Smile, Kerala

This has been so in good fiction, pulp fiction and non-fiction. Even memoirs are tales of struggle, angst, displacement, betrayal and nostalgia over the good, old and often in-vented times. There seems to be a compul-sive audience for such stuff in print and on TV, which offsets the mass of gloom with a mandatory run of mimicry and parody shows. None would know this better than K.M. Mathew who runs Kerala8217;s largest news-paper chain, Malayala Manorama. Yet this editor in his eighties has chosen to write his first book differently. While at it, one sus-pects, he wielded the blue pencil more than his writing pen. He tells a personal story and leaves it at that. No hype, no colour and no claims of great virtues for himself, his wife or their long companionship.

Written originally in Malayalam, this translation is no fairytale of Power marrying Money or Power. The wedding itself hap-pened when the Mathew clan wasn8217;t still out of the woods after C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, the Diwan of the erstwhile Travancore State, cracked down on every business the family owned. The bride was a Malayali Christian who grew up in small towns of Tamil Nadu where her doctor father served. She loved a lot that was Tamil 8212; from colourful cottons to Carnatic music.

Post-marriage, Annamma had her share of relocations 8212; first to a lonely coffee plan-tation, then to the metropolitan Bombay of the 1950s and finally to the municipal town of Kottayam, the headquarters of Malayala Manorama. The couple stayed on here and found plenty to do. While her husband was managing the paper, Annamma ran the house, wrote cookbooks, edited the group8217;s woman8217;s magazine Vanitha and played the vi-olin.

They found no need to strut about. My Sanskrit-knowing friends call this attribute 8220;swakshetra balam8221; 8212; a certain ability to stick to one8217;s core field and refuse to step on the escalator. The two celebrities who make an appearance are reluctant ones 8212; Mother Teresa and M.S. Subbulakshmi. Annamma sang the much-liked MS song 8220;katrinile varum geetham8221; 8220;the song borne in on a breeze8221; a million times to her musically clueless husband.

Among the many things happy about this book is a coincidence. Recent research by the Imperial College, London, shows that old age can mean a better quality of life and not nec-essarily hardship and bitterness. What is true of Londoners could well be so in Kerala whose Euro-grade social indicators include longevity. The region has a considerable greying population and many might be age-ing more gracefully than one imagined.