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Kamala Das

Life in the slow lane

My 76-year-old cook is actually not my chief cook. She can be called the night cook, for she cooks only my supper. In the morning, a younger woman comes here by bus to cook me a sumptuous vegetarian lunch. Her talents are mediocre. But being a brahmin functions as a status symbol. For people of a lower caste, a brahmin cook is more valuable than a diamond necklace.

The night cook is a Nayar woman addicted to baths. She bathes herself twice a day and dons white clothes. Ancient travellers to India had extolled the hygienic purity of the Nayar women. My cook, Chirutheyi Amma, continues with the tradition. The part-time maid belongs to a caste that was regarded untouchable till Mahatma Gandhi named them the children of God. She merely sweeps the floors and swabs them with dusters wrung out in phenyl.

The driver belongs to the rich minority community, the Ezhavas whose forefathers were toddy-tappers. Later, they brewed arrack and more deadly stuff adding spirit and millipedes. The lady of the house has nothing much to do except to brood over her man's misdemeanours. A widow like me should probably sit brooding over her late husband's misdemanours. Brooding is an unpleasant occupation. It does not seem to suit my face.

My brother, a psychiatrist who practised for 20 years in the United States, returned to settle in Cochin only because he grew tired of shovelling the snow and carrying the dirty clothes to the laundromat and the garbage bags to wherever they are to be deposited. He missed servants. He missed the comfort of physical inactivity. Friends chided him for abandoning a lucrative career merely to laze around the house.

My brother's house of red glazed bricks is spacious and just the kind of house to laze around in. He has two patios, each facing a garden full of flowering shrubs and mango trees. Early in the morning, the gardens fill with birdsong. When he was heading a mental institution, a lunatic kicked him in the stomach injuring his intestine grievously. Another loony broke a mahogany chair on his skull. Such occupational hazards also may have been responsible for his coming away to India.

I would, if invited, go to the US and celebrate my freedom by drinking the fruit juices sold in cartons. To escape from one's servants, if only for a month or two, seems a delightful prospect. They chatter all the time, making it difficult for me to hear my own thoughts.

Once I visited Columbia University and gave a talk. The audience consisted of teachers and scholars. All of them with the exception of Professor Riccardi looked insufferably snobbish. They made me feel inadequate, like some sort of a country cousin.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier