There is an opening in the long fence running across the cliff on top of the Varkala beach in Thiruvananthapuram. Strolling by the many shacks and shops selling cute curios and loose harem pants mostly bought by dripping wet foreigners, you might miss the opening, a stairway down to the beach that nature has artistically coated with green mold. It is at such a setting that you imagine the four young heroes of The Cliffhangers to hang out, day in and day out.
That’s the name of a novel set in Varkala written by Sabin Iqbal who grew up there, enjoying all the niceties that a small town could offer him. Days before the coronavirus would be a part of all our lives, Sabin’s book was launched at a make-shift stage in Kanakakunnu Palace by writer and politician Shashi Tharoor. Sabin, the director of a literary festival that was happening on the premises, rushed to flash a smile for the photos before running off to see to the other events.
A journalist for many years, he has been holding onto a dream of becoming a published writer for two long decades. Manuscripts have been written and rejected in the years that passed, a familiar story for most aspiring writers. At a point when he thought there was no hope of seeing one of his books published, Sabin, standing inside a mall in Doha, thought of a line that would become The Cliffhangers.
“'That day the balloon had gone way up,” he says in an interview, when pressed. His long answer to the question of what led to the book had not contained the line. It’s not there in the book. But a reader of the book would find the line most fitting. It can be anywhere between the lives of four young men who call themselves The Cliffhangers. Moosa, Jahangir, Thaha and Usman did the christening on a day they felt too humiliated by the ustad of the local madrassa who pulled down their shorts and beat them purple. No more adhering to a religion, they swore that day and began spending their time among themselves, aware of a certain future that awaited them.
Their parents and many grownup men from that side of the town went to the Gulf, a trend that began in 1970s Kerala, to find new riches. The boys born to them were expected to join the club sooner or later – despite the suffering they’d be sure to inherit from their fathers, the hard work of a labourer under the scorching sun or menial jobs at restaurants that helped run families and build homes.
Sabin too had a Gulf life. In his first tryst, he went, leaving behind his journalistic dreams, to look after a family left poor by the illness of a recently-returned father from the Gulf. “After I did my post graduation from the Institute of English, University of Kerala, I went to the Gulf in search of a job as my father was unwell. After one year of struggle—I had even worked in a construction site as a labourer—I came back.”
Clearly, experiences he picked up from the different soils he’s been to, are sprinkled over the lives of the Cliffhangers. All four boys have a curious thirst for the English language. They explain it as a way to land decent jobs in a foreign land that they will be forced to go to. They strike conversations with foreigners to pick up the language faster but till the end of the novel, all they are left with are broken pieces of English and a deep sense of inhibition to even attempt using those. A complex you wouldn’t put past most Malayalis attaining different levels of graduation, who can churn out lovely long pieces in English with perfect grammar but can’t for the life of them speak a line without radio-like cracks and pauses.
Illustration of various characters in The Cliffhangers
Those are the characteristics that make the Cliffhangers interesting, more than their regular lives with the dose of trouble they land in by coming in the way of the law, being unruly men with the arrogance of youth.
Sabin’s past has contributed to this obsession with language. “I studied in a Malayalam-medium school, and couldn’t speak or write in English reasonably well till I was in my degree at Fatima College in Kollam. I began scribbling poetry, but the switchover to prose was not easy. Learning English was a challenge even though I come from a family of English teachers and I grew up in an atmosphere of books and discussions on reading and writing. The British Library became my regular place of visit, and I began reading the English dictionary, and to learn phrases and usages by heart. I spent long hours working on my grammar, and reading contemporary poets, and books on cricket, which is my other lifelong passion.”
He does not spare any of his passions from spilling onto his book. There are large portions dedicated to the cricket matches the lads play. Yet another bit of their life that makes them more than the troublesome youth that the local police keeps chasing for every new crime that unfolds on the beach.
And there have been quite a few. Sabin sneaks into his book real life tragedies of foreigners like Liga, who was murdered in Thiruvananthapuram two years ago, and adds new stories of his own. A similar tragedy replicates Liga’s in Sabin’s novel, but stops short of death. Susan, a heartbroken woman nursing her wounds on the beach, is raped on New Year’s Eve. People described dear to the men – a lifeguard, a Communist intellectual, a kindhearted foreigner – die painful deaths, but the Cliffhangers are always the first suspects.
The local police led by Sub Inspector Devan would drive his jeep to the wall that Moosa and the gang sat on and drag them to the station for frequent bouts of questioning. He can't find a piece of evidence but he jumps at the first chance.
Add to it the religious extremities of the village that is divided into two halves of Hindu and Muslim houses, the politicians that exploit all of it or do too little for the people. Sabin the journalist borrows heavily from the political realities he deals with in his job.
