SOURCE: Harish, Ranjana. “My Story.” In Women's Writing: Text and Context, edited by Jasbir Jain, pp. 213-22. Jaipur, India: Rawat Publications, 1996.

[In the following essay, Harish underscores the novelty and appeal of My Story.]

This book has cost me many things that I held dear, but I do not for a moment regret having written it. I have written several books in my life time, but none of them provided the pleasure the writing of My Story has given me. I have nothing more to say.

(Preface)

In Virginia Woolf's view any woman who sets her pen to paper and adopts the writer's profession, like her, has to undertake two enterprises: “killing the ‘Angel in the House’ in her and ‘telling the truth about (her) own experience as a body’”. She describes an Angel in the House as an “intensely sympathetic, immensely charming and utterly unselfish” woman who “never had mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.” Killing this angel within one is no doubt difficult enough but telling the truth about one's body is perhaps the most difficult. Virginia Woolf herself succeeded at the first but, by her own admission, failed at the second. “The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet” (Woolf 538). In her view, what man will say of a woman who tells the truth about her passion always hampers the creativity of a woman writer.

My Story is the only attempt of its kind among Indian women autobiographers in English to tread the untrodden challenging area of exploring and sharing one's experience as a body which serves as the foundation of her sociological, psychological and even spiritual development. Discarding the superficial way of the fellow women autobiographers, who try to grapple with the acute problems of their existence avoiding any talk about their bodies, she confronts her body with unparalleled frankness and honesty. But the most noticeable fact about her bold attempt is that, in spite of trying hard to kill the “Angel in the house” within herself and throwing the traditional Indian morality to winds in her love-life Kamala Das constantly remains aware of her deviation from the accepted norms. The awareness of the culturally defined category ‘woman’ looms over her existence. Time and again she tries to return to her culturally defined self and then discards it realizing that it is not meant for her, that she cannot live her life in accordance with the cultural prescription.

From such a vacillation between the traditionally defined role model and her personal yearning to carve out an undefined, independent role for herself springs an apparent inconsistency in her narrative, for which she has often been blamed. At times, when the super ego of the Angel within dominates her self, she behaves as a traditional Hindu woman with a deep-seated fear of sex and with a deep love for her feminine role. But even this inconsistency has its justification in the context of her autobiography; that is what she has been. Like a true autobiographer she just projects herself honestly as she really has been, leaving it for her readers to pass their final judgement on her personality; they may brush it aside as a sheer inconsistent or try to delve deep into the psyche of the person to get at the roots of the apparent inconsistency. Any such attempt would lead them to the surprising realization that deep down the apparent inconsistency there lies an inherent consistency.

To a sympathetic reader who looks upon the writer as a fellow human being and not as an accused on whom he is required to pass his moral judgement, Kamala's case provides an excellent opportunity for a psychological study of the loveless and emotionally deprived life of an imaginative romantic being who could not get what she desired out of any of her usual, socially recognized relationships. The lack of security and love in her well-to-do parents', as well as her husband's family made her whatever she became. ‘Women are not born; they are made’, said the great French feminist Simone de Beauvoir in her thought-provoking book The Second Sex (683). In her view it is the socialization of women as women which makes them what they become. Kamala's case convincingly demonstrates the truth of this observation. She was an ordinary girl, a ‘good’ girl from society's standard, whom her deprivation and psychological needs turned into a rebel. Circumstances made her what she became. With an understanding husband she would have been a happy wife and would have made a success of her marriage. But her husband's aggressive, assertive approach to sex and her, as yet, immature body at the time of their marriage, resulted in her being labelled as frigid, an adjective that comes in handy to any man, who, as a member of the dominant group, readily uses it for woman who fails to boost his ego or play up to him in such a way as to confirm and enhance his feeling of being a real “man”. How strange it is that even in the context of this most intimate relationship between man and woman, in which they both ought to be equal partners giving and receiving pleasure from each other, women are looked upon as mere instruments of joy, judged solely on the basis of the extent to which they satisfy the men and are readily labelled as cold or frigid when they fall to do so, while in fact the poor ones do not even know what frigidity is; for more often than not, as Nancy Friday points out in her book My Mother, My Self, they are strangers to their own bodies.

Later, when Kamala had physically matured, her husband lost interest in her after the birth of their first son, and resumed his flirtatious relations with his cousins. Driven by sheer indignation Kamala now made up her mind to be “unfaithful to him, at least physically” (95). Feeling as if her love were alms meant for general distribution, she started looking for the “begging bowls” needless to say there was no dearth of such begging bowls to come across. In those relationships she was no more passive. She discusses a number of affairs she had. Unlike any other woman autobiographer she makes an open confession of her sins, if sins they are to be called.

