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Kamala Das

You cannot pass the doorway of death carrying the luggage of falsehood

Although free of Alzheimer's disease and other debilitating conditions, I tend to forget the date for paying the insurance premium, the car tax, the advance tax, phone bills and electricity bills, not to mention the water tax. The government can lock me in jail any day for forgetting to pay for these essentials of civilisations. It is the fear of jails that has kept me honest in financial matters.

In my childhood, my parents had a cook whose cousin was an on-and-off jailbird. When let out, he would come and share with his cousin the dingy room situated exactly halfway up the staircase. He would spend the first half of the month sleeping off his fatigue. As children, my brother and I found it irresistible. He had a curly beard and a wide smile. He snored loudly in the afternoon. When he was awake, he would sit on the stairs, scratching the scabs at his elbow.

He was always generous with his confessional anecdotes, most of which dealt with the cruelty of policemen. "If I had known what brutes they were, I would not have stolen the necklace from the doctor's house," he said one day.

"What kind of necklace was it?" I asked him.

"It was not much of a trophy. When I went to sell it, the jeweller told me that it weighed less than 10 grams," he grinned a better grin.

"Why hit me so hard?" he had asked the policemen at the lock-up. " I did not steal the Kohinoor, did I?" But they had ignored his word. They left him battered and bleeding.

"You could have found an honest occupation," said our cook.

"Honest occupation? Where could I have found an honest occupation? Honesty is not for the likes of us. We are poor people, Our hunger drives us to steal. In jail, I ate three times a day. When I came out after a three year stint, even my sister could not recognise me. 'You look so stout,' she said, staring at me. Her children came and sat quietly in my lap. She told me that her miserable husband beat her with a cane at least twice a week. 'You are a jailbird's sister,' he would say. 'You don't come from a respectable family…' Ah, the brute! If I had caught hold of him, I would have squeezed the life out of him…"

My parents were not even aware of the cook's connections. My mother thought the visitor was a sanyasi returning from a pilgrimage. She presented him with two sets of khaddar clothes and a bottle of cough syrup.

Right from childhood, I was terrified of the police. I was good at obeying the laws of the land.

I often wonder what happens to the gold and money that the policemen and custom's officers seize from the economic offenders. Does the government utilise such finds for the welfare of the people? Money lying unutilised is like love that is never revealed. Money and love have their own functions.

Dinkar Deenanath Pai was the Calcutta manager of the Reserve Bank of India. He used it invite interesting people to his parties, unlike other bankers who cared only for their own. Pai invited poets, playwrights, jaded aristocrats and beautiful women. He sang a Marathi song about a young woman bringing flowers to an old admirer's grave. The old man's ghost asks her why she took so long to reveal her love.

People are odd. They take too long to reveal themselves. They drop their masks only when they are about to die.

I know of a lady freedom fighter who only wore khaddar in her life and was revered for her Gandhian mode of living. When she lay dying with a rattle in her throat, she mumbled incoherently to the relatives beside her bed. But nobody could comprehend what she had to say. Then, an eight-year-old cried out, "Grandma is asking for a green silk sari. Grandma is also asking for a diamond necklace…"

The crowd around the dying woman ignored the child. They brought a photograph for Mahatma Gandhi and held it up for the old one to see in her dying hour. Pretences leave human beings when they are near death. You cannot pass the doorway of death carrying the luggage of falsehood.

I am forever looking for receipts and documents that I have misplaced. My sons advise me to keep a secretary who will, in turn, go crazy looking for the receipts and documents that have been misplaced. His tension and his fidgeting will rob this house of its tranquillity. The silence in these rooms sustain me. In a brief while, I might be dead. Then there would be no need for anyone to locate the papers I have misplaced.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier