about religious hatred, is sombre, restrained and unpretentious. It is more convincing than Gieve Patel's poem on a similar theme, “The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel's, He Being Neither Hindu nor Muslim in India”, because there are no stances taken. Kamala is plumb within the vortex of hatred, it is her “inheritance”, however much she would like to reject it. The poem bristles with the irrationality of religious hatred, an emotion which is both powerful and all-pervading, an “ancient / Virus” assimilated willy-nilly into our collective unconscious. It is not confined to any religion or group of people and, in this respect, differs from the posture of the outsider in Gieve Patel's poem. In Kamala, the inheritance is ironically the opposite of what every religion professes to teach: love.

The mosque, the chapel-bells and the Brahmin's chant are balanced in a simultaneous movement, productive of “hearts grown scabrous with hate”. The Biblical, archaic overtones of the religious messages underscore the horror of what is being preached:

                    Slay them / who do not
Believe, or better still, disembowel their young ones
And scatter on the streets the meagre innards.

The invocation to God which ends the poem is deliberately ironic, for the statement the poem makes is that the true purpose of belief in Him has been long forgotten. He is exploited by those who claim to serve Him, hence the reference to “religion / Purified in the unbeliever's blood”. The irony is effective because of our sense of the poet's anguished conviction that this is indeed so.

I have already drawn attention to the shift in the tone of Kamala's love-poetry in this volume. The body's vulnerability is especially apparent. Biographically, this obsession with physical “weakness” could be traced to Kamala's frequent states of ill-health, some of them quite serious. Also, age and repeated experiences of a certain kind in her love-encounters no doubt combine to produce a more sceptical, subdued, even at times, resigned outlook.

In “Glass”, the associational qualities of the image are presented in shifting scenarios. In the beginning, the woman visits her lover in the role of “pure woman, pure misery / Fragile glass, breaking / Crumbling …” There is, however, a certain complexity in the image. While glass appropriately implies fragility, something that is transparent (therefore “pure”) and easily destroyed, its other related qualities do not necessarily imply positive values. Broken glass can also hurt, and this fact is used to give the poem a certain twist. We are told that the lover drew her to him with rude haste but, at this point, her “fragile” womanliness is abruptly transformed into an “armful / Of splinters, designed to hurt, and / Pregnant with pain”.

There is, in other words, an unexpected transference of roles. While the glass-image is in character, the emotional pattern becomes a little difficult to follow. We cannot easily move from the depiction of a “fragile” woman to one who not merely hurts with intent but actually goes on to profess that this is second nature to her now:

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.

The poem's chief strength is the blunt honesty which makes no attempt to conceal the woman's motives. One is willing to go along with her belief that she renders these men a service, giving “a wrapping to their dreams / A woman-voice / And a / Womansmell”. One is even willing to overlook the Freudian quest for the father with which the poem ends. But the rather confused manner in which the glass-image is used is another matter. Had Kamala been a little more judicious, this could have been a very fine, complex poem.

“The Prisoner” uses the same theme of geographical mapping that “The Old Playhouse” had used so remarkably in its opening passage. In both, geographical boundaries and topography are symbols of the poet's freedom boundaries. But “The Old Playhouse” used them to describe a deliberate attempt on the lover's part to ensnare her and hold her captive, while in the present poem the poet, already a prisoner, appears to be willingly so. There is no restlessness, and the poem's chief charm is the almost academic curiosity with which the poet studies the contours of her lover's body. Though the analogy used is that of a convict studying his prison's geography, there is a lightness about the whole which prevents it from appearing unduly oppressive.

