Kamalca Su rayya - The love queen of Malabar: memoir of a friendship with Kamala Das

The Love Queen of Malabar

Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das

Merrily Weisbord

McGill-Queens University Press 2010

ISBN 978-0-7735-3791-0

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2010
Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free
(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

McGill-Queens University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Weisbord, Merrily
The love queen of Malabar: memoir of a friendship with Kamala Das / Merrily Weisbord.

Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7735-3791-0

1. Kamala Surayya, 19342009. 2. Kamala Surayya, 19342009Friends and associates.
3. Weisbord, Merrily. 4. Women authors, India20th centuryBiography.
5. Authors, Malayalam20th centuryBiography.
I. Title.

PR9499.3.D35Z93 2010 828.91409 C2010-903734-0

Photograph on page 18 by Angie Kaye; page 30, unknown; page 67, Guy Borremans; page 95, Stephen
Legari; pages 216 and 226, Elizabeth Klinck; pages 229 and 248, K.C. George; page 261, David Schaffer.
Photographs on page 148 courtesy T.P. Nandakumar, chief editor, Crime Fortnightly, Group Publishing
Co (Pvt) Ltd, Calicut, Kerala, India; pages 1623, Chandrika Malayalam Daily, 29 February 2000;
page 258, Mathrubhumi Daily, 8 March 2005. Early photographs of Kamala, mother, and family
courtesy of Kamala Das and Nalapat Sulochana. All other photographs by the author.

Quotations from Morning at Apollo Pier, An Introduction, Composition, The Old Playhouse,
Blood, A Requiem for My Father, Loud Posters, Anamalai Poems, Forest Fire, A Phone Call
in the Morning, The Freaks, The Sunshine Cat, Jaisurya, Tomorrow, Radha, Grey Hound,
Substitute, The Millionaires at Marine Drive, Herons, Convicts, A Widows Lament, For
Auntie Katie, Gina, My Grandmothers House, Next to Indira Gandhi, The Inheritance, The
Siesta, The Swamp, Terror, The Dance of the Eunuchs, Palam, are taken from Only the Soul
Knows How to Sing: Selections from Kamala Das (Kottayam, Kerala: DC Books 1996).

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Minion 10.5/16.

For Kamala Das, long may she reign.

1
Cochin, Munnar, Kovalam, South India, 1995

2
Montreal, Laurentian Mountains, New York, 1995

3
Delhi, Cochin, Kovalam, 1997

4
Cochin, Calicut, Malabar, 2000

5
The Laurentians, Montreal, 2000

6
Cochin, 2003

7
Cochin, 2004

8
Cochin, Punnayurkulam, 2005

when I walked in
I feared that you might hear my heartbeats thump

Perhaps every new place has to humble you with its nature, customs, history, bacteria, something that exhausts, confounds, or lays you low. In South India, it is the heat the oppressive, overbearing heat. Moisture dries briefly after a shower, which is perhaps your third or fourth, and enfolds anew. Heat presses in like an unwelcome, cloying lover.

When are we moving? my friend Angie asks when I stir. Shes ready for action, a documentary film director, fresh off the plane from England. I am half here in India, half dreamily in Nepal where I was recently trekking in the Arun Valley hills.

Should we phone ahead? Angie asks.

What schedule do you envisage? she nudges. How do you plan to proceed with Kamala Das?

At the mention of Kamala Das, I snap awake, alert as a tiger with her cub. Beloved, notorious Kamala Das, Indias honoured writer and great contemporary love poet, read by millions, revered and reviled, is largely unknown in the West and to me, and feelings about our meeting are too delicate to share. I have seen pictures of her, a dark-haired beauty with eyes a lover could swim in, and have read accolades to her courage in life and art. Her gorgeous poetry enchants me, and her ground-breaking autobiography transports me to another world. She was the first Hindu woman to write frankly about sexual desire and would not back down when attacked. I fling arrows at the uncivilized brutal norms of life for women in Kerala, she challenged, I tweak the noses of puritans a response that inspires me.

Angies questioning make me nervous. Standing on a lime-green marble floor in an eighteenth-century palace off the Malabar Coast, I am on unfamiliar turf with no parameters to gauge what happens next. Kamala Das is the reason I have flown into this South Indian heat, and I have no plan except to proceed spontaneously with all my antennae quivering.

Its been a month since I left Canada, running away from a memoir I wrote for over a year. Id been writing professionally for decades, and was using the memoir to survive an uncommunicative phase with my companion, talking myself through on the page. Then one day my companion patted my head lovingly, and I didnt feel anything because I was typing angrily about the day before. When I realized that the memoir had become more real than life itself, I abandoned it. I saw then that I was free and alone in a way I hadnt been for years my kids living independently and my companion consumed by his work. I longed to fly out of myself and into a larger world. I felt that if I stayed put, comfort and familiarity would close around me like a shell. Writing a travel book seemed the perfect escape, and Kerala, a small tropical state on Indias southwest coast, beckoned.

Brochures promised waving palms, sandy beaches, canals and backwaters, stunning mountains, exquisite cuisine, and generous hospitality. Centuries ago, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Chinese, Dutch, and finally British traded in Malabar, the Spice Coast of India. Jews had lived in Kerala since the first century AD, Muslims claimed a mosque from the time of Mohammed, and Christians believed the Apostle Thomas converted Kerala Hindus in 52 AD.

Not only was Kerala beautiful and cosmopolitan but it had the lowest infant mortality and highest literacy in South East Asia. Kerala Nayars were matrilineal, and in a country where female fetuses were aborted, Kerala was the only state in India to have more women than men.

I lingered over pictures of the wildflowers and wildlife on the seaward slopes of the Western Ghats, and photos of the wild, blue-green Arabian Sea. Kerala was the destination I hoped for, but I didnt want to write a superficial travel book, and I couldnt imagine a way to journey more deeply into another culture. And then, in my foot-high research file, like a siren calling, was Kamala Das and a poem so beautiful it made my body tingle.

Welcome me, lying down, dear love,
And remain so,
I shall shut the window
for, upward floats the lepers tremolo...

And when I read her autobiography,