On an overnight journey to Chennai last week, I came across a few interesting fellow-passengers. There was a woman of mature age dressed in elegant simplicity, reclining on her lower berth and browsing through a slim book, with a half-open handbag by her side revealing a bunch of booklets of similar size. And there were two healthy, modern, middle-aged persons who, going by appearance and body language, passed as husband and wife.
K X M John
(First published in New Indian Express in July 2009)
The couple were of good personage and were chatting with some excitement as if they were reunited after a separation. With great self-confidence and self-assurance they both spoke modern, professional kind of English with good cheer and gave the impression of being mid-level business executives.
The title of the book the mature woman was reading was partly visible to me; and I noticed that the first word in the title was the oft-used Malayalam term ekaaki (the lonely). I have always felt dismayed by the opiating influence of this term on the Malayalee mindset and its overdose in their literature. So the book’s title aroused my curiosity, and I made it a point to find out what it was about. An opportunity soon presented itself. She had covered several of its pages when the tea vendor broke her reading. She laid it aside and took up the cup.
Gently did I gesture my interest in having a glance at the book. She responded with a diplomatic smile and offered me another book from her stock for my reading. Apparently she suspected that, once the book presently in use were handed to me, I might not put it down, thereby depriving her of the satisfaction of completing it at one go. Thereupon I casually brought up the term ekaaki and observed that loneliness and melancholy seemed to continue as favourite moods of the Malayalee even these modern days, the term ekaaki itself having charmed Malayalam writers and readers alike over the decades. Someone had written a couplet with this opening line:
Light brings sorrow, my child;
And the lady promptly completed the couplet by quoting the concluding line:
Isn’t it darkness that is comforting!
And she followed up her statement by enunciating the “truism” that love begets sorrow, that the end of love is misery.
At this stage, the husband-&-wife team joined the conversation with obvious curiosity and relish.
I asked her to elaborate. She said she had deeply loved her husband, but in the end he gave her pain and sorrow by dying young. I said, if she truly loved him, she would be grateful for the joyful years she had with him rather than being wrapped up in the self and being sorrowful about her loss after his death. Honour and celebrate the memory of the deceased, instead of wallowing in self-pity after the event. Your sorrow comes from your own sense of insecurity and weaknesses and not from his death. His death opened your eyes to your dependence on him and laid bare your own weaknesses, and you wrongly attribute your present pain to his death. In other words, blame not his death for your sorrow, but blame yourself for your present plight.
And the two executives wholeheartedly and cheerfully endorsed my views.
Self-pity and insecurity-complexes seem to be scripted into the Poetic Unconscious of the Malayalee. Perhaps the higher rate of suicides in Kerala has something to do with this propensity. And Kerala’s litterateurs even today seem to romanticise and hallow loneliness-related moods. Is the Malayalee so weak-minded that she can’t cope with stressful situations?
When love breaks down, when infatuations are abruptly shattered by disillusionment, when trust is betrayed, the weak experience the earth caving in under their feet, and tend to wish the earth swallow them up. And they seek refuge in self-fulfilling sorrow.
Love is enabling; not disabling. Malayalam fiction is full of this silly disabling stuff; Ekaaki is a beloved theme for fiction writers. The question is: In spite of the recent shifts in our cultural paradigm, how long more will it take for us to become truly liberated from the shackles of such disempowering thoughts?
The business executive said, “Look at the Americans. They teach their children never to give up. Never quit. Their self-improvement books, a best selling branch of their literature, exhort people to persist till they snatch success from the very jaws of defeat. That is how the moderns should live. That is how one should live a lively life.”
His wife supplemented him, “Socio-cultural leaders and writers always influence the community and are honoured as their gurus and prophets; and it is all the more reason they desist from inculcating negative attitudes in their communities. Instead, they should prepare the people to be strong-willed enough to brace themselves to face challenges with quiet courage and equanimity. The poet who would run away from light and take refuge in darkness is no guru.”
The lady was intelligent and graceful. She listened with empathy and was non-committal and non-judgmental, without showing any trace of dissent. However, the wise lady expressed the view that prose and pragmatism alone would not make life wholesome. No one could live by prose alone. There should also be some poetry in one’s life as a balancing factor.
All the three of us wholeheartedly agreed with her.
This lively evening session was concluded with a brief exchange of personal information. And I learnt that the graceful lady had authored several books and got them published by reputed publishers. The books, she said, had had reasonably good commercial success. Her husband was a renowned film director who died at a relatively young age a couple of decades ago.
The delightfully intriguing couple turned out to be colleagues working for a foreign firm in India, then on a brief official visit to Kerala. They were married, but not to each other.
20/07/09
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