Kohli's interpretation of the poem is highly imaginative and well-worked out. Referring to Kamala's use of the word “trappings” to describe her lover's physical charms, he says: “Trapping is doubly significant. On the one hand, it suggests the trappings of lust from which she must free herself to know true love. On the other hand, it suggests the soul's cry against its mortal dress. Generally the convict attempts to escape from the prison only to return to his usual course of life. Thus perhaps Kamala Das is speaking of the freedom which brings further imprisonment, of the escape which brings one back to more snares and more trappings. Either way there is a trap, and since body and soul are not envisaged by Kamala Das as separate, there is little qualitative difference between losing one or losing the other.”¹⁰

Kohli even refers us to “The Suicide”, first published in The Descendants and included in this volume, to support his claim: “Bereft of soul / My body shall be bare / Bereft of body / My soul shall be bare …” Seductive as his interpretation is, I must differ in seeing the poem as much simpler. It is tempting to read a plethora of suggestions into the comparisons made in the poem between the poet and a convict. I doubt, however, from the evidence in Kamala's other writing, notably her prose, whether she goes in much for such elaborate patterns. The basic analogy is that both she and the convict seek possible modes of escape. “Trappings” should really be seen as no more than the physical characteristics which make her lover so significant to her personally. As I said earlier, even the talk of escape does not really carry with it much more than the realisation, lightly stated, that the relationship will have to end one day. Since this is so, she ought to school herself to be detached about her lover's body. This discipline would, hopefully, make the break easier when it becomes necessary.

Unlike “The Prisoner” which has its undeniable appeal, another short poem, “Love”, is not thin as to hardly justify its existence. Earlier published in Summer in Calcutta, it is difficult to see why it appears here again. I quote the poem in full:

Until I found you,
I wrote verse, drew pictures,
And, went out with friends
For walks …
Now that I love you,
Curled like an old mongrel
My life lies, content,
In you …

In spite of the unusual simile “mongrel” to denote her love, the rest of the poem is slight beyond redemption, very amateurish, and more like an exercise in poetry than the real thing. It does not hint at the intensity which Kamala is capable of conveying even in poems which do not always work very satisfactorily.

Another unsatisfactory short poem is the one dedicated to “Kumar Gandharva”. The singer is merely a peg on which the poet hangs her unexplained anguish. Though “cocooned” in the shelter of Gandharva's singing, her ears lose their peace in every little pause. The poet is presumably at a concert, for the impression created is that of the hostile, external world trying to enter her self-built haven. All the same, the images used to describe her plight sound baffling we are told that her ears, in every pause, must

Like the silent mouths of fish
Sucking at the air, draw with gasps
The tendrilled, shadowed sounds.

What are these sounds, and why do they symbolise a kind of menace, the loss of the poet's sense of safety? Also, was it necessary to compare ears to the silent mouths of fish? There is after all something very definite and characteristic about the movement a fish makes while breathing. It is difficult to transfer this function to the ears, no matter how willing one is to suspend one's disbelief.

Unlike most of the new poems about the man-woman relationship, “After the Illness” has a certain romantic fervour which is unconventional because there is no illusion here, and no scope for idealising. Rather, it is the absence of these that makes the poem seem poignant without being either sentimental or repetitive. As its title suggests, it describes a phase after an illness, but one in which the poet is reunited with her lover.

What strikes us most here is the unusual sense of peace between the lovers. “Peace” may seem an odd word in view of the lover's “soft, suffering face” and the wasted body of the poet. I use it, however, to describe the difference between the lovers' exchange and the very intense, emotion-charged drama which characterises most of Kamala's other love-poetry. The lover's acceptance of her physical unattractiveness is heightened by his vulnerable desire for physical proximity, his face against her knee while he tells her how he had willed her to survive. As the first few lines of the poem indicate, the reunion is almost a rebirth. Not only has there been no death after the illness, but a reawakening into this surprising state where the lover looks beyond her body.

As elsewhere with Kamala, the bodily details are unsparingly listed: the lover is described as having noticed

          the high greens of my illness, the bones
Turning sharp beneath the dry loose skin, the yellowed eyes
The fetid breath …

These are hardly romantic details. Yet, the lover had not merely noticed them but has not let them affect his feelings. There is a certain serenity in the poem, largely the result of the knowledge that the poet is unattractive and yet beloved. In the aftermath of the illness, which had left her emaciated, the blood “Weakened too much to lust”, the lover's devotion creates a sense of security. This is apparent in the poem's mood of quiet acceptance. It is, all the same, such an unusual display of romantic loyalty that the poet cannot help but be amazed at it.

The poem ends with the author pondering over the mysterious source of her lover's passion. According to Kohli, “It is characteristic of Kamala Das not to attempt to resolve the dilemma beyond the limits inherent in the very nature of the experience envisaged in the poem.”¹¹ While this statement is essentially true of Kamala's writing as a whole, such a resolution does not appear necessary in the context of this poem. It is not a particularly profound dilemma; in fact, it is no more than rhetoric masquerading as speculation, and it ought to be recognised as such. The poem is complete in itself, refreshingly different from much of Kamala's other work. Kohli goes on: “To say this is not simply to point out the element of realism in her portrayal of her moods, but to underline her approach to experience which makes such a realism, if that is the right word for the borderline between the beauty of sexual love and that of spiritual love, possible.”¹²

I see this as unnecessary mystification of an uncomplicated attitude. For Kamala is essentially uncomplicated. She does not possess the intellectual stamina for intricately thought-out “approaches” to her experiences. Her responses are usually spontaneous and most often dominated by emotion. Even the uncertainty which ends the poem, though beautiful, is very much of the moment. It is emotion recollected in tranquillity, if you like, but no more than emotion all the same. Words like “realism” are not necessary since her dominant characteristic has always been her “honesty”, whether or not it works within a particular poem. Nor is this so-called awareness of the “borderline between the beauty of sexual love and that of spiritual love” all that special to her. Further, it seems more accurate to describe what Kamala talks about in the poem as an “alliance” of, rather than a “borderline” between the two.

It would be a mistake to assume that the mood in this third volume is consistently morose or that it lacks the frenzy of Kamala's earlier poems of passion. While undoubtedly an older woman's book, occasional poems make it apparent that her former uninhibited involvement in the game of passion still surfaces from time to time. The difference of course may be that her feelings are now aroused less easily.

In “The Stone Age”, this eruption of strong sexual ardour is contrasted with the poet's married life. The “fond husband” merely cramps her style, enmeshing her in webs of domesticity. These are symbolised by the “shabby drawing-room”, and his “loud talk” which breaks in on her escapist dreams in the early morning. There is something faintly disturbing about the unattractive image of the “Old fat spider” to denote the husband. The spider's webs, moreover, are woven out of its own venom and waste, and are insubstantial.

After the initial outburst against the husband, the substance of her daydreams is explicitly stated. They involve “strong men” who “cast their shadows” and “sink / Like white suns in the well of my Dravidian blood”. The presence of darker subterranean passions and needs is expressed through the image of the “drains” which “flow beneath sacred cities”.

These daydreams moreover are soon realised. No sooner does the husband leave for work than she drives her battered car to her lover's home. In a bold image of the neighbours watching her arrivals and departures, Kamala brings alive the feel of such a situation in the Indian context. It sums up brilliantly the aura of scandal such a liaison would create. The last few lines of the poem describe the lover and her responses to him:

          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.

Kohli, who also quotes these lines, is of the view that “At this point … the lines suddenly come alive with the energy of questioning, and the theme of winning and losing and the underlying sense of exhaustion assert themselves.”¹³ I doubt whether one can demarcate the poem in this way, contrasting the “life” in these lines with, by implication, their lack of it earlier. It is true that the tone of the poem changes here from the irritated withdrawal of the earlier section when the husband is singled out for reproach and disdain. But the energy expressed is really the sense of release when the husband leaves and the poet sets off for her rendezvous. It is easy, also, to identify the presence of guilt in Kamala as a diatribe against her husband. His presence restricts her style; only when he leaves is she able to dismiss for the moment the bonds she has pledged herself to observe.

The lines which end the poem, besides being extremely forthright, have a compelling urgency. They are not merely bold, but also intimate, and capture very successfully her uncontrolled abandon to this affair. What is remarkable about them is that Kamala actually creates poetry out of the very explicit details they contain, that she almost approximates to the erotic nature of ancient Sanskrit love-poetry and, most important, that she does so from the female point of view. This is a woman in a state of abandon, one who exults in her body's response to her lover's arts, and asserts that now indeed, more than ever, were it bliss to die. It is the moment for itself, perfect even if it were to be the last, and the questions posed are only a way of saying so.

