Manju by M T Vasudevan Nair

 

(Buy on Amazon)

I haven't liked much of whatever I have read of M T Vasudevan Nair’s fiction so far, except Naalukettu, especially because of its ending, and one of his short stories. And every time I read one of his books, I sincerely hope I would like it. However, it's only now that I’ve found a novel by him I can honestly say I love and admire. This book Manju (Mist) is different from most of his other works; the story doesn't take place in Kerala but in an exotic Nainital, and perhaps this is his only novel with a female protagonist.

It’s not a novel, but a novella with sixty-odd pages and is sweet like a little melancholic poem. Vimala is a boarding school resident teacher in Nainital who stays in the school quarters even during the summer vacation when all the students and staff leave for home. She hardly visits her family. It's the end of winter and the start of the tourist season where Vimala sometimes talks to the boy known as 'Buddhu' who operates a boat for tourist boating trips around the Nainital lake. She also has a brief encounter with a Sardar who comes for a short stay around the place. There's hardly anyone else there she's acquainted with except the school guard and she spends the vacation mostly engrossed in her solitude. Vimala has never gotten over the thoughts of her lost boyfriend, and so is 'Buddhu' about his father, and both sort of wait for their return every tourist season though they are not certain about anything.

The smoothness of the narration is not upset by any sort of disturbance or turbulence despite the prevalence of such elements throughout the story as they remain a silent undercurrent never coming to the surface to interfere with the serene flow of thoughts, dreams, memories, and feelings. There are enough factors in the plot that could lead to tremendous bursts of agitation and violence. Vimala’s father, now bedridden, used to be a very strict and frightening patriarch whom the children couldn’t feel any love for or attachment to. Her mother is busy with her secret meetings with her paramour. Her brother is into drugs and gambling, and her younger sister is after some boy. However, the author has chosen to describe such things in a few lines and be done with them instead of blowing them up into a massive family saga that could fill hundreds of pages. Had he done that, it would have been an eventful story with a tumultuous plot, but with all its poetry vanished. It would have looked like yet another ordinary novel. Now, what he has presented us with instead is special, a marvel. His minimalism has stripped the book of everything he felt was unnecessary and what’s left is its pure, uncontaminated essence.

The conciseness of the plot helps the reader focus on Vimala and her feelings against the backdrop of the beauty and serenity of the place with its calm lake and the relaxed tourists. There are not many distractions, and she has interactions only with a minimal number of people, and that too brief enough. The characters including her lost boyfriend and members of her family only appear in her reminiscences and through their letters. Much of the story is revealed through Vimala’s thoughts and memories in some sort of a 'stream of consciousness' as in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. The characters and events in her life are presented in a passing manner and do not really superimpose themselves over the main narrative.

Since the narration is not of the usual kind, you may have to read it twice for a real appreciation. But that's not a problem as the book is a thin volume. More than flowing into the future in a natural course, it’s a story wherein the past unfolds bit by bit through its chapters as the reading progresses. In other words, you start reading without much knowledge of what has already occurred in Vimala’s life and her past story unfolds gradually as you move along the pages. After the first read, you are tempted to start over to read the entire story once again to follow Vimala with the full knowledge of the character.

The author has portrayed a charming atmosphere of the misty Nainital helping you savour its delightful sights the same way Orhan Pamuk walks you through the mesmerizing streets of Istanbul in his book Istanbul. And the narration is beautifully punctuated with numerous symbols and images. This book is told to be an experimental work, and fortunately, the outcome has been enormously, overwhelmingly elating.