Amma as the nucleus

A little over 90 years ago, in the village of Koodallur in North Kerala, Ammalu Amma tried everything she could to abort her pregnancy. Every attempt fell flat. This was fortunate; she would go on to give birth to one of Malayalam's greatest writers, and ironically, it is only through his writings that she is remembered today.

The first page of M T Vasudevan Nair's memoir 'Bear With Me, Amma' tells us Ammalu lived a short life. She was 50 when she died. When we look at MT's stories across nine decades, we see that it is filled with people who lost their loved ones; they must trudge on, despite the world being a less happy place. Perhaps the tragic predecessor of all these losses was the year 1953 when a 20-year-old lost his favourite person in the world. Amma is almost always spoken of in his different stories with a child's sparkle in his eyes; a sparkle that was put out by her untimely death.

The volume is not a continuous narrative. We see fragments of a childhood spent ashamed and angry at the world for an unequal distribution of comforts and money; from these fragments emerges Amma who was trying her best to keep Vasu from being scorched. The mother and son lived in a world that does not exist anymore; a world where legends were as real as people, the Nila river that flows through Koodallur was more lush, and many who loved Vasu before he was a writer were still around.

'Bear With Me, Amma' is divided into two parts: fiction and non-fiction. If such an editorial barrier did not exist between the two, we would struggle to tell which is which; the same characters occupy both worlds. In a sense, some writings are 'non-fiction' because, in them, the characters get to live under their own names, while in  'fiction', they bear aliases. These alter egos are thin veils; the intelligent reader will be able to see right through them.

Amma is the nucleus that ties all the pieces of this volume together, but it is as much about the background characters and setting. We see teachers who enchant students with the 'Count Of Monte Cristo'; the haunting memory of a half-sister whom MT's father brought back from the then Ceylon but had to be taken back; the town of Thrissur, where novelists and poets breathed out the literature that all of Kerala would breathe in. We see mother goddesses, who may have once been people, reign as deities to families who today serve them. In destitute times, when mothers in a family have nothing to give children who go to sleep hungry, the goddess appears at the door with food. Or so the legend goes.

MT is known for never smiling in photographs, for being quiet and guarded, and for not having a sense of humour. (Which is probably why we relish the rare jokes in his books and movies.) A shroud of melancholy has characterised almost all of his writing. But it is melancholy with a vice grip; it is hard for the reader to tear themselves away from the story.

While 'Bear With Me, Amma' has MT's personal favourite 'In Your Memory' in it, the book's most revealing work is 'Money'. It is here that we get the closest glimpse of his mother's death and the strained relationship he had with his father. Most importantly, it is here that we realise that the 1969 novel 'Kaalam' is MT's most autobiographical work. Reading 'Money' against 'Kaalam' offers a study of how writers transmute raw materials into stories.

A memoir is constrained by things as they happened; a memoirist's debt is to truth and memory rather than to aesthetics. Fiction, on the other hand, can take the dramatic turns reality never actually took. Memoir deals with 'What is…'; fiction deals with 'What if…'. To turn the former into the latter is what happens in the storyteller's smithy.

MT does not write as much as he used to. His last film was made in 2013 and we do not get any new books. 'Bear With Me, Amma' itself is the combination of two books — 'Ammaykku' and 'Muthassimarude Katha' — published in Malayalam earlier. This may be disappointing for those who have been expecting MT's autobiography for decades. We can guess why he does not oblige: for one, he has written about himself enough for an autobiography to not be shockingly original. Secondly, an autobiography demands a mandatory wholeness from the writer, while a memoirist has the luxury of cherry-picking.

MT had reinvented Malayalam prose in the 1950s and 60s with a Hemingway-like discipline and a sparse, poetic style. Translator Gita Krishnankutty has no such lofty ambitions; she is content with a clear and modest style. Nonetheless, 'Bear With Me, Amma' remains a good introduction to someone who has been called a 'sahityakulapathi' — the 'patriarch of literature'.