Nothing but a nasty aftertaste

Within Kerala, stories of locally produced counterfeits abound, told with a mixture of bemusement and awe at the audacity of those making these objects. In the northern reaches of the state, the ‘Kasargod Embassy’ is where you (apparently) can get fake visas and passports belonging to any nation in the world. In central Kerala, you have Kunnamkulam which supposedly prints its own dollars. I haven’t seen either the infamous Kunnamkulam dollar or the handiwork of the ‘Kasargod Embassy’ so I can’t possibly attest to the quality of these fakes.

What I can say with firmer conviction is that T D Ramakrishnan’s 2009 Malayalam novel Francis Itty Cora (translated into English by Priya K Nair), centred around a powerful clan in Kunnamkulam, reads like a pastiche of a pulpy conspiracy thriller, an ersatz Dan Browneqsue caper with fake history mixed in with real characters from the historical record and plenty of quasi-Christian imagery and themes. It’s all written in prose that can at best be described as pedestrian with different characters from different parts of the world speaking in the same basic, monotonous syntax and who frequently spout facts like they’re a voice assistant on your phone reading out a restaurant menu.

Cannibalism, violent sexual acts, intelligent women who are beautiful and therefore keen to seduce every man they meet to get their way, bad rock lyrics (Papa Roach and Sum 41 anyone?), and a potted biography of Tupac Shakur cribbed from Wikipedia fill the pages of Francis Itty Cora. No doubt there’s a certain kind of (mostly male) reader who will be thrilled with the “intellectual prowess” and “creative courage” of this kind of writing. The rest are more likely to keep a sad eye on the pages that are yet to be read, wondering why they can’t seem to make faster progress and get to the ending quicker.

The bare bones of the plot are these: In the present century, not long after the invasion of Iraq, a former US soldier named Xavier Itty Cora from New York searches the internet for help with his sexual dysfunction and finds “The School” (basically a high-end brothel) run by three women out of an apartment in Kochi. He chats with one of them, Rekha, and immediately confesses to a whole lot of childhood trauma, his time in Iraq with the army which involved stomach-churning rapes of young girls, participating in the American campaign of violence in that country with enthusiasm, and eventually returning home where he’s now apparently become part of a cannibal community. While he’d like Rekha and her colleagues to help him get his sexual drive back, he also tasks her with finding out about his illustrious ancestor, Itty Cora, a legendary pepper trader and ship owner from Kunnamkulam who eventually ended up in Florence where he died in 1517.

And there begins the tedious investigation by Rekha and her friends (the blurb on the back of the book terms them “sensual scholars”) to find out how Itty Cora the elder reached Florence and rose high enough to become acquainted with, among others, the Medicis and Raphael and also somehow established a reputation for being a mathematical genius ahead of his time. There are forays into Kunnamkulam itself — and here, for a brief shining interlude, Ramakrishnan’s writing shows some promise before it’s quickly snuffed — and you get to meet the present-day descendants of Itty Cora who’ve remained in situ. They are adherents to a Satanic sex cult (the “18th Clan”) he established and continue a revolting practice of droit du seigneur where any woman who marries into the family is taken to a secret dungeon and forced to copulate with the ghost of the ancestor Cora.

In between we get frequent updates via email missives of what the ex-soldier Itty Cora is up to (nothing good) and some pretentious blogging about Fermat’s last theorem and repetitive fantasising about Hypatia, the mathematical genius in ancient Alexandria whose gruesome death Ramakrishnan keeps returning to. By the time one reaches the damp squib of an ending, you have to ask what was the point of the 300 pages that came before. The narrative loops without purpose, the glaring copy errors (Abu Ghraib misspelt as Abu Gharib repeatedly), and the troubling sexual politics leave nothing but a nasty aftertaste.