For a long time now, I have been unable to read fiction...or even best sellers. Thousands of books stare at me from racks in the bookstore, their coverpages sophisticated and almost forbidding, and I find myself running to the warm familiarity of the worn-out books that talk to me from the dusty shelves of some old library. There, I hunt for fragments of human lives- of stories narrated and then bound and buried in layers of dust.

In that respect, I was grateful to Anita Nair for digging out some of those narrations from their grave, and giving them their due merit, by compiling them and re-circulating them amongst a generation that is still making futile attempts at getting a footing.

In the crumbling pages of some of these age-old books, I discovered verses and words that I wouldn't trade for all the money in this world. Voices that reached out across time and space. The essence of human life...of each of our lives....buried in all its beauty.

It was thus that I was introduced to Kamala Suraiya. I stumbled upon "My Days" quite coincidentally. I only knew Kamala as a controversial writer. I wasn't even sure what the controversy was. This is the only book of hers that I have read. And that is all I needed to read to feel that I knew her as one only knows oneself. There was nothing that needed explanation or clarification....there was nothing that was mysterious or controversial....there was only beauty that I could see in the mind that reverberated those words. A flowing river that absorbed all the elements of the dynamic world that it flowed through, with the same vitality and transparency. She saw as much beauty in the mountains that she originated from, as in the sea that she merged into. She was a mirror. If you looked into her words-her mind, you saw yourself. And I loved what I saw.
I loved her as much as I loved my parrot- the one that flew away after having learnt to scream its name. They have both found their worlds of freedom.

Her death has created an immeasurable void on this planet, for no further creation shall emanate from that mind again. But then, I take respite in the fact that I can still communicate to her. She speaks to me through those immortal words. I cannot ever stop marvelling at the power that words have....at the vitality that they have. In her words, I never saw words....I saw her- her naked emotions.

When I concluded reading "My Days", I impulsively wrote a letter to her. A letter that I never mailed her. A letter that was 'me', just as her book was 'her'. That was my unspoken gratitude for the words she wrote....for the words that will always give me the courage to be myself- uncontaminated, unruffled. I have learnt to treasure my own mind, for I am now convinced that it is not my own.....it is a divine gift that has to be cherished and loved.....loved for what it is, and not what it needs to be.

In her death, I go back to words that have clung to my soul. For some strange reason, they sound more alive now....


"In the afternoon, I occasionally walked to the old cemetery. The tombstones were like yellowed teeth and even the writings had faded with the rains of half a century. But it was thrilling to read the words that had not faded. I was too young to know about ghosts. It was possible for me to love the dead as deeply as I loved the living. From the dead, no harshness could emanate, no cruelty.....

When we die, we die. On the site of my pyre, my sons shall plant a coconut tree. Then some day one of my descendants may go up to the tree and rub her palm against its bark, murmuring futile messages to the dead......

When we were separated, my brother and I, I felt alone and lost, for between us even in the silence we shared was a pure kind of communication, an interminable dialogue that went on and on like that of the wind with the earth or the sun with the trees. Each drew sustenance from the others' unspoken support.

The word mate with its earthly connotations made me uneasy. I felt lost and unhappy. I could not tell my father that I had hoped for a more tranquil relationship with a hand on my hair and a voice in my ear, telling me that everything was going to be alright for me. I had hoped that he would remove with one sweep of his benign arms, the loneliness in my life. I had expected him to be all that I wanted my father to be, and my mother. I wanted conversation, companionship and warmth. I thought then that love was flowers in the hair, it was the yellow moon lighting up a familiar face, and soft words whispered in the ear. At the end of the month, experiencing rejection, jealousy and bitterness, I grew old suddenly, my face changed from a child's to a woman's. Any sign of kindness from people made me weep like a child.

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

My grief felt like drops of honey on the white sheets on my desk. My sorrows floated over the pages of magazines darkly as heavy monsoon clouds do in the sky....

One's real world is not what is outside him. It is the immeasurable world inside him that is real. Only the one who has decided to travel inwards, will realize that his route has no end. Our ends, our real destinations, are our beginnings.
Tragedy is not death but growth and the growing out of needs.
Like alms looking for a begging bowl was my love which only sought for it a receptacle. At the hour of worship, even a stone becomes an idol. I was perhaps seeking a familiar face that blossomed like a blue lotus in the waters of my dreams. Beauty seemed to be only a brief season.

