She has gone with the monsoon winds. One hundred monsoons later, someone who meets Kamala Surayya on one of her thousands of pages might ask in disbelief of the rainy wind. “Is she fact or fiction?”
A question put by generations of readers to themselves, the rains and the blades of lightning that branched into extempore dimensions across wet skies much like Kamala Das lived her life. She was as unpredictable as a monsoon night. Her right was her might.
This, perhaps, is one reason why every Malayali man fell in love with Kamala even as he ensured that his mother, sister, wife or girl friend never dared to imitate her or imbibe her ideas.
She was the freedom every woman wanted to experience but never got a chance to. She was the love that every woman wanted to give but was never allowed to. She was the woman every woman wanted to be hut was never able to. She was the original that many wanted to copy but were never courageous enough to attempt.
Critics and learned minds have analyzed Kamala threadbare to arrive at inferences and conclusions that are nothing more than smug social snobs normally arrive a de in an organize spew mien; t e usual. Psychological excuses that are attributed to any extrovert woman, like Princess Diana, who lived by her own script. Kamala’s life was a breathtaking collection of thoughts, definitions and stories. And she was as unstoppable as a river, reflecting the nature along her banks with the same emotion, in the same mood; what we read is her running common tray on society as she witnessed it while flowing through it.
And like running rapids, she never stagnated; embracing Islam was just one of the surprise turns in the flow. In every tribute, Kamala is acknowledged as a perennial source of love. But close friends would say that she was not someone who loved everything and everybody. Her love was laced with the aesthetics of affluence. Her taste for the exotic, her eye for the rare and her dream for the exclusive were all mirrored in her concept of love throughout a life that was more strange and thrilling than fiction. History will list proofs to convince tomorrow that she was real and her love was surreal. But the disbelief will linger. For that is her story.
BY MANOJ .K.DAS.NEW INDIAN EXPRESS
