Wages Of Love: Uncollected Writings of Kamala Das

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.