“Under a pillar of rain / thinking goodbye”: Remembering Kamala Das

Abstract

THESE2 ARE AMONG THE MISCELLANEOUS VERSE LINES KAMALA DAS inscribed in my copy Old Playhouse and Other Poems over week in July 1978 when we first met in her flat in Bank House, Back Bay Reclamation, Mumbai. That was eleven years after my articles on in Calcutta1 and Descendants? and three years after my book on her poetry,5 had appeared. Barring four letters we had exchanged, we had never met before.We met again in Mumbai in October 1978 and April 1980, and subsequently several times in Delhi and in Kochi. In 1994, after her poetry reading at South Bank Centre, London, Kamala stayed with us in Germany (6-19 November) while she gave poetry readings at University Bonn, where was teaching then, as well as at German Foundation International Development, Bad Honnef, and universities Duisburg and Essen. last time saw her was in August 2006 in Kochi, when she had telephoned me in Delhi and asked me to go over to meet her and Monu, her eldest son.Sadly, after she moved to Pune, we could not meet, owing to restrictions placed by illness on my own travel. But we stayed in contact by telephone or by email messages conveyed through Jaisurya, her youngest son. The bond [. . .] that exists between us shall go on, she had said in her letter 26 February 1982. Our correspondence came to a halt with her wobbly handwritten letter 31 July 2008 from Pune; she wrote: Arthritis has stopped my writing. A spirit has come to live in my body.Such interplay metaphor, humour, and sadness that characterized Kamala's letters also enlivened her conversations through what always struck me as her 'bird-in-flight' voice. We saw this in full throughout her stay with us in Essen. Although suffering from problems health and clearly uncomfortable with weather, she remained in good humour, recording a reading her poems for me, and at times reminiscing, as she was wont to do. She joked, interacted with Isha, our then six-year-old daughter, drew a portrait a nun jointly with her that now adorns our study, and subsequently sent her a poem from London on her way back to India. I had a marvellous time at your place, she wrote, and a sense security. Later, back in India, she genially remembered my colleagues Edgar Kamphausen, Klaus Boerner, Eberhard Kreutzer, and Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn, and how much she had relished German cheeses, pretzels (the cumbersome thing, not like potato wafers she had expected), the little loaves resembling rocks with barnacles sticking to their sides, and, course, Sekt - German equivalent champagne - that always brought a smile to her! remember early evening after her reading at Bonn when, travelling in restaurant train to Essen, we imbibed silvery Sekt while timid November sun filtered through our glasses. It seemed like a natural setting for an autumn variation her celebrated poem Summer in Calcutta, but it was almost always hot summer and pouring rains that inspired her, whereas prospect Delhi winter or the death Zurich would make her think buying a warm coat, just as she did on reaching Essen! And in September 1995, in preparation for her visit to Canada, she wrote: I shall have to carry German coat to survive Quebec winter. Not surprisingly, then, an exceptional poem like Winter, rather than evoking cold winds [that] / Chuckled against white window-panes, celebrates warmth love-making indoors, of earth groping for roots and smell new rains and tender shoots plants.6Under a pillar - Kamala's oxymoronic metaphor- has a startling freshness, although rain or monsoon season is a familiar defining image for moods meeting and parting in Indian poetry, painting, music, and popular films. impact torrential Indian monsoon, felt like a crumbling pillar, suggests being sensuously inundated, as it were, by life in its fulness and, simultaneously, by its inherent fragility. …