Telegrams Before Time

The narrator, with other thoughts on his mind, doesn’t open the letter at once. He decides to have a bath first, lingering over thoughts of an office flirtation that may or may not turn into a romance. But when he opens the letter and finds news of the death, his thoughts rush back to the village of his childhood. The letter continues to tell him about the mango tree that had stopped bearing fruit, the yam that had yielded nothing this year, and the general desolation of deaths and cremations. And, reflects the narrator, unsent telegrams and unmade telephone calls.

The early chapters continue in this vein, with the narrator mulling over the sketchy details of Kalyanikutty Edathi’s funeral: a mango tree cut down, a cremation in the northern court-

yard instead of by the Nila river, a feast on the 16th day, an atmosphere of relief rather than sorrow. No tulasi platform, and no attempt to immerse her ashes. Such was Kalyanikutty’s end.

Her beginning, too, was not happy. She was the second of three girls, neither the beloved first, nor the pampered youngest. And she was dark. And so, living a circumscribed life within the house, doing everyone’s work for them, being exploited by the others, she was thirty-five when she finally got married. And that, to a man who had already been married once, unhappily, and who had forgotten how to love. When he finally gave up in life and came back to the village to live in her house, he became another cross for Kalyanikutty to bear.

The novel’s strength is in unfolding, one by one, the many layers of memories that the narrator sifts through. Such as the most poignant memory, when a boy is cruelly thrashed by his uncle — for a crime that is not only not a crime, but one he has not even committed. There is silence all around the tharavad, so much so that even the sound of a footstep is not heard. When the uncle asks for water, it is only Kalyanikutty who gets him a glass to drink; and it is she who, at the end of the beating, gives the boy a towel and tells him to go have a bath in the pond.

Surely, for every patriarchal figure in the family, there is also a Kalyanikutty who holds the home together with her sacrifices and silences. The Unspoken Curse is a moving tale that takes us back to our family memories.