THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It’s a little after lunch. Thoppil Mohamed Meeran stretches his legs and relaxes in his chair, a plastic affair kept at an angle on the enclosed verandah of his sister’s home. He proceeds to tell you about the worst disease on earth. “Memory loss; that’s the worst disease. Memory is the biggest blessing. These days, I have to ask my grandchild’s name eight or nine times,” he says with a concerned chuckle.
The Kendra Sahitya Akademi award winning writer from Tamil Nadu turns 71 this September, and he is now fully involved in his latest novel which has much to do with memory - local history and collective memory, to be precise. “It’s about people who have had to flee their homes fearing persecution by the Portuguese who came here centuries ago. They settle in another place, a wasteland of sorts, and the story deals with their new life there,” says Meeran, whose ‘Chaivu Narkali’ (The Reclining Chair) won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award in 1997.
His first novel, ‘Oru Kadalora Kiramathin Kathai’ (The Story of a Seaside Village) was published in 1988, and the one he is writing will be his seventh. He has several collections of short stories and translations of Malayalam writers to his name. But for someone who describes himself as having started writing well before he was formally taught the alphabets, writing is not as easy now as it used to be.
“I write maybe one or two pages at the most a day. That too, not at a stretch. Earlier it wasn’t like that. I would write through the night. I would hear the morning call to prayers and only then realise that the night was past,” he says.Meeran belongs to Thengapattanam, a coastal town in southern Kanyakumari district. Today, he lives 35 kms away in Nagercoil, a city of about 2.25 lakh people. In the early days, he visited Thiruvananthapuram often to promote his chilli trade. Later, the reasons became mostly literary in nature, and the fact that his sister lives in the capital city has made it easier still.
Her old-style home sits on a narrow lane a little distance from East Fort. It has a low-hung tiled roof and a sun-lit verandah running the length of its front. The lane itself is wedged between rows of buildings and there is a non-stop flow of people, but Meeran doesn’t seem to mind the racket. He is a portly man of medium height and his gray hair is combed straight back. Over the years, the writer in him has whittled at and fine-tuned his idea about the nature of his literature.
“I’ve never formally studied Tamil. I don’t know its grammar or the classics. Nor have I read the great writers of that language. My theory is this: I am writing about a place I know, in the language of that place in the best manner I can,” he says. For him the stories flow out as he writes. “Some writers go and live in a place and then write. I can’t do that. To each his own method.” He has little patience with his publishers, who he says rarely informs him of the number of copies his books have sold. His works have found numerous translations, even into German, but getting your work published in another tongue is tiring work, he admits.
“If I want my work translated, I have to find someone to translate it, and then a publisher to publish it,” he says with some consternation. But what hurts him most is the neglect faced by writers in Indian languages. “You still go after Kafka and Camus. They lived in another age, in another culture. But we still don’t know our writers. Malayalis don’t know Tamil writers and it’s the same with the Tamilians. They don’t know Malayali writers. This should change,” he says. Meeran is quite happy with contemporary Malayalam writing, though. He says: “A lot of good stories are getting published. A lot of trash also. But some of the stories are really world class.”