The light fades, the glow lingers.
The
light fades, the glow lingers.
He's gone now. He was 91. While the doctors around him struggled to keep him alive he must have wished for time to take over and do its part. Afterall, he saw life as just a stop gap arrangement, an interval, agreed upon by death. When I heard the news of the gravity of his illness, I wished for him to stay on... fervently. He had many more lines to deliver before he disappeared behind the curtains or so I felt. I wasn’t yet ready for him to leave.
It feels as if
I lost a relative - someone who was familiar, someone who I admired from a
distance and was content knowing that he was doing well.
I use the word familiar
consciously. MT’s friendship with my uncle and the stories I have heard about
them from my dad added on a familial comfort after I had started reading his
stories. I was proud to have had that connect. It made me think that when he
wrote what he wrote, he was looking out for me.
When the news
of his passing was announced, an inexplicable gloom took over me. I drove back
from Christmas lunch, alone and in my web of MT thoughts. I spent the rest of
the day at home, in the company of his books, thinking of his stories, the
powerful characters therein and how they shaped me as I was trying to find
myself.
I didn’t grow
up in Kerala. I was born and raised in a foreign land. Now I can’t think
of any other place that I would call home. I struggled with a sense of
belonging when I first came here. I felt I was uprooted. The language was new
to me. I was speaking another one fluently till then.
My tryst with
Malayalam started around my early teen years. I had a wonderful teacher who was
my earliest inspiration. She introduced me to the poetic and musical elements
of the language through the works of masters like Aashaan and Vallathol and
opened the gates to a world of stories where icons like V.M. Basheer and M.T.
Vasudevan Nair stood guard.
When my family finally
settled in the northern part of Kerala, in the Valluvanad region, close to MT’s
birthplace, home to so many of his stories, I slowly began to find myself
there.
Ninte Ormakku
was a beloved short story that we did in school. The story of a young girl from
Ceylon who came to visit her new family resonated with me. I felt her awkwardness
at being stared at by unfamiliar relatives, understood her misgivings about
trusting her new family. When she finally found a friend in her half-brother it
gave me the faith that I too would find my home in this new place. The simple
elegance of the people of Valluvanad, the beauty of their speech and manner, I slowly
made them my own, thanks to the lives portrayed in his stories.
Hs stories
spoke about ordinary men and women with complex interiorities with a gentle straight forwardness. He addressed conflicts
that were social, sexual and intellectual in nature and wrote in a language
that spoke to all. You felt with his
characters, you felt for them. He, like Ishiguro, believed that ‘…stories are
about one person saying to another: This is what it says to me’.
I realised that
my notions of romance and the romantic was being shaped by MT’s stories and his
characters, as I grew up. I looked out for the women in his stories and how
they related to their men. Right from Kaalam to Naalukettu to Randaamoozham what
appealed to me the most and what I still remember, years after reading these
novels, is how they made me feel.
Sumitra and Thangamani were women from his first novel I read, Kaalam. Then there was Geetha from his movie Aksharangal. At first glance and to a young eye, they seemed to be reticent and self-sacrificial. But when I read them closer, I came to see that they were far from insignificant. They were self-assured and confident women who never took centre-stage but knew their place with their men. They were strong silent forces behind the male protagonists, whose grit took care of them, irrespective of the men in their lives.The acceptance of society and its norms didn’t matter to them and in the end, they might not have had a happily ever after, but they were okay.
As a young girl, I didn’t
want to be left alone and without a man but now looking back, I see that man or
no man it didn’t matter. The men came and went but I continued to go on. That must
be something that MT’s stories did for me.
I was going
through some of his old interviews in the past few weeks and they speak of the man beyond his words and stories. Belonging to a
generation that continuously seeks to make sense of the new world but finds it
challenging to do so most of the times, I found it reassuring that he was brave
enough to find his place in the new world. He was always encouraging of new
writers and his art kept him going till his last days. Gives me the faith that
it's still possible; possible to be part of the old and make sense of the new
to work with it.
MT had no political
agenda, he didn’t have any love for power though it was very easy for him to
get all of that. He stood for the cause of the common people and they joined
him when he took the stage to protest, be it for the plight of his beloved Nila
or the adivasis in Wayanad. Maybe it is because he never saw life here as an
achievement or a privilege but more as a gift and an opportunity to do your
best and move on.
Discussing his work in detail here seems not to be in place. I only wanted to express my sense of sorrow and loss at the passing of one of Kerala’s favourite storyteller. For those who haven’t read him, his movies are enough to join the fan club. Among the movies that have stayed with me are Sadayam, Sukrutham, Amrutham Gamaya and Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha.
He was an intelligent writer who didn’t try to write intelligently. He wrote to be read with heart, not striving to sound different from who he truly was. As a writer I try to do that every day and I know it is not an easy task. It is so easy to get pulled towards technique and craft and do not realise how the truth of what you wanted to say just slipped away.
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