In her latest collection of stories, Susan Visvanathan maps centuries of life in Kerala, from the time ships from Rome dropped anchor, to the present where flights head for the Gulf. When graced by the arrival of Saint Thomas, time here is marked by that event.
Some 300 years later, archetypal Susa trades pepper for gold. Resolute in her efficiency, she manages a large wealthy household with the help of slaves and other, free, labourers. In what will become a refrain across the stories, she has a loveless marriage with Yakub. ‘Women were just ornaments they kept by their side, bearing children as easily as a mango tree bore fruit’. The fulfillment of love, when it does arrive, disregards age and social conventions. Nelycinda..., this first and longest story, lays out the terrain, emotional and geographical, over which the rest of the stories form a complex layer.
As in her other collection Something Barely Remembered, Susan populates her stories with people related to each other, each occupying their own story like the singular sun in the sky. So, while reading one story, the details found in another both inform and embellish what we discover. Susan is a fine and careful writer, drawing the reader into a web of her creation. While the academic in her animates the facts of history, the storyteller in her never allows those facts to overwhelm what she has to say. Replete with Susan’s observations of Kerala’s lush landscape… ‘my father’s fields rolled out as far as the eye could see… rice lands, pepper gardens, palm tree, areca nut trees, yams, pineapples, roses and lilies,’ and the inner life of its sandal-fragrant women… ‘it seemed to Susa that the whole business of life lay in watching time pass,’ Nelycinda and Other Stories provides a rare pleasure — the pleasure of reading.
Equally interesting, though written in far simpler language, Sudha Murty’s The Day I Stopped Drinking Milk... Life Stories from Here and There describes common situations such as being accosted by talkative people or accepting the generous hospitality of the poor, and presents an underlying moral.
Whether contrasting the tremendous gratitude shown by a young runaway from 'Bombay to Bangalore’ who benefits from Sudha’s help with the ingratitude shown by a young lad who uses that help to make millions, or underlining the importance of hard work in ‘Lazy Furtado’ versus the time wasted by a gossip, or upholding the selfless work done by rare human beings such as Vinayak and Ganga , Sudha wants her readers to reflect on what her experience and long travels have taught her about human nature.
While one enjoys vicariously her power to help genuinely needy people, after a while the tales can seem like a list of good deeds done by her. The Mahabharata says ‘If wealth is not distributed, it will be wasted as the water stored in the unfired clay pot is wasted.’ However, it is not easy to give away wealth wisely. Sudha describes her predicament, ‘When a person in front of you is in need of help, you must decide in a short duration whether you should give money to that person or not, how much you should give and for how long. Understanding human beings is… difficult.’
Not all poor people welcome financial help. In ‘Bad Help’, Sudha’s philanthropy results in a postman’s family becoming wealthy. Discovering them trying to hide their background of poverty, she concludes, ‘If a person is not comfortable with the help give to him, it becomes a lifelong burden for him to carry.’ Written from the heart, this book is sure to appeal to a lot of readers.