A Hot Noon in Malabar is an autobiographical poem in which Kamala Das recalls some of her experiences in her Malabar home at noon-time in the course of her life there. Kamala Das looks back at those experiences fondly and longingly. Thus it is a nostalgic poem or a poem in which she has expressed her feeling of home-sickness. In respect of its theme or subject- matter, therefore, this poem strongly resembles the poem entitled My Grandmother’s House.
Kamala Das has successfully created the atmosphere of her Malabar home through the imagery depicting the men and women who passed that house or visited it. Those men and women included beggars, fortune-tellers, “Kurava” girls offering to read palms, bangle-sellers carrying their wares. (namely the red and green and blue bangles), and strangers who sought. shelter or aid of some other kind. The imagery is perfectly realistic and, therefore, imparts the quality of authenticity to the poem. There is absolutely nothing fanciful or remote or far-fetched about any of the pictures presented here to our minds. The realism of the imagery is enhanced by such details as the bangle-sellers being covered with the dust of the roads and the cracks on their heels, and also by a reference to the “brick-ledged well” (meaning the town-well having a low, protective wall, made of bricks, around it. Another such detail is the grating sound produced by the bangle-sellers when they climbed up the porch of the house to offer their bangles for sale.
Also Read:
- An Introduction by Kamala Das Critical Analysis
- Kamala Das’s Summer in Calcutta Poem Collection
- Analysis of the poem The Old Playhouse by Kamala Das
Some of the phrases including a couple of similes show the verbal felicities which Kamala Das is capable of devising in her poetry. The bangle- sellers’ feet “devouring rough miles”, the hot eyes of the bangle-sellers “brimming with the sun”, and the strangers who rarely spoke so that when they did speak, their voices ran wild “like jungle-voices” are among the verbal felicities here. The feeling of home-sickness has effectively been. expressed in the words: “To be here, far away, is torture.” And the effect is further enhanced by the lines which follow:
“Wild feet Stirring up the dust, this hot noon, at my
Home in Malabar, and I so far away.”
In these closing lines we are again reminded of the travellers with their dust- covered feet arriving at the house, and then once again told of the poetess’s feeling of nostalgia.
We have here a short, compact poem with nothing irrelevant in it. Kamala Das, among other things, possesses the skill to condense her material and thus to produce an effect of concentration and compression. Her style of writing is not prolix. Kamala Das is not a garrulous writer; and she does not believe in wasting words. This poem is characterized by the maximum possible economy in the use of words.
This poem also shows Kamala Das’s capacity to write rhythmic lines, though not using any rhyme. Of course, her poetry does not have much of music in it and cannot boast of any melodic quality; and even this poem resembles prose more than it resembles poetry. However, this poem, unlike many others by her, does possess the quality of clarity and lucidity. The use of commas, wherever they are needed in this poem, certainly contributes to its clarity because in most of her poems she does away with such marks of punctuation as the comma and the semi-colon, thus creating difficulties for the reader.
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