This is not a review, just an attempt to explain my feelings as a reader seeing my hometown in a novel of national acclaim. That was what led me to the novel ‘Chronicle of an Hour and a Half’ by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari. I discovered him through one of my friend’s instagram story, there was a new novelist from Areekode and his work has been making the rounds at national writing competitions. I felt a weird connection, maybe I saw myself in the novelist, both of us, I presume children of Chaliyar, who from its banks by the folds of fate reached the sea of the English literary world, which by being forced open by strong streams like ours is growing in size by the day.
As a reader of English literature from Areekode, during my witnessing of the novel, I found myself standing at the edge of an estuary, rather at the center of the flow itself, two worlds I was familiar with seamlessly blending. The novel with its stylistic inspiration from Faulkner, Joyce and maybe even Woolf is as Areekodian as it can get, flowing into each other, forming something that’s very quintessential and mundane for us. Yet the mundane and quintessential, when stated takes us into the depth of our thoughts, forcing us to look inside.
The novel was very easy to read, yet its rawness like a fish bone stuck in your throat makes it impossible to ignore its complexities. The ‘Chronicle of an hour and a half’, as the title states, is just the story of a set of inevitable events taking place on a Friday afternoon right after the Jumuah prayers in a small village near Areekode in Kerala. The plot, one that involves the extra marital affair of a housewife of a gulf migrant, is one that is familiar to everyone from Malabar, where every second house was built on the blood and bones sacrificed in the Arabian Gulf. The familiarity of the plot to everyone, including the characters within the novel is what makes the plot possible. In a village where every household has a man who has patiently endured the long pleasureless desert to raise a family and build a house back home, giving away in the process his youth, desires and his could’ve been life back home, the story of the betraying wife of the Gulf migrant becomes everyone’s wife. Every man in the village, as characterised in the figure of Shahid, a fellow villager, himself a gulf returnee, in the novel feels that when a fellow ‘gulfukarante bharya’ (a gulf migrant’s wife) is cheating on her husband, it is as if he himself is being cheated, It is his own rage of impotence that has every right to lash out. The impotence not due to lack of virility, rather one formed by the menial migratory flights they had to take that took them thousands of miles apart to the desert, most often as lone birds. Much has been written on the ‘Pravasi’, his plights, desires, paradoxes and absent presences.
My joy of finding Areekode, our troublingly transliterated town that is written as Areacode, Areecode, Areakode and Areekode among other variations, in the folds of a novel written in English was doubled by the carefully knitted threads forming itching characters. As cliche as this sounds, I could see my neighbors, my playground mates, local political figures, people I share a masjid with, local sectarians and everyone around our tiny place in the novel. These representations were as raw and real as they could get, from the paradoxes of a Masjid going Muslim Marxist to the mothers who shrink as they age just because of the sheer amount of work at home. What made these representations fit in, I believe, was the stylistic choices of the novel, the setting of the atmosphere, the feeling of urgency in the air. The chapter going through the characters, at some point in the novel naturally merges into the mobs, mimicking the formation of an actual mob in the novel leading to the macabre end.
This novel, if not for anything else, is the image of Areekode as raw as it can be, at this point in its history. This is not to limit the upcoming author to the boundaries of his origin, as one reads through the available interviews he has given, one finds in him an author with much a much more universal yearning. His views about humanity though bleak, is one of honesty.
In an interview with The New Indian Express, the author said: “There are certain fundamentals to these fakeness. We have to be fake in order to be normal in this society. Because society doesn’t want truth — it wants fiction. Telling the truth often becomes a radical act. And that is why, in fiction, we have to speak the truth.
On a question “Is that what you’re trying to do with writing?,” he replied: “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I am a prophet of truth or have some moral vantage point. Truth can be entertaining, sad, or miserable. But ultimately, truth is useless. For truth to have a positive impact, society must reflect on it. If society rejects it, it becomes mere entertainment.”
In another one of the interviews when asked about political correctness in his works, one finds a rather empathetic side of the author towards the human experience. He said: “The purpose of imaginative literature is to engage and reflect on the human condition in all its ordinary and extreme complexities and political correctness is antithetical to this primary responsibility of the novelist. A novelist must actively resist correctness and that is the only way to be honest with one’s characters. The author must obsessively exile or exorcise himself/herself from the novel.”
For a novel written in India written around a mob lynching instigated through Whatsapp, one might find it surprising that it is set in Kerala, rather than the other parts of our very own ‘lynchistan’. The author’s comment on this surprisingly reveals his insight about the fake Keralan society and its large claims about progress based on literacy numbers.
He says: “In other words, whatever is true of north India is equally true of Kerala as well so far as caste and misogyny goes. We are in this together, regardless of the preposterous differences in the social and economic indices. This is my understanding.”
And ultimately, for the author, the novel is a modern form of heresy, where instead of abusing God, humans are the subjects of trial, and like a trial it should expose layer by layer the beliefs and systems we have built around us. As a literary and cultural studies student who identifies as a Muslim and is interested in the developments of culture in the community, I must say that Saharu Nusaiba is a promising author, along with the likes of Anees Salim and others.