What an irony of fate it is that Kamala, who was condemned by her husband as frigid, who herself accepted the label saying, “Sex did not interest me except as a gift I could grant to my husband to make him happy”, should now, out of sheer disgust and a burning desire for revenge, step outside the sacrosanct orbit of marriage and send for the handsome bricklayer working across the street in order to gratify her own desire! But this was only her first transgression and “was to be followed by many more”.¹

Back in Bombay, again the same old routine life was resumed; the days were for child care and house work and the nights for the silent surrender to the cruel tax collector's brutal handling. At times she would just helplessly go on listening to the poor hungry child crying in the next room while her body tried to please its owner. Once when the child was just two years old the cruel father had locked him in the kitchen so that he would not come to their door crying. The poor child had cried himself to sleep on the cold bare floor of the kitchen. This incident made her lose whatever little love she had for the man. She often felt like committing suicide or taking a divorce; but neither course was open to her because after all she was a daughter of the famous Nalapat House. She silently continued her drab, dreary existence.

When her second son fell seriously ill, the suppressed thoughts of suicide once again came to the surface, this time with greater intensity because her husband had now, in the face of the crisis, sought comfort in a homosexual relationship with one of his friends. “They behaved like lovers in my presence”, writes Kamala (104). Driven to despair by sad circumstances she once made up her mind to jump from the terrace of their multi-storeyed building and end her life. But during that dark moment of desolate desperation she had a rare experience; out of her agony sprang a poem. What a miracle! She was not meant to die in defeat. She must live to face the cruelties of the world and express her pain in poetry, returning beauty for ugliness, pleasure for pain. Climbing down from the terrace she sat at the writing table and penned her first poem, beginning:

Wipe out the paints, unmould the clay.
Let nothing remain of that yesterday …

It was printed in the journal of the Indian P.E.N. of the next month. Now her sorrow was not hers alone; it was shared among many and so less severe and more bearable.

Kamala was now determined not to let anything from her yesteryears shadow her present life. As promised in her first poem she did wipe out the old paints and unmould the old clay to mould her new self. But before she could begin afresh the great strain of all these years of married life and of her body's sickness made her suffer a nervous breakdown. Recovering from the breakdown she steadily and resolutely marched on the new course she had set for herself.

Now she was a new self, determined not to live a loveless, miserable life of a timid frigid woman, “ripe for the sexual banquet” she looked for the right man. And she writes, “At the hour of worship even a stone becomes an idol” (118). Yes, her love turned many a stone into idols—men from different walks of life and of different ages, some even old enough to be her father. They loved her for different reasons; some to fill their own inner void, some to enjoy her poetic company, some to satisfy their needs, some to worship her while some like Carlo, her white pen-friend-turned-lover, to marry her. But she was not “the divorcing kind”. She may love them, may lie in their strong arms for some time; but she must return to her sons and husband. Carlo was not mistaken in believing that he was like a waiting room between trains in her life.

With so many lovers and admirers around, life for Kamala was a wonderful experience. Recalling that happy feeling she writes, “I was like a poor girl who found herself rich all of a sudden. I was drunk with power” (145). For the first time in her life, now, she had the feminine urge to look beautiful. She visited beauty parlours, changed her hair style and tried to look modern. At last her cup of life was overflowing with love. She was in love with life itself.

It was just as this most blissful juncture of her life when her euphoria was at the highest that she was suddenly and dramatically reminded of the mortality of the human body. She had a bout of serious sickness followed by a long period of hospitalization during which she promised God that she would live an acceptable, respectable life if she survived. But on her recovery she was once again charmed by the magic of love, she yearned for an ideal lover.

By now she was well recognized as a poet whose personal life had public significance. Her notoriety proceeded her wherever she went making people wonder why she lived her life the way she did when she had “everything” that a woman looks for. What and how could Kamala explain to them? “Even birds have their own particular heights. The land birds who do not rise far into the lonely sky, often wonder why the eagles fly high, why they go round and round like ballerinas”, she says (175). Despite being surrounded by relatives, friends and admirers she became increasingly lonelier and finally withdrew into the cave of the self.

This lonely phase of her life coincided with her middle age, the time which fills most women's hearts with the fear of old age. Simone de Beauvoir's creative output of her middle age clearly and indubitably demonstrates the validity of this observation by providing ample evidence of her deepseated fear of old age and the consequent loss of youth, beauty and love, Kamala, too, was now beset by the same fears. Looking at the mirror, during that lonely phase of her life she would ponder over what was happening to her thus:

Was it no longer possible to lure a charming male into complicated and satisfying love affair with the right words, the right glances, the right gestures? Was I finished as a charmer?

