Kamala Das as a Poetess

Kamala Das: 31 March 1934 – 31 May 2009

 
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
– W.H. Auden in Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love

Of that love, of that mile
walked together in the rain,
only a weariness remains

I am that stranger now
my mirror holds to me;
the moment's silence
hardly moves across the glass.
I pity myself in another's guise

And no one's back here, no one
I can recognize, and from my side
I see nothing. Years have passed
since I sat with you, watching
the sky grow lonelier with cloudlessness,
waiting for your body to make it lived in
– Jayanta Mahapatra in Of that Love
 

How was Radha whose pains the wide world knew it not, felt it not!
How was Mira, whose pangs and sorrows of widowhood distilling into nectar of love, man doubted it!
How the heart full of love and devotion so often looked with suspense and betrayed!
What to say it about the devotional heart so sacrosanct?
And how the worshippers of love going to worship?

Poetry of the confessional mode and slant
Love and its dreams, man-woman relationship
Nudity, sexuality, eroticism in art
The dark consciousness
The feminine self, women studies, gender bias
Social ghettos and taboos, restricting patriarchal conventions and norms

The identity of a woman
The heart-matter, the soul-matter, the love-matter in poetry
Love the body not, the soul too
A yogan of love
How this prem-pratigya, prem-tapasya?
 

Kamala Das, also called Madhavikutty or writing under the pen name, is one of those confessional writers of Indian English poetry who happen to be from Kerala and have the distinction of being one from Malayali exponents of poetry and those feminine writers who have failed to discern their girlish nature, puerile behavior and coquetry. A poetess from Malabar, she was born into a family of literary personages and personalities as her mother was a writer and poetry came to her spontaneously, impulsively tumbling as the lines of verse, broken lines arranged and re-arranged and she lisped in numbers unawares. Her father was later posted in Calcutta as an executive of an automobile company and used to shuttle in between dividing his time at intervals. She was married at an early age. Her husband too was a banker and she spent a good part of her life there in Calcutta. A recipient of several prizes and accolades, awards and honors, state and national, she has turned into an icon of feminism and confessional poetry. But apart from confessional and autobiographical, she is a propagandist of some sort and likes to stoke the storm by raking controversies and is media-savvy as likes to be in the glare of media light
 

In the words of K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar,
 

“There is no doubt Kamala Das is a new phenomenon in Indo-Anglian poetry--a far cry indeed from Toru Dutt or even Sarojini Naidu. Kamala Das’ss is a fiercely feminine sensibility that dares without inhibitions to articulate the hurts it has received in an insensitive largely man-made world. While giving the impression of writing in haste, she reveals a mastery of phrase and a control over rhythm—the words often pointed and envenomed too, and the rhythm so nervously, almost feverishly, alive. Her characteristic trick is to split phrases and meanings--even the infinitive--between two lines and this is surely symbolic of the fissured, or fractured, sensibility she wishes to communicate. Of course, the endless reiteration of such hurt, such disillusion, such cynicism, must sooner or later degenerate into a mannerism. But one hopes--and her exceptional talent offers the ground for such hope--she will outgrow this obsession in due course and find her way to a season less trying than summer and a world other than the ‘unreal city’ of the dreadful ghosts.”
– K.R.S. Iyengar, Indian Writing In English, Sterling Publishers, 1987, p.680
 

To read her is to be reminded of Sylvia Plath’s Daddy and others, her love for the dear daddy and the cry for him in missing him untimely and the pain of living with faithless and envious Ted Hughes and his violent behavior rather than tender to her softly, so cruel and callous to her and her neurotic self that she put an end to her life. To read and go through her is to be reminded of Jayanta Mahapatra’s Hunger, The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street, A Missing Person and so on. Shiv. K. Kumar’s poems too deal with sexuality and eroticism. John Donne’s The Sun Rising, Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress and others can explain it best
 

How would have poetry born in her? She received her education at better institutions. It is as because her father V.M. Nair was an editor of a Malayalam newspaper. It would be as her mother Balamani Amma was a famous writer of Malayalam. Nalapat Narayana Menon and Vallathol Narayana Menon too seem to be an impact on, both of them. We think she got from the house whatever she had to. Actually, the family culture drew her into writing. But who published her for the first time? The first poems were elsewhere. It is P. Lal who also published and promoted her as because there were a few takers of Indian poetry in English then. It is also a fact when we used to read Indian English poems, it used to sound differently. People used to shrug them off, put them aside for the self-published lying books inaccessible and the writers too were evolving and the matter too appeared it not satisfactory
 

We do not know which English poets have influenced her the most? Who is the source of her inspiration? How has she taken to poetry?
 

