Kamala Das captures the picture of her mother in a significant moment of comprehension. The speaker in a fast-forward life, pauses for a moment to regard her mother, with with reference to time and space.

Driving from my parent’s

home to Cochin last Friday

morning, I saw my mother,

beside me

Words are indicated to signify time, space and position (‘beside me’). The act of ‘seeing’ poses as a stationary moment as against the kinetic act of ‘driving’. The drive from home to Cochin also serves to illustrate the metaphor of journey as experience. The poem is indeed born, out of love as one observes the possessive pronoun ‘my’ when the word ‘Mother’ would have sufficed. The speaker’s understanding of her mother at the age of sixty-six, would be indeed one of enriched experience; as it would be coloured with the speaker’s individual maternal experience as with her own children. It would be a different one, with indication to the past when she was single. She could probably judge her better as a wife, and mother now.

doze, open mouthed, her face

ashen like that

of a corpse and realised with

pain

that she was as old as she

looked but soon

put that thought away, and

Words like ‘doze’ point to the torpidity that old age has imposed upon her.…