Kamala Das was born at Punnayurkulam in Malabar, Kerala. Educated mainly at home, she was especially close to her grandmother who showered a lot of love and affection on the growing child. She is often remembered in her poetry as in My Grandmother's House and A Hot Noon in Malabar. Wherever Kamala Das went and wherever she lived, she remembered her early girlhood, cherished and nursed by her grandmother. And this accounts for the element of nostalgia in her poems, particularly in A Hot Noon in Malabar, which appeared in her first published collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta in 1965.
A Hot Noon in Malabar expresses her nostalgic yearning for her happy childhood and for her family house in Malabar. She herself writes: “From every city I have lived, I have remembered the noons in Malabar with an ache growing inside me, a homesickness.”
The poet finds the world outside defiled and boring. The summer in the city where she lives now is a torture to her. It is a hot noon with the beggars shouting for alms in their plaintive, singsong tones. There are also men from the hills with parrots in cages; with their dirty, soiled cards they foretell the future. There are also Kurava girls who read the palms of their customers and predict their future in their carefree, singsong voices. They are joined by bangle - sellers selling their nut - coloured bangles covered with the dust of the road. They have walked long distances and their feet have cracks on their heels.
The poet had known them all in her girlhood when she lived in her family home in Malabar. But now when they come to the porch of their house, they seem to her strangers, the noise they make is harsh and unpleasant. The ellipses (dots) here express the poet's yearning for a time when they were neither so strange nor so unpleasant, but were a familiar and pleasant sight.
The poet's soul is tortured with intense heat in the hot noon. It seems to her that strangers from the outside world are peeping through the window of her room with their hot and burning eyes, and searching for shelter from the heat of the sun. Their first peep into the dark room and not finding anyone there look yearningly towards the “brick ledged well” to quench their thirst and get some rest there from the heat of the sun. They are all strangers with a wild look in their eyes; they do not speak much but when they do, their voices are wild, like “jungle – voices”. Such is the maddening heat of the sun in the strange city where the poet lives now. It is a torture to her because it reminds her of equally hot noons which she once passed in her ancestral home in Malabar, where she was gay and happy despite the heat. Now everything is strange dirty and painful. Then everything was familiar, innocent and pure.
The poet thus simultaneously recalls the past and compares it with the present. How different was the past from the unhappy present! It was also hot then, but how different, how innocent, how pure and familiar these very faces in the hot noon looked to her at that time! She yearns for the innocence and purity of her old family home. It is a torture for her to be there in a strange city on that hot noon. Strangers with wild feet must still be there outside her ancestral home in Malabar, but also, she is so far, away from home. Life there must be going on as usual, but everything has changed for the poet. Her home in Malabar is the ideal, dream world for the poet. Distance leads enchantment to the view; she yearns to be there as to a place of refuge from the sorrow and suffering of the present. It is all a cluster of associations and far reaching emotional yearnings. Words like “jungle – voices”, through a fusion of sense and sound, enact a verbal drama and contribute to the peculiar, nostalgic tone of the poem. The poet lives in a jungle now and yearns for the safety and refuge of her ancestral home in Malabar.