Neermathalam Pootha Kalam – Review

Krishna, I am melting,
Melting, melting
Nothing remains
But you 
~ Kamala Das 
 
In my teens and until recently, the legendary & iconoclastic writer put me off with her histrionics; or what I perceived as her histrionics. All her women protagonists came across as sexually frustrated and infidelity was a leitmotif in all I could read. When I read somewhere that the lady was nominated for the esteemed Nobel Prize for Literature, I wondered for what. Now I look back and wonder, how could she not win it? 

Das isn’t a feminist of the typical mould; yet she has to be the truest of them all. She admitted her need for emotional security, her longing for physical beauty, the need for attention and all the other vulnerabilities innate in a woman. The undercurrent of emotions in Madhavikkutty, Kamala Das & Kamala Suraiya are the same; its the superficial exhibition of it that baffles me at times. But I relate to Madhavikkutty more than Kamala; may be the Nobel Committee to Kamala. The quintessential feminist, eternal lover and the most independent soul, the lady is my idol. 

Though autobiographical, Neermathalam Pootha Kalam isn’t just her story. It is the story of any one of her generation would tell. I have heard similar stories from my parents & grand parents. Reading it gives the same feeling; the feeling of sitting in your grandmother’s lap and listening to her stories of “good old times”.  

No drama, no whirlpool and nothing extra ordinary. Just plain, mundane day to day life; told in the language so non-fictional. Yet it is the Diary of Young Ami, so captivating and it gives you that long needed catharsis. In the initial chapters, Das brilliantly draw the whole family tree. But later on, growing up as the daughter of one of the greatest poetess of Malayalam and successful Indian Official in the British India, Ami speaks more about the servants in the kitchen, the dhobi whose daughter of her age had to marry an old widower, the poor Anglo Indian girl who pursue her to get a job for some relative in her father’s company. So many characters evolve, as the author juggle between her days in Calcutta and her ancestral home in South Malabar. We move with her, without any disconnect. We live with her grand mother, swim with her in the pool and then take the train journey with her. Such is her versatility.  

You can’t read thru the pages without being Ami, as the author is fondly called by her family and as you finally finish the book, you are left with the angst, unrest and eventual peace the grandmother go thru the first time Ami comes home wearing a sari. 

As a Malayali, you owe this read to yourself. If you are not one, you still owe it to yourself to know one of the best authors our country has ever had.

~ by The Diva on October 31, 2007.