‘Like a knight hopping on chessboard’: What Maythil Radhakrishnan is to his readers

It is hard to explain why a writer like Maythil Radhakrishnan, who qualifies to be a nerd, matters. Description falls short of the experience of reading him, and the most honest way to introduce his work is to put a book in someone's hands.

Recently, when he was announced the winner of the Ezhuthachan Award, the highest honour given to a Malayalam writer by the Government of Keralam, Maythil’s readers were overjoyed and superlative in the praise of their beloved author. One sentiment that kept coming up was that he was grossly underrated; a writer belatedly recognised by a state for his literary genius. 

Maythil, 82, who wrote stories in his college years and had a stint in journalism, eventually chose the path of technology, as head of the computer department at a Norwegian shipping company and later, as senior technical writer with the Nest USA’s Chennai branch. 

Alongside, he wrote novels such as Sooryavamsam, Chuvanna Vidooshakarute Anchampathi and Hitchcockinte Itapetal; poetry collections such as Bhoomiyeyum Maranatheyum Kurichu; and, above all, short story collections like Naayakanmaar Shavapetakangalil and Dylan Thomasinte Panth.

A native of Palakkad by birth, he grew up in the same terrain as MT Vasudevan Nair, the doyen of Malayalam literature, but slipped away to other shores. What might have taken him further away, from writing and his homeland, was his desire to study filmmaking in the US, for which he was all prepared, until his visa was rejected. Maythil, dejected, fell back to his writing, which, he would say in interviews, was engineering, not aesthetics. 

Readers may disagree. “It is hyper detailed, he can write about a simple table for 12 pages and you won’t be bored. His language is that unique, it is a sort of poetry that refuses to deal with social issues or personal despair or longing as writers tend to dwell in,” says veteran writer M Mukundan. He compares him to French writer-filmmaker Georges Perec whose writing was once described as one that hops like a knight on a chessboard.

“You might say that of Maythil as well, he is hopping about on a chessboard, playing with language in a way only he can, creating worlds of poetry. He gives one image which translates into many in a reader’s mind,” says Mukundan.

Mukundan’s appraisal becomes clearer as you take one of his stories and realise you cannot skimp through his words even in your rush to know where they lead to. You feel this pressing need to absorb every word, enjoy every unusual and unexpected imagery thrown at you. In one story, a man is afraid to be photographed because he has seen in American films how the spotlight falling on you can make you visible to everyone while you can’t see a thing (‘Athellaam Americayil’). In another someone borrowing a shirt becomes, for the time being, the original owner (‘Mattoralude Kuppayam’). A newspaper delivery man muses about the psychology of slim people in yet another tale (‘Melinjavarude Manashastram’). On a night he attempts to steal from an empty home, he becomes aware of the privacy of the soul as he enters a young woman’s room, and leaves after jotting down a one-word apology. 

These are but the gists - the content - which, alluring as it may seem, is not the focus of the author who stresses always and always on the form - on the how, and not the what of writing.

“His writing was the kind one had never seen before, defiant, very beautiful, aesthetic. When he began serialising his novel Sooryavamsam on Mathrubhumi, it was received with extreme passion by young people like us,” says EP Unny, cartoonist and writer.

 Maythil had a column called Zebra Crossing on the Sunday Express, the Sunday magazine of The New Indian Express. His English, recorded in a candid interview by RJ Vishnu, flows, it seems, in an angry rush of words, as he talks about language and technology and the lack of democracy in a world that only sees the ‘autocracy of the majority’. 

His politics rarely seeped into his writing. “He did not write anything opportunistic, he did not try to critique the Left or the Right, never followed a trend, or anything contemporary,” Unny says.

Sooryavamsam, the first novel, serialised in 1970, is his most popular one, the work that is quoted by many readers and writers as the defining work of Maythil. On the surface, it is about the death of a man called Chakrapani, who becomes the topic of conversation for three people, including a close friend, a woman who knew him for a night, and a man who was a stranger to him. Maythil’s stamp becomes visible through pages of conversations as his characters keep slipping into the privacy of their thoughts, like a series of asides in a Shakespeare play. Literary critic KP Appan described Sooryavamsam as a work that equates eternal time with love. 

“It pierced my heart. I was in college when I read it, and it was a time when critics were making much of OV Vijayan’s Khasakinte Ithihasam. For me however, Maythil was the better writer,” says writer Chandramathi. 

She could not relate to the local dialect in Khasak, or to characters with names like Appukili. “Maythil’s novel was the opposite, it was like an egg shell breaking into a palatable omelette,” says the writer.

Comparisons between the two writers have been made before, especially as Maythil burst on the scene when modernism was newly embraced in Malayalam literature and Vijayan was its mascot. In his interview with writer Shabitha for Mathrubhumi, Maythil refused to discuss a connection or comparison between him and Vijayan. He did not believe in comparisons or competitions, and has famously denied awards before. However, he was happy to receive the Ezhuthachan Award named after a writer he deeply revered. 

“We were young together, and he and Vijayan were both received well by young people of the time. He was different, his writing was not the continuation of the Malayalam literary tradition, it was a rupture and a new beginning. He was rational, his work was much ahead of its times, attracting the Gen Z of that period,” says NS Madhavan, another veteran writer. 

Madhavan, like Mukundan, stresses on Maythil’s attention to detail, his precision. It was Maythil’s poetry that Madhavan most admired, he says. 

In his collection of stories Maythil Kathakal released by Mathrubhumi in 2013, the writer dedicates the book to his late wife Prabha. “In your memory, Prabha, with the corrections that you made in every one of my stories and drafts.”

Maythil, at 82, wears a scrunchie in his hand, one that belonged to his daughter June who died of breast cancer a year before. That is one sorrow he allows himself to wallow in, he has admitted in a rare candid moment.