In the early days of his retirement, when he had the time to ponder the many stories and epics he had read as a young man, PM Reghukumar began to form an idea. Wasn't it one hasty promise of a king that got his son sent into exile for 14 years, and wasn’t it the misplaced word of a gambling man that threw his wife into the enemy’s hands, Reghukumar sat thinking on the verandah of his house in Kottayam.
It led him to write the story of a young man called Anandakuttan, who falls into an unknown abyss for long enough to not know himself anymore, because of one night’s heedless act. At the age of 72, Reghukumar, torn between health issues and the loneliness of retirement, became an author. His novel – a Malayalam paperback of a hundred-odd pages – Akalunna Theeram was published by Green Books a year ago. Now at 73, Reghukumar, a retired government official, is ready with a yet-to-be-named book of short stories.
“In the novel, there are incidents drawn from my childhood, characters I have grown up with, rituals and practices of my village in the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram,” Reghukumar says. But the rest is fiction that grew from the idea of the many chains engulfing man, he says.
Reghukumar comes back to the word every now and then—chains. He says that few he has known in life have had free will, that mostly everyone is chained by the shackles of society.
The characters of Akalunna Theeram are, without their knowledge, imprisoned by their unwillingness to break free. He quotes the example of Anandakuttan's grandfather, the model Gandhian that all of the villagers have great respect for, and an uncle, a Communist with high ideals. “Neither can come out of the conventions they are tied to—the grandfather to practices of caste, and the uncle to the party,” the author says.
Anandakuttan is influenced by both the men in his childhood, drawn towards the disciplined life of his grandfather, and later to the ideals of his uncle. As he grows older, he becomes more cynical, agnostic, and doubtful of ideologies. Reghukumar follows a certain order and method in charting the first half of Anandakuttan’s life, filled with the confusions of a boy growing up without a father, and swayed by all that he has read and heard around him.
Midway through the book, the author appears to let go of his protagonist. Anandakuttan has his great fall, the kind that epic heroes had because of a minor slip in words or deeds. The book changes course entirely, adopts the tone of magical realism, and in place of the ordered chapters of Anandakuttan’s life, you sink into an unexpected darkness, with the hero suddenly turning into a middle-aged figure, a slave with no mind of his own. He seems lost in a cloud of other people’s drugs, nonchalantly giving up, suffering for the many inactions in his life.
The story had begun there, with Anandakuttan in deep water, more literally than figuratively, Reghukumar reminds you. “It is non-linear,” he says. He had prepared the reader for what was to come from the beginning.
Reghukumar’s writing is an interesting mix of descriptive narration and literary wanderings. The letters that Anandakuttan exchanges with the first love of his life, who for some reason is always mentioned by her full name Gopika Vasanth, are direct outpourings that come from the youthfulness of the mind. Jancy, the woman he meets later in life, is more mysterious.
Even the humour comes across in unexpected ways. In a funny passage, Reghukumar describes the curious ways in which men in the village appeared to lose their way home in the night and turned up only the next morning. A local myth spread about a ghost bewitching the men in the night. Later, when the police nab a couple for brewing arrack illegally, many women found the answer to why their men had lost their way in the night, writes Reghukumar.
Some of these stories and legends come from his childhood, he says with a chuckle, and adds seriously that only Damu (the brewer) was not chained, unlike the rest of us. He was freer in his thought and action. There is a separate story for Damu in Reghukumar’s upcoming book of short stories.
Reghukumar had not shown his hastily written novel (“I finished writing it in one go”) to anyone for 14 years. It had been buried among his possessions when he became busy with the affairs of his children and saw the birth of his grandchildren. A year ago, when he finally dug out his draft of the novel, his friends and family were surprised. His son, a doctor, found in the writing elements of mental health issues and a striking resemblance to Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. He had not read or known about The Bell Jar, but Reghukumar quotes Dickens in his book: “We forge the chains we wear in life.” He also quotes Rousseau: "Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains."
“The most beautiful moment on earth is sunset, when it is time to break the chains of the day. In that way, death becomes the moment man is finally free,” Reghukumar says, adding that that is why he put two crucial scenes in the novel in the middle of a graveyard. The book begins in a river and ends at the sea, because the chains of life grow that large, he says. He does not say this with the affectation of a philosopher, but as a matter of fact.
Negativity is not the intention of his from-the-heart book, it is simply the brooding of a thoughtful man who finds relief in writing.