Indian writing in English has many Savithris. The Savithri of Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope has risen out of the westernisation of Indian culture by some impatient practitioners of Indian fiction. The Savithri of Sri Aurobindo is an epic heroine descended from the Vedic cycles and the Mahabharata upakhyana, one who symbolises women’s empowerment without injuring the classical myth. The Savithri of Manu Bhattathiri ascends from the ‘ordinary’ Indian woman who is ‘burdened with the sorrow and struggle in time’ and shines glorious as the ancient heroine, carrying her burden not as a punishment but as the gift of love. If there is nothing holier than ‘mother’, there is nothing more loving than a ‘grandmother’. And that is Manu’s Savithri Ammoomma.
I confess happily that when I completed reading this slender book, I felt like John Keats who exclaimed that he was like an astronomer who has discovered a new planet when he read Chapman’s translation of Homer. There is a crispness about Manu’s English which, to the rhythm of his own mother tongue, remains true; the stories are focused on a single milieu, making it a fine microcosm to give us an idea of the macrocosm: people are the same everywhere! But the microcosm is unique at the same time. And so is Karuthupuzha, our new planet. All the navarasas are here, including humour, violence, romance, heroism and peace. But always under the control of Manu’s ductile prose.
“As with almost all the forty-two winters of his life, Kunjumon wondered in this one too how a cosy south Indian town like Karuthupuzha could grow quite so cold. Why, your breath blew in clouds and your teeth chattered like bolts in a box. And Eeppachan Mothalali, the owner of the rice mill where Kunjumon had been working for most of those forty-two years, eagerly cut salaries if you were late because of the cold.”
There you are. Like a woman in middle age carefully embroidering a scenario for a wall hanging, a lovely peacock perched on a sill in a garden with flowering plants, a portion of the sill here, a plant aglow with pale or bright flowers, and the greenery of the grass below slowly filling up, Manu’s various coloured threads in his short stories take a shape at last, the enduring Karuthupuzha with the cheerful wedding of Chamel and Shanta (made in heaven, of course, in spite of Sumati’s shaky rationalism) ringing the curtain down, the peacock swaying in the breeze. With the black river, Karuthupuzha, giving it the name, and with time on his side, one day Manu may be the originator of an Indian brand of William Faulkner’s celebrated Yoknapatawpha county (from the Yocona river), if he piles up a few novels in the same steam.
The tales never disappoint. The title story, for instance. The waiting of an elderly couple for their son’s holidays so they can have the joy of pampering their grandson, Kuttan. Savithri Ammoomma’s storeroom gets filled up with a variety of Kerala delicacies: five types of chips and other goodies like achappams and unniappms. The elderly couple are both excited having waited for this annual visit, but then a telegram comes that leave for militarymen has been cancelled because of a border skirmish. Though the leave may be granted later, they will not come as Kuttan’s school would have begun by then. So what happened to the delicacies stored thick in the room by the fond grandmother? Manu performs a pleasant acrobatics, and you have to read the tale to sip the nectarean joy that gets plucked out of deep disappointment.
Whether it is Kunjumon trying to be charitable, Murali who knew God (did he, really?), or Inspector Paachu who cannot help laughing with the fellows arrested by him, or Sumathi trying to make Ponnappan a believer but becomes a rationalist herself, or the love of Aachu and George strung with music: each story shines by itself and yet is linked firmly to the rest of the collection. Karuthupuzha’s institutions have a life of their own too: the rice mill, Madhavan Nair’s teashop, Chamel’s Old Age Home, and the toddy shop, “this shop of intoxication” set in a rice field, swirling with indigenous aromas “of fried frog legs, richly marinated roast crabs, a thousand types of fish, boiled tapioca and freshly tapped toddy.”
And what is a microcosm if it has no space for gangs? The raucous terror unleashed upon Rayapettan makes the brooding Guddu an avenger. And Karuthupuzha celebrates its freedom from Maniyan as Chamel weds Shanta. Like Thakazhi’s Karuthamma, Manu’s Karuthupuzha will ever remain an icon for the lover of significant literature.
Savithri’s Special Room and Other Stories
Manu Bhattathiri
Harper Collins
2016, pp 206
Rs 399