JOIN USMuch ink has been spilt already on this thriller yarn from the redoubtable Malayalam writer Benyamin. Manjaveyilmaranangal in Malayalam, translated into English as Yellow Lights of Death by Sajeev Kumarapuram, is a work which could easily don many other hats as well.
Postmodern fiction, meta fiction, crime fiction, diasporic writing, story of displacement etc, being some of them. Every reader of Benyamin comes to this book with a heavy hangover of the memories of Goat Days. Memories of the searing pain he was made to live through every bleeding page have forged a rare kinship between the author and his readers. And Benyamin has allegorised this kinship in the narrative pattern he adopts in the form of a missive sent by the devout fictive reader Christy Andrapper to the author/narrator Benyamin. Christy and Benyamin exchange locations off and on.
Christy writes under a fake identity from nowhere in particular, and his online identities are strategically disposable. Christy’s book of enigmatic experiences reaches the author in many parts confusing, fascinating and enchanting a group of friends called the Thursday market, of which Benyamin is a member. The novel is a message from one wannabe writer to an arrived writer. A writer who wanted and failed.
Simply put, it is the story of a crime committed in broad daylight. Senthil, an old classmate of the narrator, gets killed and a community sinks into a magical amnesia. Nobody remembers, which is eerie, because it calls into question the mental faculties of the person who believes he has seen the murder. But it is uncannily contemporary too. The public death sinks into oblivion and Christy Andrapper is the only man fated to remember it much to the chagrin of the authorities concerned.
They would be happier if he just relaxed and wrote stories. Writers are meant to be a harmless lot, aren’t they? But this writer cannot escape the ethical ecology he has come to inherit in Diego Garcia, which revels in a love-hate relationship with the mainland of Kerala. Call him naive if you will, but he just cannot forget that a human being has been wiped off the earth right in front of him.
Located in a fictional place called Diego Garcia, the exotic touch embeds the novel within deep cycles of history. Because the place carries the marks of the real Diego in patches. A whiff of the colonial past lends a seductive charm to the narrative, as we savour our own Portuguese connections, our ancient daredevilries, fancy alliances and diabolic trysts with religions and cults. It is a land of ancient hungers. Many kinds of scripts — legal, political, erotic and the scriptural with scraps, emails and blogs — float around, peppering the parallel plots with the spice of gossip, lust, deceit and curiosity. It is a beguiling quilt of ancient and contemporary snippets of communication, which ironically furnish no links to the disappearance of a man first and a woman later.
Fables of beliefs and rituals buried deep within a social psyche lure you into the scrolls of the past, from whose genetic codes even today’s digital selves have no escape. There are texts within texts, quite similar to the ancient palimpsestic imagination which makes one wonder about the simultaneity of the contemporary and the ancient in our present moment. Past and present weave a dark and menacing web. Thus Miriam Seva and other dubious practices not only live shoulder to shoulder with cellphones and social media, but also reinforce each other. But even in these ages of GPS and other deadly surveillance tools, a person can sink into nowhere and no one would miss him or her. It is that horror that keeps us going with this book.
In this journey through a nested narrative, the reader needs to be exceptionally alert to multiple time frames, motives, designs and clues strewn throughout. Lines are defiantly blurred between fact and fiction as people and personae, real and false hobnob with each other with an enviable nonchalance. Tantalising glimpses are offered into current forms of staganography where messages are embossed within digital images to elude detection. Thus this harmless murder mystery takes you on a dizzying ride through the maze of Christian history, theology, sects and sub-sects, which promise to be just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Translation is a tad jarring, matter of fact and a little too prosaic for a tale of enchantment, spells and black magic.
And what I badly missed was the linguistic excitement Benyamin’s style is capable of igniting with its biblical flow and incantatory charm. Beauty and power of idiomatic diction often drains out in English, leaving us with patches of insipid writing. And the translation takes time to pick up pace to a nail-biting unresolved finish. Still, it is an honest effort to make visible an amazingly complex piece of Nasrani history to a world outside Kerala, and deserves praise in no small measure.
Yellow Lights of Death
Benyamin
Penguin 2016, pp 394, Rs 399