Noted poetess and writer Kamala Das or Kamala Suraiyya passed away in Pune after treatment for a respiratory illness.

She was 75 and is survived by three sons, M Nalapat, Chinnen Das and Jayasurya Das.

Her body will be flown to Kochi in Kerala on Monday and her burial will take place at the Palayam Juma Masjid in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday. Kerala education and culture minister M A Baby will be present. The body will be taken to Ernakulam, Thrissur, a few other places, and finally to VJT Hall in Thiruvananthapuram for people to pay homage.

Friends and close associates of the writer converged at Jehangir Hospital, where she had been under treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) for over a month, on hearing the news. Her body was embalmed at the Sassoon General Hospital and the burial is scheduled for Tuesday.

“We are taking her body to Mumbai… (it) will be flown to Kerala on Monday morning. The burial will take place at a mosque in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday,” said Nalapat.

The writer and poetess breathed her last in a city hospital in Pune where she was admitted on April 18 following a complaint of respiratory distress.
Kamala Suraiya had settled down in the city a few years ago.

The writer, who loved to tread the unorthodox path, had also made a foray into politics and floated the ‘Lok Seva Party’ aiming at social and humanitarian work, providing asylum to orphaned mothers and to promote secularism. She unsuccessfully contested a Lok Sabha election in

Surayya, who wrote in Malayalam under the nom de plume, ‘Madhavikutty’, was born in a family of writers in Ponnayurkulam in Thrissur. Her father, V M Nair, was the editor of a widely read Malayalam newspaper and mother Nalapat Balamani Amma, a well-known poet.