A breezy cross between fable, dime novel and a Factory film with hi-fidelity audio (farts and all).
But it’s as if Menacherry wrote two books, and then shuffled. The flashbacks are from some other distillery: wry, supple, replete with genuine moments. In life-sketches of the father—peon, novelist-manque and dismissed railway clerk, who swims further and further out in a sea of rotgut—and the part-Irish paramour (an endearing Mhow detour), you see a black-comic eye for psychological detail and behavioural nuance, a gift of empathy that grants inner life to even the one-scene extra. Alcohol stains these pages, like a creeping moral daemon, numinous and corrosive—from retro Kerala, a place that knows a thing or two about ebriety, to dingy Bombay bars. But the nub lies in this image—a man “who desired only to blend in”, yet looms Christ-like, deep in a sermon on a suburban slope, near the Buddhist Mahakali caves. It’s a new nativity, a fantasy against anonymity and unbelonging.