Wages Of Love  (English, Paperback, Kohli Suresh)

Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings brings together different pieces of literary works by Kamala Das. This is a beautiful book that is sure to keep readers engaged with its poems, stories, essays, and plays.

Summary Of The Book

Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings is a collection of plays, nonfiction writings, stories, and poems by the renowned Kamala Das. These have previously not been compiled into an anthology.

The wide range of the collection includes an essay about how she contested in the Indian Parliamentary elections in 1984, but failed to win a seat. This book also has the story The Fair-Skinned Babu. In this story, Das tells the cynical tale of a woman who had converted to Islam, and is now in search of a contract killer for dismal purposes. Another one of her works throws light onto the allegations made by Khushwant Singh about how she had allegedly manipulated her Nobel Prize nomination. Neipayasam is the story of a father and his three young children. The author shows how the mother suddenly dies of a heart failure, and the children are too young to comprehend her death. After her cremation, the father feeds them payasam (rice pudding) that the mother had made that very morning. He silently grieves as the kids would never be able to eat their mother’s cooking again.

Suresh Kohli has compiled these literary gems of Kamala Das in Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings. This book reminds readers of the genius that Das was.

About Kamala Das

Kamala Das, born in 1934, was an Indian writer. The author has written several books such as Sandal Trees, Only The Soul Knows How To Sing, A Childhood in Malabar: A Memoir, and The Kept Woman and Other Stories.

She was born in 1934 in the Malabar District, British India. Das was the editor of Poet, and the poetry editor of Illustrated Weekly of India. She was also the VC of Kerala Sahitya Akademi, and the President of the Kerala Children's Film Society. She was nominated for the 1984 Nobel Prize for Literature. Her works have been translated into various different languages like German, French, Japanese, Russian, and more. She also travelled across the world to read poetry and some of the places she visited were Adelaide Writer's Festival, South Bank Festival, London, and the University of Bonn. She wrote poems and stories in Malayalam and English. Her columns were very popular in India, and she addressed a range of topics like child care, women’s issues, and politics. The author was a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award and the PEN Poetry Prize. In 1999, she converted to Islam and changed her name to Kamala Surayya. She passed away in 2009 at the age of 75.