The melancholy river bears us on

Anees Salim does it again — this is a book whose intensity and brilliance need to be experienced firsthand.

Anees Salim

Reclusive, known for never attending award functions or lit-fests and for minimal social media presence, Anees Salim’s acclaim stems only from his writing. He is the sort who silently lets his pen do the talking. Most of his books win awards and The Bellboy is all set to join this list.

What hits a reader square is the lack of verbal callisthenics: no preening, no pretensions or intellectual asides. The stories are written with deep intent, mastery and an inimitable style. It is impossible not to be drunk on Salim’s words. Just as it is not possible to return to the state of mind before, once The Bellboy is read.

No one writes Kerala like this author does. He eschews tired hyperbole, explanations or even conscious cultural references. Instead, the very soul of the region is played with just as a child may let her lustrous backwaters flit between its fingers, almost as if no other world exists but this. Every word here speaks of intimate alliances with smaller unseen tracts and its people. Kerala comes alive in flowers and swamps, in varied green hues of the river, in how a deceased uncle is buried and in jobs available on its tinier forgotten islands. Also in his characters drawn with such deft strokes, always nobler or more memorable than most of us may consider the indigenous to be.

The style opposes what creative writing courses teach. Worldwide, paring sentences to almost minimalist sparseness is celebrated. As a counterpoint, Salim’s sentences are not only voluptuous with descriptions, but they also stack lush clauses in almost the same spot until images embed in 3D within the reader. Rich sentences enmesh in each paragraph, congeal into facts, and concede to the next. Yet, it is not defiance as much as weaving rich ecosystems of tales into an accessible private milieu.

Latif the bellboy aka Ibru has to take up a job at the tender age of 17 because his widowed mother’s employment at Quilon Cashews entailed handling hot sappy fruit and seed until her hands turned into spongy pus-filled sores. He steps up as the man of the house and travels 40 minutes to the mainland on a boat called Jesus. On the way, he averts his eyes from the spot his father had drowned in as he attempted to save an ecologist and also from the grotesque clip-shaped palm on another island where his body had been retrieved from. Latif’s place of employment is the mainland, at the once-chic Paradise Lodge, which has not only gone to seed but is nicknamed Suicide Lodge for this is the end of the road for many, the place where people come to die.

Whorls of tinier tales nestle within the spaces of the narrative. Time is the inevitable villain whispering that all good things must come to an end. Ultimately, this is a story of human greed and betrayal of the most innocent, so commonplace that we look away. Though Latif does not ride a cycle, the cover design featuring a cyclist by Gunjan Ahlawat is haunting and exquisite. This is a book that has earned the right to grace bookshelves everywhere. Its intensity and brilliance ask to be experienced firsthand.

Interview with Anees Salim

From his debut novel ‘The Vicks Mango Tree’ (2012) to his latest ‘The Bellboy’ (2022), Salim has, in a decade, published seven books, winning accolades, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018. Stanley Carvalho chats with the reclusive but prolific writer. Excerpts

Loneliness, death, sorrow, fictional places and family are the leitmotifs that run through your stories. Are these from lived experiences?

Yes, I write about things I have witnessed or experienced, about people I have grown up with, and about places I have run away from. Unlike death and sorrow, loneliness is something you choose and make a part of your life. As a child, there was no dearth of opportunities for me to socialise, make friends and cut capers. But I chose to be alone. A small town can do a lot of things for a child. It can fill you with a high degree of desperation or make you dream big. I think my home town did both and I started to believe that the way out of the small and suffocating town was only through writing.

How challenging was it to write an inventive novel like ‘The Odd Book of Baby Names’, your sixth, which is in a polyphonic structure?

It was extremely challenging, not just because of its polyphonic structure but also because of the restlessness that I experienced during that time. I could not just get started, even though I had the characters and the storyline ready. And when I finally started writing, I realised that giving the characters nine different voices was a tough task. I had to write several drafts before each character gained a distinctly different identity and voice.

How is ‘The Bellboy’ different from your previous work in terms of craft and construct?

‘The Bellboy’ is the story of a boy from a sinking island in Kerala and how he loses his way in a bigger world. I have intentionally kept the craft simple and limited the settings to a small island and a fairly big town, a river flowing between them. I like to experiment with craft, but the story is also important, everything else just happens in the course of writing.