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Journalism of Courage
As old as the story of writing is the story of the writer struggling to find the right words. Pen meets paper in easy camaraderie only in the imagination of the non-writer. Just ask Lord Spider, bestselling author of mysteries, thrillers and romances who cannot wrap his head around the demands of an essay on compassion (commissioned by the revolutionary party in order to raise funds for old comrades).
Or ask his creator Paul Zacharia, whose own struggles with composing columns on political and social issues, after years of fiction writing, found expression through Spider’s travails in True Story of a Writer, a Philosopher and a Shape-Shifter. “I had to almost relearn writing,” the 80-year-old confesses in an email interview,
I was dealing with facts. I had to double check the truth of everything I said. I had to reinvent my language to make it plain yet loaded.
If writing itself is a fraught enterprise, then what of rewriting? Zacharia, one of the most well-known writers in Malayalam literature, celebrated for the spare, elliptical style of his short fiction, has recently published his first novel. In English. For the second time. True Story of a Writer, a Philosopher and a Shape-Shifter is a revised version of The Secret History of Compassion, which was published in 2019 by Context, an imprint of Westland Books.
After the closure of Westland in 2022, a new edition of Zacharia’s debut novel was being planned with Penguin when the writer recognised the occasion for what it was: A rare opportunity to revise an existing work. “My experience is that every revision improves and sharpens a text. When I suggested it to the publisher they were interested. It was a valuable learning experience for me because it involved working with a large text with several interconnected narratives,” he says.
True Story’s plot — if one were to describe it as such — is about more than just the difficulties of a writer. The trio of the title — Lord Spider, his wife and renowned philosopher Dr Rosi and the multi-hyphenate J L Pillai (shape-shifting hangman, would-be writer and fan-turned-collaborator) — talks, argues and speculates about such things as the nature of death and the weight of human desire (and whether it affects one’s ability to fly). As Pillai, followed by Rosi, work with Spider to produce the essay on compassion line-by-line, what emerges is a distinct authorial vision of what lies beyond the easy binary of fiction and non-fiction.
Zacharia’s deft segues into tall tales and myths (and even a translation of the short story Satan’s Brush by the late Thomas Joseph) and his sly wit suggest that what we typically see as the straightforward logic of a story, too, is just a lie. What seems like a farcical flight of fancy is, in fact, a sharp comment on the compromises and adjustments through which we try to draw meaning from the meaningless: “Can it be… that the most efficiently organised agencies of Compassion are the armies, navies, air forces, secret services, serial killers, terrorists, dictators, religious fundamentalists, racists and nuclear-button controllers? Perhaps we have been mistaking them for annihilators whereas they only annihilate Sorrow at its root — by annihilating Life.”
Clearly, Zacharia sends up pieties and certainties with as much assurance in his English fiction as he has done in Malayalam over the course of his long literary career. He’s spoken before about how writing The Secret History of Compassion in English freed him up to be inventive, “without stopping for any propriety or possible moral taboos”.
Since he encountered it in college in Kottayam, Zacharia has loved the language (“as much as Malayalam”) and when it first struck him that he should write a novel — because it meant a “more demanding engagement” with his craft — English felt like an apt choice. “I think the basic challenges of writing are the same in any language,” he says,
English, perhaps, made my task of writing the first novel easier because, to me, English, because of its historical richness, held out a wealth of possibilities in regard to literary expression. And it saved me from having a model to look back upon.
Linguistic pride being an especially sensitive topic right now, there is widespread prickliness on the question of English vs Hindi vs every other Indian language. So it is easy to forget that such creative and intellectual bilingualism is a long-established Indian tradition; Zacharia has good company in writers like Gopalkrishna Adiga (under whose tutelage in Mysuru, he fell in love with English literature), Nirmal Verma, AK Ramanujan and UR Ananthamurthy.
Yet, even as debates rage over mediums of instruction in classrooms and linguistic hegemony in India’s most vibrant cities, Zacharia remains optimistic about the future of the country’s multi-lingual character.
There never was a time when everyone spoke everyone else’s languages. But when the need arises, they all do. A Keralite in Mumbai will willy-nilly speak Marathi, Hindi and English. In fact, I feel Indian languages have evolved, become stronger, and modernity has become a continuing objective for them.
And what about the fate of compassion in a time of conflict? Satire in the age of humourlessness? And, of course, the act of writing in the era of the endless scroll?
Reader, take heart from True Story…, where the titular trio wends its fantastical, if chaotic, way to an essay. Distracted, but never derailed, by the stories and characters they encounter during this time together (including Jesus and Satan), they conclude that, “the penalty kick of Fate is the final test and let’s hope for the best. For, the end is not here. It awaits you as a secret shrouded in a mystery. Or vice versa.”
