Speaking Of Arcadia

In the Flood, Thakazhi's debut story and the first in this collection, conjures up a dark landscape in swift, light water-colours. The effect persists through the book, but never with the same primal clarity. It's an arcadia marked at the core by irony and the heaviness of loss, orphaned by time if not god— a world available only to one who is alive to the pettiest of sublunary affairs, but regards sweeping change with blank, sullen incompre hension.

It's early Thakazhi, in his first flush, during the 'pink' days of Malayalam literature ,before maturation took him to the colossal vision of Kayar. The stories raise a few issues beyond their immediate content, but first, a few more gists: a crusty old farmer, with the song of the seasons written onto his unwashed body, comes to spend his last days with his tahsildar son... a dream sours. A girl, with the dew still fresh upon her, grows old and fruitless— just like her alter ego, a mango tree— in a lifelong wait for her childhood mate. A street urchin joins the army, then launches a doomed hunt for someone to whom he can belong. An orphan beggar, shunned in life, with searing irony, gets spanking-new white clothes for his burial...

A book such as this, with its touching absence of savoir faire, offers itself as hostage to a set of literary spooks. One has to do with translation, a universal devil no doubt, but one with many local visages. The other has a more specific, late-'90s Indian flavour. Contemporary (one hesitates to say 'modern') Indian fictionists, busy consecrating a novelty that goes by the name of Indo-Anglian writing, look askance at older Indian (specially 'vernacular') works. They'd have us banish entire oeuvres from the category of literature, and retrieve them only as document.

The question of historical placing becomes acute with a story like Death of Gandhiji, a curious amalgam of naivete and gnomic insight (" they had made a prisoner of him where he stayed...and to imagine the publicity worth thousands of pounds that Birla Mandir received because Gandhiji was staying there!"). Now, it's possible to say Thakazhi of the '40s engaged with only the primary complications of the Indian state, much removed from its deeper modern crises. Should that automatically and exclusively invite the charge of anachronism? Should figures like him fall to the narcissism of self-anointed savants, who identify literary p roductions with the culture of technology, marked by 'high turnovers and higher rates of obsolescence'?

Then again, the book suffers from its stilted, metered English. Translation, one may say at more embittered moments, is the art of failure . A loss of intimacy, of the tactile pleasures associated with a snug provincial horizon, a shared turf of value and meaning— they're all here, all the inevitable slips in freightage that accrue in dislodging a story from the language that tells it, reducing it into its 'universals', then reconstituting it on another plane, erecting it anew on a verbal scaffolding that obeys an alien code. In barter, you get a transplanted, yet garden - fresh Thakazhi. His compassionate gaze thrilling to the ebullience and tragedy of 'human' affairs — fidelity, pining and betrayal, meanness and hopeless dignity, woman's betrothal (willing or otherwise) to a system of exploitation— all conducted in diluvian Kuttanad, where the earth, sea and the skies become one conjoined entity awash with tropical monsoon water.