Kunjootty has always been writing the book of his life. A young clerk in a government office, he had even chosen a title for the unpublished work—The Book of Exodus. It was about a desolate isle, called Potta Thuruthu (isle of reeds), where life is a long list of arrivals and departures. Kunjootty and his land of misery is the subject of Malayalam writer VJ James’ The Book of Exodus, a novel first published in Malayalam in 1999 as Purappadinte Pustakam.
James’ central character writes feverishly on his notebooks stories that unfold at home and around. The history of Kunjootty’s land is written in blood, which flowed when poor workers took the decades of violent suppression by feudal landlords to their own doorsteps. Since then the people in Potta Thuruthu had been living a life of freedom, depending on the abundant fish in the lagoon. But freedom doesn’t mean an end of misery, as the inhabitants of the isle find out.
The Book of Exodus begins with the death of Kunjootty’s grandmother when he was a young child curious about the world around him. His grandmother had arrived on the isle one day to make it their home. Many more arrived in the lagoon, but life for them somehow seems like a mirage of a sparkling, not-so-distant city beyond the waters. Lying unconscious in a hospital for four days, Kunjootty himself sets the stage for his stories of the lagoon and its desolation.
There are weddings and funerals, as the novel moves along, building a melange of tales. One story is about Chathutty, a college dropout who comes to the lagoon to hide from his rich family. David Chiriyankan, a son of soil who left for France as a young boy, returns 14 years later with his daughter, only to disappear, leaving her stranded on the isle. Murali, Kunjootty’s friend from college, comes with his family after a transfer to an adjacent city, only to kill himself soon after.
“Kunjootty was aware that the pages of The Book of Exodus lay scattered over the plains…,” narrates James, a former scientist at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, in the novel. Those plains are littered with the lives of simple people who see complexities always lurking in the corner. As he writes his book, Kunjootty can’t help himself encountering sorrow even outside the lagoon, in the story of Diwakar Menon, his office manager broken by a failed marriage. Readers of James’ works will connect the desolation of Potta Thuruthu to the loss and grief in the village in his novel, Anti-Clock, once a land of rolling hills and pristine forests that has lost its splendour to mindless mining.
In the author’s note to The Book of Exodus, James writes about a visit to an isle near Kochi to attend a wedding that became the point of departure for his first novel. “I had no idea that the isle had been waiting for the writer, with a cast of intriguing characters and a haunting ambience,” he says. “From that vantage point, one could glimpse the sparkling hauteur of Kochi’s city lights. But no development had crossed over the river to reach that isolated isle. For a drop of drinking water, the pitiable natives had to row to the opposite riverbank and wait for hours at the water pipe.”
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
