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Kamala Das

The age of mediocrity

I have been writing columns for the past several years. It was only after contributing to the Internet that I was informed about the inadequacies of my writing. Some annoyed guy from the US, an Indian, called it "unadulterated crap". If he had known the real meaning of the word crap, he would have realised that crap is never adulterated.

I started off as a poet. But, in the course of time, my banker-husband told me that it was wiser to start writing prose which would bring in a substantial amount of money. Then poetry became a vice which I had to practise secretly. Poetry eventually abandoned me. In India the ad-writers earn more than the poets, the novelists and the columnists. Catchy slogans sell. The one who came up with the sentence, Utterly Butterly Amul, was crowned the emperor of the ad-world.

This is the age for mediocrity. While watching the parliamentary session on the television, one discovers that only those who can shout the others down succeed as parliamentarians. The brilliant ones seldom get an opportunity to speak. Their speeches are never popular these days.

Once, I too stood for a parliamentary election. That was before the national television put on the marathon parliament show. I am glad I lost the election and stayed at home to enjoy sweet domesticity. There is no sweetness in the Indian parliament.

In Britain, the parliamentarians at least have the pleasure of trying to impress each other by making pompous statement in unaccented English. The British are snobbish about accents although, in Great Britain, most people speak Cockney. An Indian girl living in England with her doctor parents told me that she loved chocolate 'cyke' (cake).

Westernised Indians of the club-going variety would mind the vernacular oddities, but would not mind a touch of Cockney. Anything foreign is music to their ears. Such people live far away from reality. For them, India is the Cricket Club or the Wellington.

Sugatha Kumari, the most powerful woman in Kerala, is the chairperson of the state Women's Commission. She has asked me to help a 13-year-old, who recently came into her rescue home. She carried an infant on her hip. She had walked into a shop to buy a toffee when the shop owner closed the shutters and raped her. The child was asked not to tell her parents of the experience. Eventually, to everyone's amazement, she gave birth to a female child.

Raping minors has somehow become quite the fashion in Kerala. Sugatha told me of an infant thrown on the rail tracks by its rapist. Ants clustered around her pubic region.

Psychologists say there is a belief prevalent here that AIDS is cured by raping female children. HIV positive men are moving into their home towns after contracting the disease from brothels in metropolitan cities. In the beginning, an HIV positive person does not show any conspicuous symptom either. Some of them go in for arranged marriages and gleefully infect their innocent ignorant brides.

In India, all you have to do to get married is declare your salary. In orthodox circles, the comparing of horoscopes may be necessary. But nobody will ever ask you for your medical reports.

Marriage brings in discomfort and disease. The brides turn cynical, wondering which heaven arranged so much of misery for them.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier