Kerala - Kochi   

Her last desire goes unfulfilled

Kochi: Writer Kamala Suraiya, who passed away on Sunday morning, had an unfulfilled desire. She wanted to return to the city that bore witness to her fluctuating fortunes in life one last time. Her apartment in Kadavanthra wears an orphaned and desolate look.

She came as Kamala Das a. k. a Madhavikutty to make the city her home and left it behind as Suraiya Begum in 2007. The ten years she lived here were literally eventful. All these years, Kamala was waging a losing battle against age. But it could never steal away the youthful vigour that characterised her personality and the glow of innocence that marked her countenance. She would surely have missed the din and bustle of urban existence that she had enjoyed in Delhi, but her home was a refuge to all and sundry: a cheering mother, friend and confidante, and most of all, a compassionate human being.

She wouldn’t have any qualms about visitors ringing her doorbell, and they ranged from the firebrand Taslima Nazreen, noted writers in Malayalam to the media bandwagon that always marked her as the easy victim for a good sound bite. Many people, like poet K.G. Sankara Pillai, wondered how she pulled herself into such a setting from the vast expanse of rural landscape featuring, among other things, her prized ‘Neermathalam’ (pomegranate tree) that took pride of place in her tales.

The truth was, as Sankara Pillai realised, her mind could travel far and wide beyond the bounds of the brick structures to accommodate within a much larger world where everyone and everything coexisted. “She would get a high in both rural and urban settings; even the marginalised communities formed a part of her ‘folks’. Kamala’s decision to embrace Islam in 1999 raked up a storm, but she had made up her mind and was not to be cowed down by such prattles. Eminent documentary maker Suresh Kohli came down to Kochi after the dawn of the new millennium and Kamala, although ‘immobile’ owing to health problems, gracefully faced the camera with her intrinsic vivacity. Later, Mr. Kohli wrote about the experience of making the film in The Hindu.“If I had been a loved person, I wouldn’t have become a writer. I would have been a happy human being,” he quoted her as saying on screen. “I suppose I started writing because I had certain weaknesses in my system. I thought I was weak and vulnerable. That’s why we attempt poetry. Poets are like snails without the shells, terribly vulnerable, so easy to crush. Of course it has given me a lot of pain, each poem. Each poem is really born out of pain, which I would like to share. It is the looking that makes the poet go on writing. If you find someone, the search is over, poetry is over,” she had said. The poet, it seems, has become one with her beloved in death.

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