Dearest Merrily,
Life has changed for me since Nov. 14 when a young man named Sadiq Ali walked in to meet me. He is 38 and has a beautiful smile. Afterwards he began to woo me on the phone from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, reciting Urdu couplets and telling me of what he would do to me after our marriage. I took my nurse Mini and went to his place in my car. I stayed with him for three days. There was a sunlit river, some trees, and a lot of laughter. He asked me to become a Muslim which I did on my return home. The Press and other media rushed in. The Hindu fanatics, Shiv Sena and the RSS pasted posters all over the place, “Madhavikutty is insane. Put her to death.” I refused the eight policemen sent to protect me. There are young men, all Muslims, now occupying the guest flat and keeping vigil twenty-four hours a day. I have received court orders restraining me from going out or addressing more than six people at a time. Among the Muslims I have become a cult figure all dressed in black purdah and learning Arabic.
My Hindu relatives and friends keep a distance from me. They wish to turn me into a social outcast. My sister visited me twice but wept all the time. I cannot visit my old mother. Otherwise life is exciting…
Affectionately,
Kamala Das (Suraiya)
By the time Sadiq Ali left Kamala’s home, his flirtatious play had stirred long-buried desires
I get an Indian visa and fly to Cochin. Jet-lagged and tired, I open myself to a laughing, entrancing Kamala in burqua and black. We’ve been talking for hours, between and over the heads of the new cast of Muslim visitors. Lulled by her lilting Malayalam, I follow the bewitching movements of her slender brown arms, elegant fingers curling and extending, palms opening, arms rising, hands circling, punching the air, reaching out. Her hands perform a hand dance, hand mime, hand directions, hand tones, resting just a beat before the next arabesque.
I notice too that Kamala’s posture and body language are looser and more relaxed than on my last visit. She says Muslims are friendlier than Hindus, and with them she feels a complicity and trust. There’s more laughter in the house and she looks radiant – dark eyes bright, full lips puckering, gold on neck, diamonds in nose – her face dramatically framed by a regal, high-capped, black chador.
Whatever her new reality, Kamala’s warmth to me is unchanged. She shows me a shiny silver cell phone resting like an idol on a pedestal, and says it is a gift from thirty-eight-year-old Sadiq Ali, Islamic scholar, national Muslim League MP from Malabar, and her absent lover. All day she wears the phone on a gold belt slung rebelliously around the waist of her black dress, keeping the line open and, as he requested, “dedicated to our love.” As her bangles flash and her visitors delight, Kamala listens for the phone strapped to her body. She longs for Sadiq Ali to call. And when the visitors leave, she tells me that after their first meeting, he called for days, at midnight, every night.
“After my husband died, I found myself insecure and totally untethered. I lost my zest for life,” she says, beginning her love story. “Even in this supposedly modern age, Hindu widows are regarded an inauspicious sight. They’re not the right omen at the beginning of any journey. They’re lacklustre, like a mud lark. They can’t fly. They drag their wings in the mud.”
She had spent decades being celibate, extolling its virtues, “carrying my body around like a corpse,” accepting loneliness as the permanent climate of her life. “In a sense I was lying in wait for death. Everything seemed to be dead, or deadened, even poetry. I shrank pitifully, feeling diminished for no fault of my own.”
Then Sadiq Ali asked Kamala’s cousin to arrange a meeting. He said he had admired Kamala for years and wanted to meet her. Kamala gave him a two-hour appointment, and Sadiq Ali drove five hours from his small town to Cochin.
“He sat at my feet laughing the attractive, reckless laugh of a monarch. He was a preacher who delighted large audiences with ballads and narratives lasting five hours. He held his listeners in a spell with his four-octave range and a pure voice that resembled a newborn’s cry.”
Topic: What book are you reading?