One Hell of a Lover Unni R; translated by J Devika Eka 212 pages, Rs 399 In one of his recent stories, Earthworm, Unni R writes that someone once heard a wayfarer say, if you distill the tears of memory and write them down, a different Kerala of the past 60-70 years can be found. Unni could be called an archivist of the present and the past, constantly listening to and archiving even the tiniest murmurs of his neighbourhood to tell stories that disturb readers to no end. Unni, who began writing in the 1990s, is not a prolific writer, but his stories, written in the spoken Malayalam of the Kottayam region, with a keen eye for local detail (most of the stories are set in his village, Kudamaloor) and great empathy for his characters, are chronicles that dissect the inner life of Malayali society. Caste, gender, religion, political ideology — the many fault lines that shape contemporary Kerala like any other part of India — are woven into the fabric of the stories with great care and subtlety. Like most writers of his generation, who came after the modernists, politics is the invisible weave and is mostly suggested through the use of irony and sarcasm. If there is one thread that runs through most of his stories, it is the acute awareness about the violence that lurks in ordinary individuals who seem to be leading ordinary lives, which often spills out in the form of caste abuse, misogyny, sexual assault, police atrocities and so on. And, as his translator, J Devika, points out, the person most often on the dock is the Malayali macho masculine. Take the much-acclaimed story, Leela. Kuttiyappan, who has dedicated himself to a life of debauchery, wants to have sex with a girl while she is standing on the trunk of an elephant, holding on to its tusks. The story is a chronicle of Kuttiyappan’s hunt for the experience and told in a chillingly racy and exuberant tone. It unravels a world of masochism, perversity and violence that seems normal to the male gaze that pervades the narration. As Kuttiyappan prepares to consummate his “mad whim”, Unni introduces a twist in the story and the “unfathomable darkness” in what his friends see as Kuttiyappan’s leela (playfulness) is unveiled for what it is. One Hell of a Lover, the lead story in the collection with the same title, too, is a sharp rebuke of the Malayali macho masculine’s dangerous notions of the feminine and sexuality. It is a worldview wherein the most sacred of images and concepts are overturned to feed an over-sexed, psychotic male world. Calling to Prayer is the story of a bunch of young college-going girls, one of whom wishes to call the azaan. Raziya gets to fulfill her wish and with it a whole new world is born. Radha in The Grievance is a working-class woman, who refuses to play by the laws of men and seeks revenge on a man who once harassed her. She tracks down the man, but ends up carrying him to hospital after a gang attacks him. She hopes to whack him once he recovers. When she learns that the man is dead, her companion, Sumathy, asks her if she felt sad. Radha is unable to say anything. It is an unforgiving, violent world that most of Unni’s characters inhabit, but all of them rise to forgive their opponents. Like the characters in Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s fiction, Unni’s characters, too, seem to be endowed with a great deal of karuna, which, perhaps, makes his stories distinct and the concerns he flags universal. This karuna, however, doesn’t in any way inhibit Unni’s characters, especially the women, from exercising their agency. Stories such as Badusha the Walker and Satanic Verses are searing testimonies to the tragi-ridiculous times we live in. Badusha is an eccentric old man who is picked up by cops when he goes for a walk on a moonlit night. Police torture him and when he has nothing to offer them, they suspect that he is someone “with a special training”. The ordeal of the man continues, and we know why. Kunhikkannu (Satanic Verses) is taken into custody when he goes to the police to complain about a missing rooster (Bukharin). They ask how an unlettered Kunhikkannu is trading in books and jails him after finding a “prohibited book” in his collection. It is not anger that the Badushas in Unni’s fiction feel for their oppressors, but a deep sadness at having to live in a world that has lost its humaneness and is besieged by the fear of an imagined Other. Beyond the Canal, Beyond the Yard is a tribute to SK Pottekkad, novelist and travel writer, and to the travellogue genre, in which a blind grandmother and her granddaughter live in travel stories. One Hell of A Lover has 19 stories which are representative of Unni’s short fiction. A great deal of its brilliance in the Malayalam original comes from the clever use of the provincial register, references to popular culture, play of language etc, and, of course, Unni’s ability to situate the stories in contemporary social and political contexts. However, these qualities could become an impediment in translation. J Devika, the translator, has ensured that very little of Unni’s originality is lost. And they all are great reads also because Unni is a storyteller par excellence: Like his illustrious predecessor from his neighbourhood, Karur Nilakantha Pillai, one of the peaks in Malayalam fiction, Unni has mastered the craft of telling a story well. A story that ought to have been in this collection is Kalinatakam, Unni’s remarkable upturning of the narrative that mediates the Malayali’s interaction with the world of Sree Narayana Guru. Without being disrespectful to Guru, Unni had tried to explore the gaps in Guru’s life and his tortuous engagement with the feminine.
