A Childhood In Malabar by Kamala Das

Author:Kamala Das [Das, Kamala]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789351181521
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Epilogue

I grew up listening to stories: stories that Amma selected from European literature and narrated to me and Ettan, stories the grandmothers used to tell us at dusk from the Ekadashi Mahatmyam, Bharatam, Bhagavatham and Ramayanam, stories that took shape when Cheriamma recited narrative poems to us, Kumaran Asan’s Nalini, Leela and Karuna. But the anecdotes our servants told us about people who lived in our village and the local gossip they shared with us were what I enjoyed most. The dividing line between truth and fiction would often dissolve as I listened to these stories, laced with humour and passion. The other storytellers spoke of a fictional world, of people who lived very different lives from ours, while the world the servants described was real, earthy and tangible. The vivid characters and events they described peopled my imagination and became part of the experience of growing up.

Much later, when my friend Ramanlal Patel asked me to try to recall my childhood, the voices of these storytellers began to resound in my ears again. I began to fit the fragments of dialogue I gradually recaptured into patterns like one puts together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They provided rich and varied material for my imagination to work with, to extend and enlarge. I discovered that the world they came from, the world of my own childhood, remains a treasure-house of memories from whose inexhaustible depths I can still invoke tale after wonderful tale …

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.