For long, Indo-Anglican writing has drawn the parochial flak for lack of the smell of the soil and the sweat of the sinews. Vernacular writers have pooh-poohed Indian English literature as public school products which largely tell the story of Ox-bridge returnees, their retinue of servants, broken and limping marriages and, of course, of the upper middle class dinners and cocktail hullabaloo.
Or, the package-selling of the ‘exotic India’ with its heady mix of poverty, spirituality and contrasting affluence. Manu Joseph in his remarkable debut novel Serious Men broke the tradition by telling the story of the people on the streets of Mumbai. His keen eye detailed the aspirations, fret and fever of ordinary people.
Binoo K John’s scintillating debut novel The Last Song of Savio de Souza, begins where Joseph ended, and takes the reader further into the common man’s world of magic and reality. Set in the 70s and 80s of the sleepy, shy city of Puram, a fictitious take on Kerala’s capital, The Last Song tells the story of coastal people, and revolves around the de Souza family—Simon, the father and driver at Holy Mary’s school, his wife Tessy, their children Silvy, and Savio, the boy with a golden voice and basketball skills. It begins on the eve of the 2004 tsunami and takes the reader three decades back, and it ends when giant waves gulp down shores, ending many lives. But before the tsunami swells and murderous waves muster up lethal energy, John mesmerises readers with riveting prose.
If we thought only Latin American writers weave magic realism into their narrative and diction, John’s brilliant debut shows us that Puram—where siesta sunlight soaks lush tropical greenery and lives are influenced by foreign cultures and religions—is as good a mystical place as any South American village where blood runs along the streets and alleys.
The author excels in the way he picks ordinary lives, and weaves them into lofty literature with his keen eye for idiosyncratic mannerisms, slang and wry humour.
Though there are chapters where you laugh out, all through the book it is the subtle humour of John that keeps you hooked. He makes a mockery of the hypocrisy and selfishness of religions and their anxiety for survival through a crowd of believers, and the lame, the leper and the sick who come to heal.
John gets under the skin of his characters so well that his prose smells of sex, sweat and the fever of their lives. Except for a brief, forgivable drag when he goes into details about brewing a rasayanam, the novel is a pulsating read, packed with turns of phrase, subtle humour and a foreboding sadness that hums through the novel like the growling
ocean under dark, swollen clouds of the south-west monsoon, preparing the reader for an impending calamity.
The Last Song not only declares the arrival of a talented writer but tells the vernacular writers that Indian writing in English is not snobbish, drawing-room-takes on life any more, but very much rooted in the soil.
