An Introduction
I don’t know politics but I know the names of those
in power, and can repeat them like days of week or
names of months, beginning with Nehru. I am Indian,
brown, born in Malabar. I speak three languages, write
in two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said, English
is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave me alone, critics,
friends, visiting cousins, every one of you? Let me speak
in any language I like. The language I speak becomes
mine, its distortions, its queernesses all mine, mine alone.
It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it’s
honest, it is as human as I am human, you know…
It voices my longings, my hopes, and is useful to me
as cawing Is to crows or roaring to the lions,
it is human speech, the speech of the mind that is here, not there,
a mind that sees and hears and is aware. Not the deaf,
blind speech of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain
or the incoherent mutterings of the blazing
funeral pyre. I was child, and later they said I grew,
for, I became tall, my limbs swelled and one or two places
sprouted hair. When I asked for love, not knowing what else
to ask for, he drew a youth of sixteen into his
bedroom and shut the door, He did not beat me but my sad
woman-body felt so beaten. The weight of my breasts
and womb crushed me. I shrank pitifully. Then I wore a shirt
and a black sarong, cut my hair short and ignored all of
this womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl or be wife,
they cried. Be embroiderer, cook, or a quarreller
with servants. Fit in belong, said the categorizers.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better still, be just
Madhavikutty. It is time to choose a name, a role.
Don’t play pretending games. Don’t play at schizophrenia
or be a Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when
jilted in love…Later, I met a man. Loved him. Call him
not by any name, he is every man who wants his
woman, just as I am every woman who seeks love.
In him the hungry haste of rivers, in me the oceans’
tireless waiting. Who are you, I ask each and all. The answer is, it is I.
Anywhere and everywhere I see him who calls himself I.
In this world, he is tightly packed like the sword in its sheath.
It is I who drink a lonely drink near midnight at hotels
of strange towns, it is I who make love and then feel shame,
it is I who lie dying with a rattle in my throat,
I am the sinner, I am the saint. I am both the lover
and the beloved. I have no joys that are not yours,
no aches which are not yours
we share the same name, the same fate, the same crumbled dreams…
—Kamala Das, from ‘Signatures - One Hundred Indian Poets’ published by the National Book Trust, India.