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Kamala Das

Corruption seemed like smog, darkening the land…

I do not know how the late prime Minister Indira Gandhi did it, but she did reply to each of my letters within three days of receiving them. The present prime minister is indifferent to the miseries suffered by the ordinary citizens, even if they happen to be writers. Or the prime minister's secretaries are indifferent, since they are political appointees. In India, you have to be a religious leader to be taken seriously, for such a dignitary can influence his admirers to cast their votes according to his wishes.

I sent two frantic letters to Mr Gujral urging him to slop the Cochin Corporation from dumping garbage opposite my gate. The stench and the bacteria will keep away not only my Indian guests, but the foreign writers who come looking for me. When the first load arrives, I shall stage a dharna on the road and court imprisonment. Tihar jail will then smell better than my abode.

There ought to be a law forbidding the recycling of garbage within hundred yards of human habitation. Even animals like cattle and pigs will sicken and die, inhaling the lethal vapours emanating from such activities. Dead animals are often eaten by human beings. But dead human beings cannot be eaten with the blessings of the civilised world.

The mayor of the Cochin Corporation, by all appearances, seem like an honourable man. I do not know what makes him connive with the chairman of the Greater Cochin Development Authority to plan my destruction. Along with me, the students of the Central School and the inmates of the Indira Gandhi Hospital will sicken and die. Nobody seems to care.

When I was staying in Trivandrum, I used to get a pit dug once a week to dump the garbage in. After a week, the pit is closed and another opened. This made the soil fertile. Spinach grew in abundance all over the vacant lot, glossy, succulent and green.

Decades ago, my grandmother abhorred onions. In the family home, hundred yards away from the main structure, stood a privy around which grew onions of a wild variety. My grandmother guessed that they drew their vitality from human excreta. All over the estate, vegetables like pumpkin, ash gourd, cucumber, flat beans and okra flourished. When I went there during the summer vacations, I used to collect the vegetables in a basket early in the morning and carry it to the cook, Narayanan Nayar.

Women were not employed as cooks those days. Menstruating women were not admitted even into the dining hall. They were said to be polluted. The literate ones sat on the northern patio and read books and periodicals for three days. The illiterate women made themselves useful by chasing out the crows from the large reed mates where boiled paddy lay drying.

The newspapers brought in news of the war being fought in Europe. Photographs of the two princesses of Windsor, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, both resplendent in blue organdy frocks, were published. Until Gandhiji came to Kerala's temple town, Guruvayoor, and made a speech my grandmother did not even feel contempt for the British. She had, in fact, liked the royal family. She had not given any serious thought to India's right to be free. She used to talk of George VI, the emperor, with a lot of fondness.

Finally, the British lost its empire. The benevolent maharajas of Indian states were shorn of their right to govern. They no longer had the right to call themselves maharajas. Lowly men who had shouted themselves hoarse in the uprising against foreign rule became the new rulers. They began to feel that they were the maharajas. By and by, they began to feel that they were Gods. Poor decisions were taken that affected the welfare of Indians. A religious group demanded its own territory, a country to call its own. Other groups, in the wake of the Partition, made similar demands but they were put down effectively and mercilessly.

Corruption seemed like smog, darkening the land. The rulers deposited their ill-gotten wealth in foreign banks. Banks in India, not to be outwitted, conducted brazen improprieties that came to be known as scams. Not one offender was locked up or punished.

For the big-time criminals who became politicians, special protection squads were set up. The dishonest had a whale of a time in India. Indians of the garden variety, who made up 90 per cent of the country's population, are fatalists. We have sinned in our last birth and that is why we suffer, they mumble, when asked why they do not protest against the humiliations heaped upon them by the ruling classes. Like a whipped cur, the oppressed Indian stays subdued and believes in the infinite mercy of God.

Illustration: Lynette Menezes