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A jigsaw of childhood memories
A Childhood in Malabar- A Memoir: Kamala Das: Penguin: Rs. 200
TO THE general public used to Kamala Das's penchant for inviting controversies at the drop of a hat, `A Childhood in Malabar' will come as a surprise. The little events that colour a child's world are evocatively sketched through conversations. Visits to neighbours, temple festivals, dramas, rituals, prayers, clothes, home remedies, beauty secrets and the barber who arrives to bob her hair is the stuff that her childhood in Malabar is made of. Untainted by anything particularly unpleasant, the book speaks in a voice that is authentic without being maudlin. Not too many successful writers today really believe that success can lie in a record of warm normalcy but Kamala's memoir of her childhood is just that.
`A Childhood in Malabar' first appeared in Malayalam in two volumes, `Balyakala Smaranakal' in 1987 and `Varshangalku Mumbu' in 1989. This book is Gita Krishnankutty's English translation of those volumes. Kamala Das recounts how she pieced together the forgotten areas of her life encouraged by a friend, Ramanlal Patel, and these provided her imagination with a source material to "extend and enlarge".
Growing up amidst a large family at Nalappat, punctuated by visits to Calcutta where her father and mother lived, Kamala's world is filled with uncles and aunts and grandmothers, neighbours and domestic help, all of whose lives closely touch hers. A little girl from Calcutta, she is both curious and the object of curiosity. Her connection with that city gives her a special halo, which is perhaps why the book is so full of questions on her side and explanations on the other. Her ammamma and ammaman are the principal influences in her life and encourage and indulge her unlike her reserved father. Kamala's relationship with her mother, the poetess Balamani amma, is surprisingly treated in a very restrained manner.
If Kamala is the focus of attention she is equally attentive and observant of the people who inhabit her world and she learns her first lessons in worldly wisdom from the conversation of friends, the numerous workers in the village, the korathis and the bangle seller and a host of other characters who come to the tharavad. They introduce her to points of view alien to her family--Unimayamma, Madhavi amma, schoolteachers and masters, Sankaran and Devaki.
The idyllic setting of Nalappat and its surroundings is evoked through the beauty of the jamun tree, the flowers and the Malabar dusk when Jupiter has just risen in a part of the sky. Kamala's narrative style is episodic, just as memory generally is. She is too accomplished a writer to leave her memories untouched by artifice. There are moments when she poses questions, which are tantalisingly left unanswered. But there is one question that the work immediately poses in the reader's mind. Given her background what transformed Kamala Das into Kamala Surraiya? If this memoir of her childhood in Malabar had not been written so many years before she converted to Islam, one might be tempted to glibly observe that she wrote this work just to bait her readers to ask that question.
Kamala Das may have a penchant for inviting controversy and this recently published English translation is sure to rekindle the debate over the issue. `A Childhood in Malabar' is not a book that will be quickly dismissed by even those who have no appetite for controversies.
PRATIMA ASHER
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