“The Freaks” is a fine lyric which appeared in Kamala Das' anthology, Summer in Calcutta in 1965. It reveals Kamala Das' feelings of love and lust through fine and suggestive images. The title of the poem is also suggestive. The word “freak” means abnormal person who deviated from accepted social norms. The lover and the beloved are freaks in this poem because they behave abnormally.
The poetess expresses her emotions with great intensity and poignancy. Love is an illusion in a woman's life. Her passionate yearning for love always remains unfulfilled. The lover and the beloved or the husband and wife are alone together. The lover, who in Kamala Das poetry is the betrayer of love and an embodiment of sheer lustfulness, is portrayed through images of ugliness and revulsion:
“He talks, turning a sun - stained
Cheek to me, his mouth, a dark
Cavern, where stalactites of
uneven teeth gleam...…”
How repulsive he is! His physical ugliness reflects his inner corruption and degeneration. His “sun - stained cheek” symbolises the heat generated by sheer lustfulness and sexuality and also the brown colour of his check. His mouth seems to be ugly and horrible like a dark cavern. His teeth are uneven. The wife or the beloved has no liking for such a repulsive person. Their relationship is a forced one. As a woman she has to submit herself to the lustfulness of her lover. There is no love lost between him.
It is an abnormal situation which the poetess dramatically presents. The lover's right hand moves on the knees of female persona. Their minds are “willed to race towards love” but due to inner sterility and vacuity of emotions their minds wander off from love which requires complete emotional integration between the lover and the beloved. They do not share union of minds and hearts. So they are incapable of making love and they keep “tripping idly over puddles of desire”. The image of “paddles of desire” suggests that they are only interested in satisfying lust and physical desire. It is suggestive of dirt and filth in their mind and heart. The man moves his fingers over her delicate body to arouse only physical passion in love. His loveless sexual advances fail to stir the fine feeling of love for which she earnestly craves. She strives to find emotional fulfilment and security in love but all her strivings prove to be futile. In the absence of love they enjoy and satisfy “skin’s hungers.” Theirs is a hopeless case. They have lived together for long but they have miserably failed in love.
Theirs is a pathetic predicament. Their hearts are like empty cisterns, empty of the manna of love that sustains and nourishes life. The emptiness of hearts symbolises inner sterility and barrenness. The beloved waits patiently for the manna of love to fill the empty cistern of her heart but instead of it the “coiling snakes of silence” fill it. Silence is horrible and deadly to a woman. The image of the “coiling snakes of silence” expresses the revulsion and horror of a sterile and loveless life.
The woman persona is also abnormal. In order to hide her inner sterility, vacant ecstasy and revulsion she pretends to display a strong and intense desire for sexual gratification. “Freaks” is a confessional and autobiographical poem which authentically records the lovelessness, emotional sterility and disintegration, the frustrations and disillusionments, the pretension of flaunting, at times, a grand, flamboyant lust in the poetess married life. It is a faithful poetic statement of feminine sensibility, humiliated and exploited in male - dominated society.