JOIN USThe protagonist Jithendran dies as the book begins. “Man is the only creature that perishes before attaining full growth!” he says, making his last statement while listening to music with his wife. His life, like the music, remains incomplete.
The story of his family’s beginnings unfolds in letters written to his wife during the six years before their marriage. This, along with the outline of an unwritten novel, is his valuable legacy to her. “Her fingers burnt when she ran them over the letters. They began to swell and grow inside her like the seeds of lofty trees conserved for the future.”
In a way, this last line sums up what is before us. It’s a trace, shot like an arrow into the future, inking all it touches with the hues of the past. Redeemer of family flashback, his own story comes alive after his death.
We are soon taken back to a morning outing with his grandfather, who asks if little Jithen can identify the gender of the hills that gave birth to, and nurtured, the Periyar river, as they squat in companionable evacuation under the coffee shrubs. The detailing, from the sublime to the frivolous, is grist to the mill for the reader of this sweeping narrative that takes the land, real events and fictional persona in its stride.
Chinnamma, with Jithen still in her womb, says, “At least let this one in the womb be destined to live in a proper house. We’d be lucky if these two (Jithen’s elder siblings) do not die of snake or centipede bites by then!” When Jithen dies, he’s in his eighth-floor flat, in a “massive” building. There is a sense of saga in each of these lives, in where they begin, what they expect and where they finish. The irredeemable relentlessness of his grandfather Naraapilla winds down in the dark room of a sanyasi: “...those who have sinned, shouldn’t they get an assurance of sorts from somewhere?” After a life of wanton self-interest, there is now this shakiness: “What if I don’t get punished in this world or the other world? Terrible, isn’t it?”
While Subhash Chandran has been compared to Márquez — and it’s probably true in the context of the detailed eccentricities of an entire group set against the backdrop of changing murals of history — I often felt a resonance from the dark, brooding marshlands of Victorian fiction in desolate characters reluctantly reaching out in the end. The weave and counter-weave of events and their results, and action and reaction hark back to the Mahabharata. But then Malayalam fiction has always had its share of “flawed” characters in pilgrimage.
“Swami must be aware,” says Naraapilla, “that the wrongdoer gets a kind of relief when he gets the punishment, whether from God or the court?” Sinner and father confessor, strangers in the darkness, suddenly find themselves part of the same sordid web of relationships weaved by amoral, promiscuous and self-centred “wrongdoing”.
Scrawling notes in his diary for his novel, Jithen writes: “The quintessence of the Bhagavad Gita was the contrivance of converting one who turned away from violence into a killer.” The metanarrative exists at different levels. His novel, titled A Preface To Man, is never written.
There’s irony and retribution; there are lunges at completing circles. The author is consciously and admittedly making a statement. His novel is methodically, even painstakingly, structured. It tells the story of a state, a society and its culture, and it is also a stated attempt at tracing the evolution of the inner man.
The book throws up interesting moments and characterisations that stay with us. The ancestor, trussed up in a cage on a tree, scaring the hell out of his minders with unyielding courage and staring eyes. The shopkeeper who needs an extra stool to place an outgrown part of himself, and the typical “Kerala-teashop” exchanges that go on in his shop. The underwater meeting that unfolds into wedlock between nasty Naraapilla and the innocent stone-eating young girl, who finally succumbs to a wretched, head-banging life that’s robbed her of everything, including her children and her peace. There are plenty of literary and social references, often playful, and the influence and shining light of real people who stalked through the history of that time and place.
The translation is a brave attempt to gather all the intricacies of the original into its fold, using the necessary evil of a glossary. Defeated occasionally by inherent language links and very localised references and resonances that appear strange or crude when read in translation, it is an admirable effort. Also, using slang in English to match a Malayalam usage often gives it a different texture. Notwithstanding all that (which is anyway evident only to readers familiar with the original language and ambience), the present work is a successful rendition of a vastly thought-out work.
A Preface to ManSubhash Chandran, translated by Fathima E VHarper Collins2016, pp 443, Rs 499