The time of life when you read a book is important how it impacts you. One could vividly recollect books read in one's youth, than the ones that were read in later life, while juggling with life's many challenges. M T Vasudevan Nair, the Jnanpeeth award winning novelist from Kerala, is one writer I grew up with. If the earlier books had alienation of youth of an era, in his later books his craft took several leaps of improvement and the themes became diverse. The lonely, silent and brooding youth from Malabar, fighting the demons of his past, crudely and selfishly honest is the protagonist in many of his earlier books. MT went on to write movie scripts, travelogues, unconventional take on mythologies etc. There was dark rain, green verdant environs, old tiled households (tharavad) with fences of bamboo thorns in his books. There is always the river, Nila or Bharatapuzha that silently flows through many books, often at its' raging best in monsoon.
I could easily identify myself with the the male protagonist in his books although they are from a different era. MT is about 30 years older to me, we both grew under the same slice of Malabar sky, he studied in my college many years earlier and....the river and rains so evocatively brought out in his books were always a part of my lonely, lost adolescence. Nothing much had changed during the lost decades of 50s, 60s and 70s.
Just when I smugly thought that I had finished reading all the stuff that MT has written, I discovered that I haven't read Varanasi, one of his later works. Seldom have I sat through a book and read it in one sitting. The protagonist, Sudhakaran, like many M T characters, goes away from his village, leaving behind a distraught girl. A loner, he went on to make a living and was almost ensnared into a marriage with the daughter (who claimed that he has impregnated her) of a man who mentors him in Bombay. Again he makes a dash for freedom and ends up in Bangalore, many cities in Tamilnadu, Paris and returns to Varanasi, alienated from his parents, siblings and his roots.
Varanasi evokes mixed feelings in him. He meets Ramlal, the scion of a family that is in charge of the fire that kept burning from the time of Harishchandra. He tries to meet Srinivasan, another mentor from academics, but he had passed away, leaving behind Rukmini akka, the widow who lived with him and cared for him. There is a procession of lonely men & women, struggling with existence, Om Prakash, Chandramouli, Sumita Nagpal, Ramakrishnan and others who played bit roles in the theatre that is life. He had made a trip a one year trip to France where his paths cross again with Madeleine and has a boy named Hari from her. She moves to US with Hari.
There he is, alone, with emptiness in life, no heirs to acknowledge him ... although he is the father of two kids. He dips into river Ganga and does the pindam ritual (seeking salvation to dead souls of near and dear ones).... After several dips he wants to know whether he can do it for his own self. The priest confirms that there is something called Aatma pindam. He goes on to performs the rituals for his own soul. It is a beautifully written novel.. traversing across time, space and generations