(177)

It was at this critical period of her life that Kamala, as if to reassure herself of her own charm, embarked upon a love affair with an elderly man known for his “fabulous lust”; it turned out to be her most satisfying relationship as the dark, tall man gave her the sense of security she had longed for all her life. With his soothing arms encircling her body in a warm, loving embrace, she felt as if she were a child again, bathing in the pond at her Nalapat House. The eighteen mirrors in his room too reminded her of the same pond. Her love for this man was so deep that she confides to her readers that she “wanted to grow in him like cancer”, wanting him “to suffer from incurable love” (184). Drunk with the euphoria of such a fulfilling experience of love Kamala makes an open declaration of her sin thus:

City fathers, friends and moralists, if I were a sinner, do not forgive my sins. If I were innocent do not forgive my innocence. Burn me with torches blood-red in the night. … Or, bury me in your back garden, fill my crevices with the red dust of Bombay, plant gentle saplings on my belly, for, he and I met too late, we could get no child of our own, my love for him was just the writing of the sea, just a song borne by the wind. …

(184)

This is just a specimen of her open, candid writing which earned her considerable notoriety and the wrath of the conservatives. They disliked her for being bold enough to tell her experience as a body so honestly, so articulately, though she was a member of the muted group.

This most satisfying relationship with the dark, elderly man gave her a sense of satiety that her love starved heart had never experienced before. As a result her carnal desires died a natural death. Using her favourite images of lotuses and the pond she records her experience of shedding her desire like a snake shedding his skin as under:

If my desires were lotuses in a pond, closing their petals at dusk and opening out at dawn once upon a time, they were totally dead, rotted and dissolved and for them there was no more to be a resprouting. The pond had cleared itself of all growth. It was placid.

(209)

She returned to Kerala to lead a simple life. However, on reaching there she found that she was not a welcome member of the family. Her people, scandalized by the salacious stories of her immoral escapades that had reached them, looked upon her as the black sheep who had brought disgrace and dishonour to the family name. They burned with indignation and rage. How dare she ever live her life in such a way; and even if she had to do those things, how could she, being a woman of their family, ever make it public? But what could Kamala do? She couldn't help the situation, as everything she did automatically became public. After all she was a writer, and as such, in her own words like a “goldfish in a well-lit bowl whose movements are never kept concealed” (206). Being a bold person with a conviction of her own she had lived her life in her own way, “never hanging it on the pegs of quotation for safety” and burning all the boats that would take her to security. Without entering into any dialogue with them she quietly settled down there to pass her old age in her native place. The end of her autobiography presents her as a happy, contented woman who has accepted death as the ultimate reality of life, “ready to depart when the time came, with a scrubbed-out conscience”, having emptied herself of all the secrets in her autobiography (Preface).

Lately Kamala Das has been expressing some regret for having written her autobiography. After the Time magazine printed a full page piece on Kamala Das describing her as the queen of Erotica, she has been more cautious in her public utterances. Indeed, she has gone to the extent of saying that the book was deliberately made sensational at her husband's insistence as they needed the money to pay the hospital bills, and adding that a woman-writer fulfills her unfulfilled desires of real life in her writing, has tried to suggest that whatever she wrote in her autobiography was not all true. Such statements of hers would naturally make an average reader doubt her honesty as an autobiographer. But a discerning reader knows what these statements mean, especially when they come from a member of women's subculture. They do not mean what they say; the real meaning is to be found in what remains unsaid, to be understood without words. They say that a woman has to pay a heavy price for being a woman, she must deny her real self, which might be that of a declared non-conformist in order to win back her people's so-called love and respect. She might have acquired a room of her own but it is still the society who decides with whom the room is to be shared. It will still take many more years for woman to be powerful enough to take such decisions herself.

Kamala Das succeeds admirably at the task of narrating her experience as a body—a task which even the great Virginia Woolf found herself facing diffidently. However, even the staunchest admirer of Kamala Das will have to agree that in her attempt to share the truth of her bodily experience her pen sometimes becomes too bold; crossing the age-old barriers of the feminine culture of modesty and propriety, it verges on vulgarity. So much so, that just the titles of many of her chapters would suffice to shock many a conservative soul among her readers.

As all novels written by women are not feminist novels, in the same way this autobiography written by a woman is definitely not a feminist autobiography. Nowhere in the book do we come across even a faint suggestion of the feminist commitment with correcting, modifying, supplementing or attacking the male culture; but one may definitely trace the positive side of the feminist enterprise in it, namely, an attempt to create a woman's text. Kamala Das could be good subject for gynocritical study which, according to the famous feminist critic Showalter, who coined the very term ‘gynocritique’ in 1979, is the study of ‘woman as the producer of textual meaning’. (25). In spite of various ideological rifts among critics about ‘woman's writing’ Kamala Das's rightful place among the producers of women's text can never be doubted.

Note

1. See Udit: The Airport Magazine, Mar-April 1989 pp. 28-33 and Savvy December 1990 pp. 11-30.

Works Cited

Das, Kamala. My Story. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd. (1976), 1988.

Das, Kamala. Article in Savvy, December, 1990.

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. trans. H. M. Parshley New York: Bantam 1964.

Showalter, Elaine. “Towards a Feminist Poetics”, Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed Mary Jacobus. London: 1979.

Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women”, The Dolphin Reader, ed Douglas Hunt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990.