Book Review: My Story by Kamala Das

My Story by Kamala Suraiyya Das
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author seems to have spent an inordinately long time in hospitals and has captured the sense of alienation and depersonalization of hospitals

You have become a mere number. Along with your clothes, which the nurse took off, was removed your personality traits. Then the pathologist’s henchmen rush at you for specimens of your blood, sputum, urine and bowel movement. With all those little jam-jars filled and sealed, every vestige of your false dignity is thus removed. In the X-ray room, another nurse unwraps your body while the ward-boy who wheeled you in watches furtively from the dark. The display of breasts is the legitimate reward for his labour.

Feel rather ambivalent being part of a sandwich filling

I have always regarded the hospital as a planet situated like a sandwich filling between the familiar earth and the strange domain of death.

Her biography is rather underwhelming, nothing approaching her alleged notoriety.

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