Punishment in Kindergarten
Kamala Das was born in Kerala - India in 1934. She was educated
mainly at home. Her short stories and poems are written in Malayalam and in
English. She has published a number of books of poems and an autobiography. In
many of her poems Kamala Das recalls experiences from her childhood. She was
very devoted to the home and the surroundings which she grew up in.
However, in this poem she remembers an incident which caused her not
joy but pain. Now, in adulthood, she can look back on that day of punishment,
detaching herself from the pain-she is not part of it any more. She has found
an adult peace with which she can speak about the incident, without becoming
upset. When she is describing the time spent at the kindergarten, the past
tense is used, but when the poet is speaking about herself as an adult, she
uses the present tense.
"Punishment
in Kindergarten" is a little autobiographical poem by the famous
Indo-Anglian poet Kamala Das. She recalls one of her childhood experiences.
When she was in the kindergarten, one day the children were taken for a picnic.
All the children except her were playing and making merry. But she alone kept
away from the company of the children. Their teacher, a blue-frocked woman,
scolded her saying.
"Why don't you join the others, what A peculiar child you are!"
This heard, all the other children who were
sipping sugar cane turned and laughed. The child felt it very much. She became
sad at the words of the teacher. But the laughter by the children made her
sadder. She thought that they should have consoled her rather than laughing and
insulting her. Filled with sorrow and shame she did her face in a hedge and
wept. This was indeed a painful experience to a little child in the nursery
school.
Now after many years she has grown into an adult. She
has only a faint memory of the blue-frocked woman and the laughing faces of the
children. Now she has learned to have an 'adult peace' and happiness in her
present state as a grown-up person. Now there is no need for
her
to be perturbed about that bitter kindergarten experience. With her long experience in life she has
learned that life is a mixture of joy and sorrow. She remembers how she has
experienced both the joy and sorrow of life. The long passage of time has taught
her many things. She is no more a lonely individual as she used to feel when
she was a child. The poet comes to a conclusion that there is no need for her
to remember that picnic day, when
she hid her face in the hedge, watching the steel-white sun, that was standing
lonely in the sky.
The poem is written in three stanzas, each having
different number of lines – the first with seven lines, the second with six and
the third with nine. The poem does not follow any regular rhyme scheme. The
subject matter of the poem has two parts, the first of which being the description of the painful experience
of the kindergarten days and the
second, the adult's attitude to the incident at present when she is no more a child.
The poet seems to be nostalgic about her childhood
days. There are certain expressions in
the poem that are worth remembering. The poet says
that the child buried its face in the hedge and "smelt the flowers
and the pain". "Smelt the flowers can be taken as an ordinary
expression, but "smelt the pain" is something very evocative and
expressive. In the first stanza of the poem, the poet describes the pain caused
to the child, "throwing words like pots and pans". This again is
beautiful. The phrase used by the poet to describe the child's teacher, namely,
"blue-frocked woman" can be justified from the child's point of view.
But to the poet who is an adult the use of the phrase looks a little too
awkward. On the whole, the poem can be taken
as the poet's interest in remembering
her childhood days.
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