“While being a journalist helps me tell a contemporary story about the faultlines in the society, sometimes the narrative is in the danger of slipping into reportage. Fictionalising facts is an exciting art, and I love to exaggerate real people and incidents so that they become fantastic or touch the hem of magical realism," he says.
There’s a bit of magic in most of his characters. Like Devan, an irritable officer few readers can stand. But he could surprise you. Sabin says, “I enjoyed creating SI Devan, who all through the novel is a pain in the boys’ neck. But in his overtly wicked heart, there is a little pool of goodness. Aren’t people like that? How can we judge people? How can we complain of the speck in someone else’s eyes while we have a log in our own eyes?”
Before Sabin goes off on a philosophical trajectory, I ask him curiously how much of him is in the men that he calls boys, fondly like a cricket captain. But disappointing me, he says, “I am not in Moosa or in the other Cliffhangers, except for their love for cricket. Growing up in Varkala, the beach and the cliff were very much part of my life. I know many boys like Moosa, Jahangir, Thaha and Usman. Oh, maybe you can find in them my own irreverence to religion, and strong opposition to fundamentalism and communal intolerance. Or, a little bit of my own convictions to break the conventions.”
With Booker Prize Jury Chair Margaret Busby and Ukranian writer Andrei Kurkov
Sabin’s broken quite a few. Soon after coming back from the Gulf in the 1990s, he did a journalism course in Thiruvananthapuram and set off to Delhi, after selling his motorbike to buy a train ticket! Becoming a hardcore Delhi journalist however didn’t work out for Sabin, and yet again, taking his family into account, he left for the Gulf a second time. This time luck favoured him and Sabin got a subeditor’s job in Emirates News in Abu Dhabi. Showing none of the immature haste of his early 20s, Sabin stuck to his Gulf days for 15 years, made a family with a journalist wife and two little toddlers and came back flying to Thiruvananthapuram.
“I was a small-town boy, and still love to live in a small town, away from the chaos of a city. In the villages, you get to know other people’s lives more than you can in a city. In a village your life has no secrets. In fact, no one has any secret. I am not saying that there is no literature out of the urban life but I tend to write about insignificant people, and about their simple lives. In a way, it is true that India is in the villages,” he says.
Sabin’s insignificant people come with marked personalities. Moosa’s mother is a character you cannot overlook, whether you like her or hate her. She emerged into existence with a loud scream, the writer says. A scream she never managed to end, you’d say, watching her go at the Gulf-returned husband day and night. The woman, frustrated for reasons that the writer does not enlighten you with, is never without anger, except in the month of Ramzan when she fasts and hopes to make a place in paradise. You are supposed to gather that it is one of the effects of living for long as a 'grass widow' – left for long years alone in the village when the husband toiled in the distant land, and remained a near stranger for decades. The return happens too late, as in the stories of most grass widows in Kerala.
In the younger generation succeeding Moosa’s parents are his brothers and their wives, following the same fate. But Rasheeda, one of his sisters-in-law, does not let her passion die and fulfils her wishes by other means. Thahira, Moosa’s second girlfriend, goes to the dingy inside of a toilet outside the house to meet her lover under the stare of an angry black spider.
Sabin loves his women characters, he says. “They are strong, and brave. They don’t trumpet their sacrifices. Look at Rasheeda, Moosa’s sister-in-law, her life is in a mess. She cannot walk out of her marriage for the sake of her family. I know many such women in my hometown, which is a Gulf pocket. There are girls like Thahira, who are not apologetic about their love and convictions, and are bold enough to ask her lover to jump the back wall and meet her in the toilet. Not that they are morally wrong but where else or how else can a girl meet a boy in a village where all the eyes are always on each other all the time? Maybe it is because my life has taught me that playing a mother’s role is not at all easy that my women characters are strong and unique in one way or the other,” Sabin says, referring to the major role he had to play in raising his toddlers to teenagers, after his wife Jeena suffered a stroke.
Through his every-changing trajectories of life, Sabin wrote, not caring anymore if he published any of them. It is his cousin Anees Salim, the renowned writer, who put that love for writing in him, he says.
“The person who influenced me and encouraged me to read and write was Anees Salim, who is one of the best writers of English prose in India now. Whenever I visited him at his house, he used to show me his bundle of manuscripts, and the novels he was reading then. One day, he showed me how his fingers were bruised from long hours of punching the typewriter’s keys. In his eyes, I saw raw passion to become a writer. Each time I went back home, I carried some of it within myself."
Watch: Sabin Iqbal speak on CAA