Composition by Kamala Das

 Ultimately,

I have come face to face with the sea.

In the beginning

The sea was only the wind’s

Ceaseless whisper in a shell.

But lying beside my grandmother,

Quite often I thought

That I could hear at night

The surf breaking on the shore.

The sea was only two miles away.

That was long ago.

Before the skin,

Intent on survival,

Learnt lessons of self-betrayal.

Before the red house that had

Stood for innocence

Crumbled

And the old woman died,

Lying for three months,

Paralyzed,

While the thieving ants climbed her hands

And ate the cuticle.

Perhaps my innocence is not

All that lost,

If the stones still endure

And pieces of mortar lie scattered

In the field.

It may be

That in my heart

I have replaced love with guilt

And discovered

That both love and hate are

Involvements.

But this only signifies growth

And, growth is natural.

The tragedy of life

Is not death but growth,

The child growing into an adult

And, growing out of needs,

Discovering

That the old have black-rimmed nails

And scalps from which emanates

A sweet, moldy smell.

In the years that followed

I was busy growing,

I had then

No time at all for the sea.

But,

There was off and on a seascape

In my dreams,

And the water

Sloshing up

And sliding down.

When I got married

My husband said,

You may have freedom,

As much as you want.

My soul balked at of this diet of ash.

Freedom became my dancing shoe,

How well I danced,

And danced without rest,

Until the shoes turned grimy on my feet

And I began to have doubts.

I asked my husband,

Am I hetero,

Am I lesbian,

Or am I just plain frigid?

He only laughed.

For such questions

Probably there are not answers

Or else

The answers must emerge

From within.

I have lost my best friend

To a middle-aged queer.

The lesbians hiss their love at me.

Love

I no longer need,

With tenderness I am most content,

I have learnt that friendship

Cannot endure,

That blood-ties do not satisfy.

And so,

With the interesting man I meet,

Be it

A curious editor,

Or a poet with a skin yellowed

Like antique paper,

A skin older than Jesus Christ,

I must

Most deliberately

Whip-up a froth of desire,

A passion to suit the occasion.

I must let my mind striptease

I must extrude

Autobiography.

The only secrets I always

Withhold

Are that I am so alone

And that I miss my grandmother.

Reader,

You may say,

Now here is a girl with vast

Sexual hungers

A bitch after my own heart.

But,

I am not yours for the asking.

Grovel at my feet,

Remove you monkey-suits  and dance,

Sing Erato Erato Erato,

Yet I shall be indifferent.

Not because of morality,

But because

I do not feel the need.

But why you worry?

What I am able to give

Is only what your wife is qualified

To give.

We are all alike.

We women,

In our wrappings of hairless skin.

All skeletons are alike,

Only the souls vary

That hide somewhere between the flesh

And the bone.

When I was home on vacation

Some thirteen years ago

My grandmother asked me to spend

One night

In the old family-home.

We shall talk, she said,

Darling,

We shall talk all night.

And,

In the evening,

She kept a lighted lantern,

On the window-sill,

And sat up waiting for me.

The house was four hundred years old,

Its rafters shook in the wind.

Those who thought my life precious,

Cried,

Do not go there,

We shall have no peace

With you sleeping under that

Tottering roof.

My grandmother’s lamp burned

All night

On the window-sill.

I know it is no use regretting now

Or feeling ashamed.

I also know that by confessing,

By peeling off my layers

I reach closer to the soul

And

To the bone’s

Supreme indifference.

Only those who like to listen,

Listen.

What I narrate are the ordinary

Events

Of an ordinary life.

My first school-house

Is now a brothel,

And

The ladies sun themselves on the lawn

In the afternoons

With their graying hair,

Newly washed,

Left undyed.

Who can say, looking at them,

That they are toys,

Fit for the roaring nights?

There must be something symbolic here,

But I do not

Remember what

I have gathered a few morals too

Picking them

Like the wild flowers

On my way.

Husbands and wives,

Here is my advice to you,

Obey each other’s crazy commands,

Ignore the sane.

Turn your home into a merry

Dog-house,

Marriage is meant to be all this

Anyway,

Arranged in

Most humorous heaven.

I have reached the age in which

One forgives all.

I am ready to forgive friends

Their loving,

Forgive those who ruined friendships

And those who forgave

And stayed on to love.

But I shall give a lot to get

One of my foes today

For a quick picnic

Somewhere.

Not having met for ages

We shall have so much to say.

But,

Seriously, I must wake up,

Come alive.

I tell myself

And all of you

Who scan the mirror for that white

Gleam in the hair,

Fall in love,

Fall in love with an unsuitable

Person,

Fling yourself on him

Like a moth of a flame.

Let there be despair in every move.

Excavate

Deep, deep pain.

To be frank,

I have failed.

I feel my age and my

Uselessness.

All I want now

Is to take a long walk

Into the sea

And lie there, resting,

Completely uninvolved.

But,

Rest is only a childish whim,

A minor hunger.

Greater hungers lurk

At the basement of the sea.

Ultimately

I will feed only the hunger

To feed other hungers,

The basic one.

To crumble,

To dissolve

And to retain in other things

The potent fragments

Of oneself.

The ultimate discovery will be

That we are immortal,

The only things mortal being

Systems and arrangements,

Even our pain continuing

In the devourers who constitute

The world.

Even

Oft-repeated moves

Of every scattered cell

Will give no power

To escape

From cages of involvement.

I must linger on,

Trapped in immortality,

My only freedom being

The freedom to

Decompose.