I clearly remember the time Balyakalasmaranakal, Kamala Surayya's childhood memoir, was serialised in Mathrubhumi Azhchapathippu. I would wait for the weekly to reach my hands every week, of course I had to patiently wait for all the grown ups (there were a quite a few of them) to finish their reading. At the time I did not know anything about the taboo-breaker authoress, I was 7, I was simply relinquishing the childhood in a beautiful village in another era.
Valyamma was so amused by my devotion to the writer that she promised to take me to meet her next time we were in Trivandrum. But like many of her promises it remained unfulfilled.
My fascination to her writing grew with years, I have read almost everything she had written in Malayalam. She was probably a revolutionist in many ways, bursting the unreal images male writers created about women, her heroines were liberated in more ways than sexuality and love, their rebellion often sought new definitions to many complicated thoughts and emotions.
She wrote in many memoirs how she would stay awake after the household had fallen asleep, to finish what she was writing. She would have worked all day organizing the household, she would be dead-tired by 11 o clock, but writing was something she could not put back. She often invented an alternate life for herself through her writing. She had stated that she needed the energy from this imaginary world to live her real life.
She shocked the conservative society by embracing Islamism at the age of 65. I'm told that her later years were spent nursing a heart break, did she believe that that she found the love she had been waiting all her life? But as she wrote herself in an article, love was a good fortune, being jilted was a better one.
I always felt that she had an aura of child like innocence about her, even when she talked about adultery and prostitution. She never really left the images from her childhood, she never really stopped worshiping love. I often wonder, did she choose the name Surayya out of her childhood fascination to actress Suraiya?
I would always remain a true fan.
Valyamma was so amused by my devotion to the writer that she promised to take me to meet her next time we were in Trivandrum. But like many of her promises it remained unfulfilled.
My fascination to her writing grew with years, I have read almost everything she had written in Malayalam. She was probably a revolutionist in many ways, bursting the unreal images male writers created about women, her heroines were liberated in more ways than sexuality and love, their rebellion often sought new definitions to many complicated thoughts and emotions.
She wrote in many memoirs how she would stay awake after the household had fallen asleep, to finish what she was writing. She would have worked all day organizing the household, she would be dead-tired by 11 o clock, but writing was something she could not put back. She often invented an alternate life for herself through her writing. She had stated that she needed the energy from this imaginary world to live her real life.
She shocked the conservative society by embracing Islamism at the age of 65. I'm told that her later years were spent nursing a heart break, did she believe that that she found the love she had been waiting all her life? But as she wrote herself in an article, love was a good fortune, being jilted was a better one.
I always felt that she had an aura of child like innocence about her, even when she talked about adultery and prostitution. She never really left the images from her childhood, she never really stopped worshiping love. I often wonder, did she choose the name Surayya out of her childhood fascination to actress Suraiya?
I would always remain a true fan.