What sort of poetry does she write it? She writes it personal poetry replete with confessions, her likes and dislikes. She talks of relationships, personal and extra-marital and dissatisfaction in sex drawing from the normal and the abnormal spaces, delving deep into consciousness layers. To read her is to go deep into as the body is her primary love. Where does satisfaction come from? How the tangle of human relationships? How the myth of man-woman relationship? Who loves what? Why is the life of a woman so? Can she not liberate herself? Poetry is a self talk, a confessional matter. An abnormal too may be a persona, a hysteric woman babbling. Who to say it why has she gone into hysterics? How compelling the situations and circumstances of life? Have you thought about the girls trafficked, drawn into flesh trade? Have you at least felt about their sensitive hearts? The pains of womankind none has ever tried to understand it.
 

The same old playhouse is there, the characters are almost the same, but the script is new. What does it change it here? What will the child prostitute do it with the doll? The glass house of human relations is very difficult to tend to and so the emotional state of ours
 

How the stuffs of her poetry? How the characters, mouthpieces, spokesmen, personae? Where does she draw it from? She draws from eunuchs and folk dancers. Eroticism, nudity and sexuality twitch her for an expression. Sexual love and dreams engage her most. What is love? How to get satisfaction? The body is the centre of love. The body gives it satisfaction. But the body destroys it. Side by side it too twitches her, who is it the lover of the soul? Why the life of a woman so?
 

Her cup of life is full and now she does not want to drink as is feeling dizzy and inebriated. A theatre persona, she looks into the gallery lying empty during the midnight where the audience is not however be the artiste viewing the gallery. The life of a theatre girl, what it to say about a dressed, make-up-applied persona? Real life is something different and bare lies it our experience of life. Drunk bar girls know what worth is this living when intoxication gets it discolored.
 

In her poetry she plays the role of a prankster, a naughty girl trying to tease it everyone. She is confessional, autobiographical and outspoken and hers is a protagonist rising in revolt against male domination and possessive love. But what to do with the Divine Scheme of Things? What to say it about? Why is love possessive and bodily? What is this recurring man-woman relationship? Is there no escape from it? The attraction-repulsion met in love, give and take relationship, love and hate syndrome as inherent in human nature, she as a feminine persona is almost obsessed of and wants to be liberated from. But where to go ultimately?
 

Kamala Das, the daughter of Balamani Amma who used to write in Malayalam, shot to fame with the publication of the works, Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), etc. published from time to time to strengthen her stature as a poetess
 

A poetess from Kerala and that too from some Malayali background, she is very, very controversial and dubious as for her playfulness and outspokenness and the statements she gives, controversies she foments and stokes in talking of love and sex freely, man-woman relationship and sex satisfaction. Sometimes she sings of Krishna taking her to be Radha, not an old Radha, but a modern Radha so mad after love, not after the spiritual side, but after the body as soul is in the body and if the body is not satisfied, the soul cannot be. She is a Mira, a modern Mira whose heart only Krishna knows it, whose pains only Krishna can feel it, not man, modern man
 

She knows how to introduce it oneself and can speak three languages, but can dream in two and write in one. Politics, she does not know it, but can take the names of those in power. From Nehru she can start with. But the language she uses in is completely hers. It may be half-funny, half-English, half-Indian. Do not mind. Let it be hers. Krishna, Ghanashyam, if she says it not the personal things of hers to him, to whom will she? How can the swallow be tamed? How can the love-bird be caged for so long? It will flutter way one day. Be sure of it. What does it lie in the old playhouse? Love is a deeper thing. Love is a thing of the body. Love is a thing of the soul. Can the body be loved if the soul is not? The looking glass will show how you look like. Bare is the assumption, supposition of love; the illusion and hallucination of it. Love is not what you take it for, love is not what we take it for, love is love, love has a deeper meaning of own. The myth of love is difficult to understand and so intricate our human relations, the story of man-woman relationship. What is this summer? It is an orange squeezed in a glass and you sipping it. Summer is as such, it may quench your thirst or may not. But the thing is this that she is feeling it hot today. What is it setting her afire, engaging her mind though the summertime too is as such?
 

She is a modern woman, a modern lover of Radha and Mira. Draupadi, she cannot reject it, even she cannot Kunti. The fire test which Rama took, she would not approve of, the Lakshmanrekha which Lakshmana drew it. She is a rebel, she is a modern woman, a modern protagonist. She is not a woman of the country who will call her husband ‘Pati Parameshwara’, (Husband the Greater God). The husband is not Satyavan to her and she not a Savitri. She has not to worry about Karwa Chauth. Her poetic persona is a Laila, a Juliette
 

There are some aspects which are not clear to us. She complains it about her husband, if she not at all, her protagonist definitely keeps it complaining. Sometimes she says it that her husband has encouraged her to write. What is the matter we do not understand it. Whatever be that, is the husband older and aged than the wife? Does she want to indicate dissatisfaction in sex? Is it a matter of libido? Can we sense feminism or extra-marital relationship? The last of all, none of the critics has talked about her schooling. Where did she get her education from?
 

How to discuss it Kamala Das and her protagonist, the poetic mouthpiece? From the range of a Mira or a Radha or not, looking into her through the psycho-analytical method of penetration? Is she an Ibsenism character or a neurotic patient? Is the matter like that of a doll’s house? Is it a penetration into a woman’s self, persona or psyche? As the things are in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Fox, The Virgin and the Gypsy, Sun and so on, are the things of hers so telling of man-woman relationship, lustrous eyes, luscious kisses, bare body, flesh and blood contact and passionate quivering for a communion? Is the woman a sucker of the man’s self? This is what Lawrence thinks it about
 

Kamala Das has not written something new but is an extension of what the female confessional writers have which we may find in Judith Wright, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and so on. But apart from all that she is very, very Lawrentine and bodily as hers is a story of relationship, intimacy and passionate love. She is sexual, physical and bodily. Her autobiography is about her freedom, liberation from patriarchal restriction, Victorian ghettos and social taboos. One should not mistake her for a Radha as she is not a Radha. She keeps politicking for coming into light and is media-savvy. She is mad after sex and is love-sick. Though a writer womanly and feministic, she is too much vocal about and is spiritually sick
 

Though we call her a Radha, after Ghanashyam, but is in reality a feminist, a confessional one who wants to lay it bare what it is in her heart, what it is in her psyche, representing womankind and the pains of it; hers is a revolt to be understood at the psychic level as well as the physical level. A rebel, she rises in revolt against social convections, ghettos and taboos which restrict it the freedom and liberty of the womankind. When will a woman be free? Why are the restrictions over? Man-woman relationship, how to dislodge the erotic figures of hugging, embrace, kiss and intimate closeness? How long will it continue patriarchal hegemony and male domination? How long will it the body be possessed? Perhaps there is no answer to it
 

Whatever say you about her, that is not complete as because she is very, very controversial and individualistic of the poetesses we come across. We love and like for her private and personal feelings and emotions which she lays them open, going deep into the consciousness layers. She cannot hold in check from saying the things of the dark consciousness.
 

Strange is the priestess into the Temple of Love
Strange the worshipper of love worshipping in the Temple of Heart
They also worship who say it not
They also worship who are but the lovers of the soul
 

Kamala Das is one of those practitioners of Indian English poetry whose names we often attach and associate with love and sexuality and the confessional slant of writing never taken to such a height of delving and penetration in our chronicles and annals of poesy. A poetess of bodily love, sex satisfaction, man-woman relationship, love and hate theme, give and take phenomenon, she is autobiographical, physical and psychological at the same we read her. The dark layers of consciousness she delves into, clawing the psyche of man for an intimate reading and scrutiny of our subjective impressions and sensations. We do not know if she has gone through Freud or Lawrence, but instead of is frank and bolder in her treatment of sex and satisfaction. Definitely a feminist, but a rebel she can go to any extent in expressing herself, in putting the things of her womanly self and identity. A native of Malabar, Kerala, she is but a Malayalam authoress and herself is but a Malayali one whose childhood spent in Kerala as well as in Calcutta for a longer part as because her father was posted there.
 

And at a very tender age she was married off to a banker, but something in her rebellion to live as wife. Male domination she could not bear with; to pass off life as homemaker never could she accept it. She wanted to be a feminist; a social activist; a women rightist. A poetess, a novelist, a short story writer, she has penned memoirs and autobiographies in the same way as she continues to write.
 

Her agendum is one of women’s liberation from the shackles of male hegemony and to some extent she is a politician too who likes to bask in media glare. Her narratives are sexual narratives full of overtones and undertones. All the time she levels complaints against the hubby, but we do not anything else about her personal relationship. Was it a happier one or not? Had we heard her husband, it would have been good for criticism sake, but we are in the dark. Does she hint towards the abnormal age gap between wife and husband? Hidden sexual lust she often gives a voice to it, sexual repression she talks it about. How is our sexual behavior? How the gap between sexual bliss and dissatisfaction takes a toll upon? If the body is complacent, only then the soul is blest. Another aspect which we do not find is this that the critics are silent about her education. Just they concentrate on her writings rather than giving any information in this regard. To read her is to feel that woman is not a plaything. She too has the rights to live as a sole entity, but can it be possible? Her persona is a dissatisfied self, but everything cannot be explained from the sexual point of view and life around sex
 

While relating to her poetry, people talk of her being a Radha or a Mira, but no Mira or Radha is she in reality. Sita and Savitri not the talk of hers, she may be sympathetic to Draupadi. Perhaps she is spiritually sick. And even if she is a priestess, she is a priestess of love, even if she dons a tulsimala around her neck, she is but a modern girl. She has nothing to do with religion and spirituality
 

Rather than taking the names of her poetry books, it is better to concentrate on her representative poems, as they shed a better light on poetic ethos. While taking to her poetry, one thing is clear that she is quite experimental in her expression. It is also a fact there were no takers of Indian English poetry in the sixties and the seventies and at that time all these modern poets were Gods of small things. Even their books not, but booklets were out of print, out of stock. It was difficult to find their books in the book-stalls as we talk of their poetry now-a-days. From the eighties and the nineties they started getting an impetus when their poems were prescribed in the syllabuses on a mass scale and it got the nod of the UGC too and their teams and when the Ph.D. was made compulsory for career advancement the people started taking them up instead of tougher British and American literary treatises and tenets.
 

Among her works, Summer in Calcutta, The Descendants, The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, etc. are the prominent works which have come to us from time to time. A recipient of so many prizes and awards, Kamala Das does not require any introduction. The Descendants again is a poem of love and lust, how the pathways of ours, as allotted by Divinity. Shall we be able to hide out guilt? Are we not sinners and our activities not sinful? Nothing can redeem us even though we speak to be. Summer in Calcutta as a title poem tells us the all of her writings. It is about the hot blazing sun as well as bodily fever. So, how to calm and cool down? Only the orange juice can. The summer noon, the siesta and the quenching of the thirst are the things of the poem under our deliberation. The Old Playhouse too as a poem takes up the same man-woman relationship story. How the duties and daily works of a wife? How the dull and drab routine assigned to her? The playhouse is but an older one, only the characters keep changing and enacting differently. The Dance of The Eunuchs is another beautiful poem where Kamala Das describes the coming of the eunuchs and their gala dance, but behind their persona lies it hidden a saga of curse and repentance as for being neither male nor female. Even though in make-up, they are not happy from their within. Through a picture of the eunuchs and a portrayal of their characters, she draws a vivid picture of human life. They beat their breasts, sing of lovers dying and the children unborn to them. In Love as a poem is all about the futility of love and loving, she describes the skin’s lazy hungers together with the carrying of the corpse taken for cremation. The body for which feel we so much thirst and hunger, where does it go to finally? Will the lovers understand it?
 

Poetic Style, Metaphor And Deliberation: A Reading of Her Poetry
 

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
– Robert Browning in My Last Duchess
 

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
– Sylvia Plath in Daddy
 

Poetry as confessions made
Autobiography with a confessional slant
The poetess of the body
A priestess of love in the temple of the body
Poetry as the alphabet of lust
Hunger of the body, self-gratification,
Things lesbian, homosexual and gay
And materials from the third gender
 

To take up Kamala Das is to take up women’s rights, gender bias, feminism, woman trafficking, flesh trade, inhuman veil system and so on and even if she speaks it not, she suggests and hints towards indirectly. To take up her is to take up the women’s movement, women studies and gender studies. How are the women’s movements? How have we curtailed women’s rights? How have we censured their rights? How have we throttled them? Do we know? Gender discrimination she cannot bear with. The psyche of a woman none has come to feel it, the heart and soul of a woman, only the body of flesh and blood. It is male domination and possessiveness’ which she rebels against. Why is this, why is as such Divine Scheme of Things? The Divine Plan? Why is this discrimination in the name of gender? Is God responsible for it? Whom to blame it for? Her persona is a womanly persona, made from human joys and sorrows. When happy, she smiles and when sad, she sheds tears. People generally play with her emotions and misuse her. What to say about the girl bride and the child prostitute? The doll cannot be a substitute for a pastime? Is the house the periphery of a woman? Is the courtyard? The poetess as a rebel is the thing, the poet as a feminist and her agendum is a feminist agendum. The liberation of woman, when will she be free?
 

Poetry is a private and personal affair with Kamala Das as it is also with the other fellow poets of Paratahsarathy’s anthology of ten Indian poets writing in English and this is the reason for which the Indian older guides and supervisors were not willing to suggest or give some research topics to their students on such an evolving genre of the virgin field of literature. To Kamala, poetry is love and sexuality, Sambhoga to samadhi stuff and she a Rajneeshite disciple with a tulsimala or a rudrakshamala in her hand. Kamala Das is an adorer of the body and in the body she sees it the soul, the body of flesh and bones, its whims and charms. To her, life is an alphabet of lust. Out of the poems written on Ghanshyam, by Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Das, the former’s is the best as because the latter mixes the personal things with the topic
 

The Old Playhouse, Composition, Luminol, The Freaks, In Love, Inheritance, Glass, Love, Summer in Calcutta, An Introduction, The Wild Bougainvillea, The Grandmother’s House, The Descendants, The Suicide, A Relationship, The Stone Age, etc. are the poems which figure in The Old Playhouse and Other Poems.
 

The old playhouse is the theatre of life wherefrom the story starts and ends too. All are but players. Who is whose heroine? Just for the time being do we make-believe roles and parts. Even she starts the poem, but in her style:
 

You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her
In the long summer of your love so that she would forget
Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but
Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless
Pathways of the sky.
– Kamala Das, The Old Playhouse and Other Poems,
Orient Longman Pvt. Ltd., Hyderabad, First Published 1973,
This paperback edition 2004, p.1
 

There is an air which blows outside the playhouse and this is invigorating life-breath. The flower in the vase smacks of human sweat and she is tired of living in the curtained flat. There is a world outside it to know. How can it be that the husband is God? To marry is not to lose one’s freedom and to be a slave to passion. A woman has an entity of own.
 

It is beautiful to hear her story which is but the story of every woman. How the destiny of woman that she is subjugated in this way!
 

“ You were pleased
With my body’s response, its weather, its usual shallow
Convulsions. You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured
Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed
My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices.”
– Ibid, p.1
 

The poem is very interesting to read, full of man-woman relationship. The scent of blood fills the air with a queer observation of human relationship. There is rampant sexuality in her when she talks about dark room relationship, skin’s lazy hungers and the sexual appetite
 

To take up Kamala Das is to tell what she is not a poetess, a short story writer, a novelist and an autobiographer. She is first of all a feminist which has gone in the making of the poetess and her personality, a Malayali girl speaking through these lines of verse; a rebel in rebellion against male damnation and possessive love and wanting to be free breaking the shackles which bind womankind. She is after all a woman wanting to be free. She wants to live freely under the skies. But is a sexist too as because she believes in sex from inhibitions and is other wisely romantic. Apart from being of free temperament, she is bold enough and franker in her treatment of sex. She is confessional too.
 

Poetry to her is an exercise in autobiography; an alphabet of lust. Her story is one of Madhavikutty growing into a woman of her making, mind and mentality, but is a politico too, as does it politics often to come into power. Her protagonist is a child prostitute; a eunuch; a child bride and through them she says it all. Malabar is on her mind and the connections with it narrates she in her literature, commemorating all that and family matters and going beyond she talks of lesbianism, homosexuality, gay literature and the third gender stuffs and while reading about all, we become reminded of our Ramlila or Krishnalila artistes acting as cross-dressed queens and characters, the beautiful heroines of Shakespeare who were but male actors which never could we know just saw them on the covers of the book flaps. But the Divine Scheme of Things, as for, who a male and who a female and why, we cannot say that even though she may question it the injustice subjected out to women
 

What Shiv K. Kumar says it in his poems as such, Indian Women, An Indian Mango Vendor and so on and Jayanta Mahapatra in Hunger, The Whorehouse in Calcutta and others the same is in a plenty in Kamala Das. To read her is to be raked by sexual overtones and undertones. Love and its coquetry, this is the periphery of her literature and even if she writes her autobiography, it will be an anecdote and a chronicle of her sexual life. The courtyard of her house is the gossip of her poetry which she enjoyed it in being at Malabar, which she felt it from the terrace of her Calcutta residence the things Calcuttan. She got it so much, felt it in the company of her father, acquired it from reading news and coming to know the high-class society. There is something in her which makes her made in Calcutta, something as made in Malabar and above all, her Malayali culture and without knowing Malabar and Kerala and Malayalam, one cannot Kamala and her mental set-up and Calcuttan summer is an orange squeezed into the glass as for a drink to quench the thirst, to give respite and relief from burning sensation and sweating humidity. But together with it, who can ever about the inward burning, the siesta to be taken and a waiting full of love? Nature is not, but a body on fire is the thing of her poetry in an autobiographical format.
 

If you ask me to do my Ph.D., I shall title it, Kamala Das As

• Kamala Das as A Poetess From Malabar
• A Study The Histrionics of Kamala Das
• A Study In Dramatic Presentation or The Womanly Self,
• The Feminine Persona: A Study In K Das
• Kamala Das From Abnormal Psychology Point of View: A Study
• A Psychoanalysis & Dream Interpretation of Kamala Das: A Perusal
• The Poetess As A Rebel, A Womanist, A Feminist: A Study In Das’s Poetry 
   

A flower in a vase cannot be as natural as it remains in a tree. If the flowers are plucked, can they be so as they remain in the plants? Fragrance tells about sweetness, so does it about loveliness. Some flowers though not scented hang onto so sweetly. The scent of a flower maddening around from far and the scent of a lady passing, her cosmetic make-up, facial cream and powder carrying out the whiffs and wisps far which but the passers-by, lookers-on, wayfarers can say it, maddening them with sweetness, fragrance and the spray of scent so magically. Beauty is as such, truth is so and as such goodness, Satyam shivam sundaram, an embodiment of the three. To be a reader of Kamala Das is to be a good lover of the soul and the body
 

The mind of a woman, how to read it? How the impressions and sensations going over her heart? The psychology of a woman, how to read it? If the physical features are different, how to take to a make believe state of presentation?
 

Let us view the request of Kamala Das? What does the poetess say it about in the poem A Request? But the request of Jayanta Mahapatra is better than that of Kamala. Jayanta asks before his death as for how to meet with his rites and really so his body vanished in the Panchttatva as per will and testament resembling Nehru. The Ghanshyam poems of Sarojini and Kamala too are standard poems, but that of the former bypasses her.
 

A Hot Noon in Malabar is another fine poem in which she speaks of the fortune-tellers, the card-readers, the Kurava girls and the bangle-sellers and the hot noon full of strangers memorized from far. A Losing Battle as a poem advises us not to love as to love a woman will mean tears in her. The other point is this that the lioness of her heart, can it be tamed? Will he be able to tame it?