The emotions which motivate such abandon are partially explained in “The Corridors”, which had also appeared in Summer in Calcutta. The poem describes a recurring dream in which the author wanders along the silent corridors of a house to enter rooms filled with laughing, friendly people, whose names she cannot recollect and whose relationship to her remains a mystery. There is a feeling of growing panic at her sense of being a perpetual stranger, “tramping the lost / Lanes of a blinded mind”. Walking up from the dream, she finds that far from being surrounded by friends she is in fact alone, even her lover having abandoned her bed. Trying to count the number of her friends is hopeless, for she is in fact an outsider, always on the fringe of a crowd, playing a role and known as something / somebody other than the person she really is.

This inability, expressed over and over again, to open up before a roomful of people, to feel at home in a crowd, perhaps gives the private moments of the poet their own limitless frenzy. It is as if wanting to belong but too awkward to make the necessary gestures in front of a large number of people, she fulfils her need to be loved, to be accepted emotionally, in these intimate encounters. Hence the frequent sense, in them, of a life complete in those moments.

This state of mind is also apparent in Kamala's autobiography, especially in her account of her last meaningful relationship with a man. As it makes clear, this was also her most significant affair, and she was hopelessly caught in the strong trap of her sexual emotions. The relationship, obviously with a powerful politician, is probably the source of poems like “The High Tide” and “Sunset, Blue Bird”.

The first of these is simply about a powerful man falling from favour. There is a sense of Browning's “Patriot” in the implied contrast between the man's past and present status. Browning's poem, however, is a dramatic monologue, spoken by the actual victim of fortune's changing favours. In “The High Tide”, there is no such characterisation. The victim's story is told by his lover, the “poetess … who loves him / Without rhyme or reason”, and who “now turns her face away” because she cannot bear to see what his downfall has done to him.

There is very little to the poem apart from this personal giveaway detail which indicates that the man was more than a stranger. However, Kamala achieves a certain tone and interest by using several devices. One of them is to refer to the lover as “the king”, thereby suggesting something more than the mere failure of an ordinary individual. “The king had lost his power” indicates a more momentous event. The images of kingship are sustained throughout: the valet, as well as the dancing girls, and the cringing crowd of yesterday. The king's messenger is represented by the telephone, which stays silent except for a wrong number. This silence sounds his defeat louder than any messenger of old could have done. An archetypal note of doom is brought in when the king imagines he has callers:

          He shouts out to his valet,
Who is knocking at the door, who is there, knocking at my door?
It's only the wind, the servant says, the sea is wild
This morning, there is perhaps a high tide on.

This image of the wind and the sea being mistaken for human visitors and voices is effective. It also has a certain primal appeal, implying a relationship between man and Nature which older literatures exploited more effectively. The wind and the high tide are brought in once again at the end of the poem to contrast the king's present loneliness with his revelry in the past, and the crowds who flocked to see him.

In “Sunset, Blue Bird”, the poet has in turn been deserted by “the king”. It is a “prose-poem', an unusual form for Kamal. It is unpunctuated, intentionally so, for even capital letters are omitted. Each unit is separated from the other by a series of four dots. Perhaps because of the prose form, the poem reads more successfully than it would have done in conventional verse. The prose makes it easier to overlook the syntactical weaknesses which, in verse, would have been unflatteringly obtrusive: “when i am with my friends and talking i remember him and suddenly i can no longer talk they ask me what is wrong why have you turned pale and i weakly shake my head nothing nothing. …”

These are hardly among Kamala's more inspired lines and one can, after reading three books of her poetry (this is the last poem in the third volume) imagine what she would have made of them in “free” verse. The true interest of the poem does not lie in any memorable insights, images or phrases, but in the anguish of the woman at being abandoned by her lover. It is a tone not really present in the “new” poems in this volume; it belongs partly to the earlier poetry. So does her absorption in the lover even though the affair is over: “everywhere i look i see him everywhere … i do not look i see him i see him in all i see him in everything like a blue bird at sunset he flits across my sky. …”

