Somewhere in the middle of Anthill, Malayalam writer Vinoy Thomas’ second novel and the first to be translated into English, is a sexist joke about a genie that has escaped from a pot. The joke is told by Prasannan, the owner of Perumpadi’s first teashop-cum-grocery store, to a captive audience on its plank benches. The joke follows a mediation between a squabbling couple at another of Perumpadi’s landmarks, the Reformation House. Disputes abound in Perumpadi, which is celebrating the golden jubilee of the arrival of migrants from the south to its godforsaken terrain. Parleys too.
Perumpadi, a land set on the border between Kerala and Karnataka near the Coorg forest, needs negotiations because, as an author’s note in the beginning says, it is a place with “dissolute, promiscuous denizens, shambolic family lives, comical institutions, moronic movements and roguish religions”. The first family that arrived here from the erstwhile Travancore region in Kerala had a story of incest, of a father and “his own oldest daughter whom he had made pregnant”. Kummannoor Paul Sir, a sexual abuse victim of a predator priest from the local church as a young boy, was the mediator whom Perumpadi residents sought out at his home, the Reformation House.
The novel (the original Malayalam title is Puttu), which shared the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for the best novel for 2021 with R Rajasree’s Kalyaniyennum Dakshayaniyennum Peraya Randu Sthreekalude Katha, begins in 2002, the 50th anniversary of the arrival of migrants in Perumpadi. Paul Sir is ailing and his son Jeremias is slowly stepping into his father’s shoes as Perumpadi’s peacemaker.
Characters and their stories rain on the reader from the word go. One of them is Goddess Bhavani, who has her own sanctum sanctorum where people seek her intervention in family disputes, evil eye, lovesickness and black magic. Teashop owner Prasannan is another with a truckload of tales. Another is Kocharaghavan, a boy mermaid named after the black-bellied whistling duck known for its deep dives in the water. The stories travel back and forth in time revealing even more characters and their faults.
Karikkottakari, the debut novel of Thomas, a schoolteacher in northern Kerala, dealt with land and labour, especially about the low-caste community members brought from Travancore to work on the fields. In Anthill, the migration stories poke at the uncomfortable questions of gender inequalities that the state is notoriously famous for. All the reforms and movements in science and literature in the state haven’t been able to bring change. Thomas proposes a Reformation House in an imaginary land. “The book has many stories that many people have narrated to me,” writes the author in the novel, which first appeared in Malayalam as a serialised work. “This book could be the epitome of every new human settlement that breaks off from the larger community for so many reasons, including nonconformity, bohemianism, heterodoxy or as cover-up for a momentary indiscretion,” writes Nandakumar K, the Dubai-based translator of Anthill, in his translator’s note. “Some 200 characters sashay through the book…”
The novel’s no-nonsense nature straddles an irreverent sense of humour to lampoon a society’s meaningless progress. Its unpretentious storytelling makes recent attempts at fictionalising migration into northern Kerala fade into irrelevance. Nandakumar’s translation is impressive and rings a natural note to tune the story with the language. Anthill’s Perumpadi is like Asterix and Obelix’s Gaulish village of Armorica in the middle of the Roman Empire. Instead of creating solutions like out-of-shape Roman soldiers, the people in this northern Kerala land go to the Reformation House to settle their disputes peacefully. There is no magic potion brewing in Perumpadi’s pots, but its stories are better than magic.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
Anthill
Vinoy Thomas
Penguin Random House
Pp 381, Rs 599
