The Kept Woman and Other Stories by Kamala Das

Author:Kamala Das [Kamala Das]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Om Books International
Published: 2010-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Flight

I t was only last year that I decided to stop living in the big cities and settle down in Kerala. I had the occasional feeling that with my art products winning greater fame, my fingers were losing their skill. Poverty of experience might be at the back of it, I felt. Gradually all my statues became mere repetitions. Art can imitate life. I don’t complain about that. But if art gets endlessly repetitive?

All who came to model for me in the city displayed the spiritual poverty of city creatures. Their faces were pale, and their hair appeared lustreless, with dust from the streets. Their muscles were slack like wet cotton. I noted with unease the boils on their bellies, the scars left by surgical operations and the blue veins. While free, they inserted cigarettes between burnt lips. They pecked at puris and potatoes brought in tins of candy, and urinated and defecated noisily in my bathroom. The briskness of their movements got on my nerves. They always showed the impatience of individuals disciplined by buses and electric trains.

I had always wanted to slow down time. And I cultivated in myself the patience of a seed lying dormant under the earth. My figures took shape slowly, like a plant growing luxuriantly into a tree. I worked on verandahs without roofs. My statues, exposed to the scorching heat, wind and rain, underwent changes I never intended. Nature patted and stroked them and made them glitter. Perhaps on account of this, many said they were alive. The statues could thus earn the glow which should have been present in the models. The sale of my figures brought me wealth. But those without any love of art spread scandals about me, probably because I had to work looking at naked bodies. My husband once told me that those who spread scandals were like the sick with a viscous liquid oozing from their lips, and thus he taught me that the habit was nothing but a filthy sickness. After that, the taunts of such people never brought tears to my eyes.

My husband, at the age of forty-three, was laid up for three months with high blood pressure. His right leg and right hand were totally paralysed. For some time, he lost his power of speech too. It was then that I became a professional sculptor. And I took up the bread-winner’s responsibility. Gradually, he regained enough strength to speak and to walk about in the house with the aid of a stick. But he had lost his job by then. He used to stand by my side, leaning on his walking stick, as I chiselled away without a break. And he would say in the softest voice, “Poor girl! How unfortunate you are! Fated to live as a total paralytic’s wife!”

The Flight •

I did not deserve the sympathy in his words. Before getting transformed into the bread-winner, I was just a plaything in the hands of my oversexed husband. It was only through a sacrificial offering of my body that I could satisfy him.

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