So might an adolescent speak of an infatuation! Yet a certain sombre mood in the poem makes it clear that it is an older woman's poem. It does not have the resilient quality of Kamala's earlier poems about the pain of loving. There is, on the other hand, an underlying sense that even the ability to experience the agony of such a relationship is rapidly passing away. And the poem's climax, the event which alarmed her lover into this betrayal, adds to her dignity even while it shows up his cowardice: “after a year two yellow moons waxed and waned without a sign of blood and i told him lying on his lap i told him and suddenly the sun set on that beautiful face his breath was heavy in my ear he said not a word. …”

There is one more prose-poem in this volume, somewhat longer and more complex in design than the one just discussed. “The Swamp” ostensibly takes its name from the swamp in Malabar into which the poet tells us she once sank with a wail one hot morning during the rains. The way the poem's several themes develop, however, makes it apparent that the swamp is also metaphorical, that it denotes the depths of passion in which she now flounders, vowing that she will some day “rise … stalk out of his bed … sleepwalk along the marine drive he will be then just another man just another season and the summer would burn down to black ash in his garden.”

As these lines make apparent, the technique used in the poem is similar to that in “Sunset, Blue Bird”: no capital letters, no conventional punctuation. In contrast to the shorter poem, however, there is an attempt to compose each development of the poem's several themes into verse-paragraphs.

Much of the substance of this poem is directly autobiographical, being about the poet's childhood, especially in the first part. Here, the present is punctuated by flashbacks into the past: the poet's grandmother, wearing the jewels of a virtuous life, the poet herself born fair and growing to be the “first dark girl in the family”, even the “bhagvatis oracle” promising to protect her grandmother's descendants from “illness and untimely death”.

Contrasted with this background of virtue, and of faith in such things as oracles, is the image of the poet in the present: a “tainted bush” from which even poisonous snakes retreat. The past is evoked in order to underscore her movement away from it. At the family snake-shrine, she had prayed for a mate like her present lover, “the richest the strongest the deadliest”. He has all the deviousness of a snake, is “armed with cunning and violent hates and mistrust”, but he sheds them all in bed with her. Even so, he cannot satisfy her inner “locus of anguish”. He answers a certain fundamental need in her, no more, for he does not give anything more of himself than his “well tanned body”.

Like “Sunset, Blue Bird”, the prose form conceals a host of technical limitations. How else to account for the fact that one overlooks lines like “virtue is the richest jewel yes yes yes but he is the jewel i prefer to wear”; or, “when i was ill my three year old son was brought to me amma he said leave this hospital come home with me even if i had died that week i would have walked as a ghost to my home and him so much of me was taken out and sent in jam jars to the pathological lab but what the lab did not need lay under sheets in room five sixty five and thought longingly of that little boy.”

In spite of such lapses the poem has a compelling, even hypnotic momentum. Its form is not easy to explain, for it is not one which Kamala had turned to very consistently in the sporadic verse she had since written. Perhaps the very attempt to impose a discipline on her verse collapsed when these poems were written. Or perhaps their inner logic seemed best suited to the prose-form. At any rate, in both, the dependence on the lover is greater than in the other unpublished poems included here. In spite of the poet's bravado at the end when she talks of leaving her lover and walking along the sea-front, her desolation when he rejects her is forceful: “often after taking leave i open his door again and see him at his desk signing letters with the glasses with the stern look with the do you want something the change is so complete that i am silent and in silence must move away.”

Notes

1. [Kohli, Davindara.]Kamala Das, [New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, Indian Writers Series, 1971.] p. 117.

2. ibid.

3. In answering my questionnaire.

4. [Das, Kamala. My Story. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1976. London: Quartet Books, 1978.] p. 125.

5. Kamala Das, p. 104.

6. ibid., p. 105.

7. ibid., p. 106.

8. ibid., p. 108.

9. My Story, p. 61.

10. Kamala Das, p. 113.

11. ibid., p. 115.

12. ibid.

13. ibid., p. 114.