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Kamala Das

A gift of happiness

A sure and easy way to recapture lost or misplaced youth is to invite an old relative to spend a month with you. An aunt, for instance, who wishes to get away for a while from the grumbling of the virago married to her only son. Set the old one free. Let her shed her fears and inhibitions and crack jokes of a questionable taste. Take her out shopping and buy for her embroidered saris of pastel shades. Take her for a medical check-up for which she doesn't have to pay a rupee. Get her to drink white wine with you. Get her health drinks and multivitamins. Get her a roomy white handbag with pockets for her comb, mirror and the pills for hypertension or diabetes. Gifting happiness multiplies your own stock of it.

The world stresses the importance of being young. As a result, grey-haired ones with experience and expertise sit at their doorsteps feeling unutilised. They have an energy that can be tapped. Can you imagine Picasso being pensioned off? Or an M F Husain? Grandma Moses began painting at the age of 70. Talent is ageless. It clings to its owner till the moment of his death.

Old age is not tolerated by the young. A mother's wrinkles are an affront to the son. Physical ugliness seems to have become unpardonable.

In the developed countries, women past 45 rush into surgeries for facelifts and silicone implants. The idea is to appear bedworthy. Why should an elderly woman, a good mother and a good wife in her time, be bedworthy at all? The world is not a bordello set up to please the concupiscent. Each living creature has a slot and a mission to fulfil. All are not cut out to be vamps.

Once, during a Canadian tour, I asked a glamorous friend who had confided in me about her expensive breast implants if I could touch her glorious mounts. She willingly removed her blouse. My first touch gave me a jolt. Her breasts were hard, like the pestle of a grinding stone.

The most attractive part of the human breast is its soft resilience. When I was a child vacationing in my Malabar home, my great grandmother, the daughter of the Rajah of Punnathur Kotta, a principality in Malabar, walked about with uncovered breasts. It was only for the annual visit to the temple of Guruvayur on the Ekadasi day that she covered them with a muslin cloth. She was petite and had a golden skin that gradually, with the passage of time, came to resemble crepe silk. I still recollect the faint scent of sandalwood that clung to her upper torso.

When, at a seminar, a speaker advised me to go back to my tradition, I remembered the Nayar tradition of uncovering breasts. Today, the sight of a woman's bosom alone seems obscene to the censors.

Personally, the sight of a woman nursing an infant at her breast is a beautiful image. Beauty contestants in scanty clothes promenading on the stage do not come anywhere near the comeliness of the first image. Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus Yesoda and Krishna… How these adorable babes have captivated the human mind for centuries!

When I was eight years old and lived as a boarder at St Joseph's Latin Convent, I have watched my older roommates squeeze themselves into tight blouses and tunics to look flat-chested. The idea was to look desexed. Sexual thought was taboo. None dared discuss it.

The nuns in their brown habits concealed their sexual characteristics effectively. No urge was evident. Each appeared as a pillar, with no conceivable concavity anywhere. They have shaven heads covered by black veils. To snip a stray hair that persisted, the nuns had small scissors attached to the chain at the waist. I did not know that their heads were shaven till a friend told me so.

I could not believe that beautiful Sister Philomena, who used to whisper loving messages into my ear when I lay in the dark, homesick and miserable, had a shaven head. I had imaged her Monalisa face surrounded by curls. My friend prodded me into climbing the steep staircase after the silence bell had tolled and Aly, the warden, had begun her snoring.

"Don't worry, Kamala, I am right behind you," whispered my friend, the incorrigible Raji, from the dark behind me. I pushed the door an inch or two and there, in the small yellow light of a candle, sat my sister Philomena, taking off a loose white shirt, her head as bald as a baby's bottom. I was startled by the sight and came away feeling uncomfortable.

Back in our beds Raji asked, "Now, do you still think sister Philomena is beautiful?" I was silent.

Nuns, with their rosaries clinking, used to walk in a single file to the chapel in the orange glow of the setting sun. I thought they were beautiful. That was the time when I played with the idea of becoming a nun and dedicating myself to serving God. All Gods seemed equally worshipped. I would not have minded becoming a Christian for a change.

"Why join any religion?" asked Raji with a frown. "Are dogs cats and cows Christian? Are they Hindu?" Her words made sense. The animals of this world did not go into a Christian heaven, a Moslem heaven or a Hindu paradise. They did not claim any God as their own.

"I wouldn't mind being a bird," I said, while Raji laughed raucously.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier