Punishment in Kindergarten Kamala Das Kamala Das, (also known as Madhavikutty) was a major Indian English poet and litterateur and at the same time a leading Malayalam author from Kerala. Her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography, while her oeuvre in English, written under the name Kamala Das, is noted for the fiery poems and explicit autobiography. Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power, but also marked her as an iconoclast in her generation. Reminiscences from childhood forms an important part of her poems. “Punishment in Kindergarten” apparently deals with an unimportant incident from her childhood. What is remarkable about this recapitulation is that she literally inverts the typical evocation of children and the experience of childhood as associated with a harmless innocence. The romantic notion of children as closer to heaven is subverted when she portrays the routine violence that even children and the adults who guide them are capable of. The violence represented here rests not in any active physical abuse, rather it concerns the more common and the more insidious one of verbal and mental bullying. In a way, the poem thus ruminates on the omnipresence of violence that can sometimes reside right within “harmless” mirth and can be used to show someone his or her place in society. The poem depicts an apparently uneventful day at a kindergarten where a child is pointed out as peculiar by her teacher, “a blue-frocked woman” and the laughter this incites among the rest of the class. The effect of this banal comment on the little child is evoked in a startling simile of her words as “pots and pans” thrown at the child and which drains “a honey coloured day of peace” of its beauty. The children sipping sugar cane juice around her laugh at this comment and this exacerbates the child’s discomfort. Perhaps this is how initiation into violence happens for the rest of the crowd too and discomfort or pain can be imposed on someone who seems like a misfit and the same can be passed off as harmless jokes. The child on the other hand experiences this simple act of being told that she is peculiar deeply; she tries to bury her face in “the sun-warmed hedge”, but smells her pain perched right there on the flowers. There is a shift in time in the rest of the poem where the narrator who is an adult now declares that she has found “an adult peace”. Years have sped along with beloved halts in between. And this has certainly muffled those disquieting 1