The conversation is left hanging because right in the middle of a character study, Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari announces, “Language kills truth.” Before one gets the chance to pop one’s eyes out and ask, “wait, what?”, Saharu makes another disclosure: the difference between humans and other animals is that one thinks in language.
“Only,” he adds casually, “Once you have discovered language, it is extremely difficult to be honest anymore. There will be layers of filters within us before we speak.”
Saharu, a writer who clearly has a way with words, has circled back to his original point, much the same way his books behave – ending where everything began. His first novel, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half (2024), has pretty much done the same and nudged him into lists of literary fiction writers to look forward to from Kerala.
Saharu's blatant pronouncements on language (killing truth) drop in the midst of an earnest discussion about Vijay Menon, the unlikeable main character in his newly released second novel The Menon Investigation (2025). The author disagrees about the unlikeability.
“Because in a book of fiction, one doesn’t deal with opinion. Vijay Menon is a character I would not like in my personal life but in a book of fiction, I’d be able to empathise with his conflict. A book of fiction works because the addressee is a solitary human being and a human being who is alone is a self-critical animal who accepts his limitations,” Saharu says.
Like his author, Vijay skimps through a network of complex ideas, almost in a bid to run away from them. As a senior police officer, newly in charge of an eight-year-old murder case, he opens a Pandora’s box by recreating the night of the crime, visualising the scene from the contents of the police files.
To a reader unprepared for Saharu’s layered characters, the opening scenes are no clue for what is in store. It is already a little unconventional, but appealingly so: Vijay imagines describing the details of the crime to his wife of many years, Doctor Padmini, who is on a couch with her hair sprawling to the floor.
Unknowingly, along with Vijay, you go through the intermingling worlds of the crime and his love life. Padmini’s history is brought out in a quick succession of images, and then the story rolls back to the present with details of their contrasting daughters.
Within a few pages, you are pulled into the vortex of Vijay Menon’s two major obsessions in life: caste and colour. He is a Menon – a privileged caste – and he is dark-skinned. His problem: He is a ‘Dark Menon’, as characters derisively refer to him in the book.
“Ours is a society where there is tremendous social expectation on the appearance of a body to give away one’s location in the hierarchy of caste. Vijay Menon seems to be defying that expectation by being dark-skinned, despite being from a privileged caste,” Saharu says.
At the other end of the spectrum, he has placed another such complex character—an Adivasi man named Shyamu who, as Saharu puts it, “is supposed to look a certain way.” But with his striking blue eyes and not-brown-enough skin, he does not fall into the stereotype.
“Like in other cultures, there is a tremendous aesthetic dehumanisation of dark-skinned bodies in our culture. It has been with human beings since the onset of civilisation. It is not unique to India. But our crisis is quite acute because it’s stuck with caste, and the ramifications are unique,” Saharu adds.
He expands the idea to speak about other religions like Christianity and Islam, which had flowed to India with their strong ideas about universal brotherhood but were still consumed by caste.
If these religions have failed to resist caste in India, Saharu says atheism is no guarantee against its power either. “Progressive people, people with a scientific temperament or well-read people—all of them may not be as outside of the system as they think they are. This is because the capacity for critical thinking does not necessarily govern how we live, make choices, act and react,” Saharu states.
The only way he deems it possible to fight caste is through intercaste marriages. That is where the covers of modernity and progress appear to crumble. When Vijay Menon learns about his daughter’s relationship with a man, he becomes restless, not knowing the surname that would identify his caste and not knowing the colour of the man’s skin. He is torn between the casteism so ingrained in him and his shame for feeling that way.
Saharu gives Vijay a backstory, as he does the villains in the book, all of which demonstrate how the system converts a victim to a perpetrator in one way or another. The abused becomes the abuser; the bereaved becomes the killer. The person who looks for the criminal finds one in himself.
“The novel explores the idea that I may be the person I am looking for. It was triggered by a sentence in Running Dog by Don DeLillo: ‘At the bottom of most long and obsessive searches, in her view, was some vital deficiency on the part of the individual in pursuit.’”
DeLillo’s words brought to Saharu’s mind a mixed parcel of writings he has read, including a story in the Bible. He does not read lightly, he says, and can, at the snap of a finger, quote long poems he’d loved.
He started on prose late, in the last decade, picking works of great writers to understand why they were great and was delighted to find them so. DeLillo, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery ’O’Connor and Iris Murdoch all became favourites. But poetry had and still comes first for him. There were days he’d take walks listening to the verses of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, TS Elliot or Emily Dickinson. “My writing career is a gift from American literature, which I began reading in my late 20s,” says the 40-year-old.
Saharu began learning English when he was 18 or 19, he says, after getting a paltry score in high school. He began reading books when he went to Aligarh Muslim University and began to like what he read. In his later days at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, he began to speak fluently.
But he made it a point to never write from real life. “I am a very disciplined and professional writer. If you are such a writer, it is highly unlikely that you will depend on your lived life for source [material]. Iris Murdoch once said that it is very amoral to use real-life characters in novels and I agree with that. One should have a capacity to imagine. I take liberty with imagination.”
However, incidents or experiences can shape his narratives. The Menon Investigation, which can’t be reduced to a single idea, touches intensely on child abuse. It is an experience deeply personal for Saharu. He has not, in his days growing up in a village in Malappuram, seen a single boy who was not abused, he says.
He does not mention girls. In his book too, the author does not attempt to be authoritative about the experiences of women. He takes the voice of Vijay Menon, feeling more at liberty in engaging with men. But the women in his book are effortlessly rebellious.
Where Vijay fights his inner demons and can’t shake away his biases, the women let love take over and defeat the system. A Brahmin woman continues her relationship with a Dalit man, unmindful of her father’s attempts to stop it. A Nair woman wants to marry a Dalit man and a teenager exposes her father’s casteism in the most merciless manner.
“I find that men are more caste and colour conscious than women but not to a great degree,” Saharu says.
The deflating tone echoes the sentiments of his book: a resignation to the system. In his first novel, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, the story began with two women complaining about their marriage and ended with their acceptance that their lives are going to remain the same.
Saharu does not seem to indulge in the freedom that fiction offers to create worlds one would wish to live in more than the world one has inherited. He quotes one of his favourite poets, Emily Dickinson, to answer why: “‘Hope is the thing with feathers’,” she said. I think that hope is quite featherless. In the end, he likes to return his characters to the real world.
A title has not yet been fixed for his third novel – the work in progress – but an excerpt has appeared in the latest issue of Granta.