I liked to study people, for I loved them tremendously.
Ask the books that I read why I changed. Ask the authors dead and alive who communicated with me and gave me the courage to be myself.

Poets, even the most insignificant of them, are different from other people. They cannot close their shops like shopmen and return home. Their shop is their mind and aslong as they carry it with them, they feel the pressures and the torments. A poet's raw material is not stone or clay; it is her personality. I could not escape from my predicament even for a moment. I was emotional and over-sensitive. Whenever a snatch of unjustified scandal reached me through well-meaning relatives, I wept like a wounded child for hours, rolling on my bed and often took sedatives to put myself to sleep.

It was dusk, and all the Delhi streets were fragrant and murky. I felt very young, very lovely and delightfully carefree.
Wherever a writer goes, her notoriety precedes her. The non-writers do not normally trust the writers. This is because they are entirely dissimilar, except in appearance. The mind being an invisible limb, is not taken into consideration. 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. The essence of the writer eludes the non-writer. All that the writer reveals to such people are her oddities of dress and her emotional excesses. Finally, when the muscles of the mind have picked up enough power to read people's secret thoughts, the writer shies away from the invisible hostility and clings to her own type, those dreaming ones, born with a fragment of wing still attached to a shoulder.

We are burdened with perishable bodies which strike up bonds which are also unreal, and unperishable. The only relationship that is permanent is the one we form with God. My mate is He. He shall come to me in myriad shapes. In many shapes shall I surrender to His desire. I shall be fondled by Him. I shall be betrayed by Him. I shall pass through all the pathways of this world, condemning none, understanding all, and then becoming part of Him. Then for me there shall be no return journey.
Disease and pain matured me. I forgot the art of localizing my love. I found it easy to love nearly all those who came to see us.

I sincerely believe in fraternizing with one's own type. If you have to survive, vanity and all, you must stick willy ninny to your own intellectual caste. Others can only misjudge you.
I had become a truth-addict and I loved my writing more than I loved my parents or my sons. If the need ever arose, I would without hesitation bid goodbye to them, only to be allowed to remain what I was- a writer.

Large areas of my ignorance had been obliterated by the lessons I had learnt in life and I wanted my readers to know of it. I had realized by then that the writer has none to love her but her readers. She would have proved herself to be a mere embarassment to the members of her family, for she is like a goldfish in a well-lit bowl whose movements are never kept concealed.

I have often wished to take myself apart and stick all the bits on a large canvas, to form a collage which could then be donated to my readers.

During the long weeks of my convalescence, I was obsessed with the recollections of my childhood days spent at Nalapat. For hours I had played in the sunlit pond behind the house flailing the water with my girl-thin limbs, while the turtles moved about in its hostile depths and eels stared at me with their opal eyes, but in all those unfenced hours I had felt no fear, nor even joy, but an anonymous peace.

I sincerely believe that knowledge is exposure to life. I could never bring myself to hang my life on the pegs of quotation for safety. I never did play safe. I compromised myself with every sentence I wrote and thus burnt all the boats that would have reached me to security. What did I finally gain from life? Only the vague hope that there are a few readers who have loved reading my books although they have not wished to inform me of it. It is for each of them that I continue to write.

The world outside my house is always so busy catching buses, balancing accounts, lobbying for de-classed politicians, pimping for the impotant and hiding their ill-gotten wealth in concealed lockers. What did the poor have in their lives to be so happy about? They were working from morning till dusk carrying cement and climbing the scaffoldings. And yet they had more vitality than I had and more of optimism.

If we were to see life as a collage, a vast assembly of things and people and emotions, we shall stop grieving for the dead, stop pining for the living and stop accumulating visible wealth. Ultimately we shall discover that we are immortal and that the only mortal things are systems and arrangements. Even our pains shall continue in those who have devoured us. We are trapped in immortality, and the our only freedom is the freedom to discompose.

I have been for years obsessed with the idea of death. I have come to believe that life is a mere dream and that death is the only reality. It is endless, stretching before and beyond our human existence. To slide into it will be to pick up a new significance. Life has been, despite all emotional involvements, as ineffectual as writing on moving water. We have been mere participants in someone else's dream.

I am at peace. I liken God to a tree which has as its parts the leaves, the bark, the fruits and flowers- each unlike the other, but in each lying dissolved the essence of the tree, the whatness of it....."

Tags: kamala das