KR Meera’s writing is always difficult to define or tie down to one genre or theme. Her latest novella Qabar is no different. From the first page on, the story is both real life and a fairy tale. Is this magic realism? A feminist fable? A tender love story? All of the above?
Bhavana is a judge who juggles unequal relationships by day and cuddles a son with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) by night. Her ex-husband hadn’t spent “his days thinking of ways we could make each other happy. He was only intent on demonstrating how he was smarter than me. In the beginning the friction was caused by the praise I received as a lawyer and a certain embarrassment about admitting it. So, my not getting pregnant right away turned into an all-encompassing crisis. The tests showed that the trouble lay at his end. Then began his paranoia. The short temper, the screaming fits and the prolonged sulks over the smallest things, and that time he slapped me in the face. And when, finally, a child was born after making the rounds of all those hospitals, it became clear that the problem wasn’t the lack of a child”.
And then in the course of an ordinary working day she encounters Kaakkasseri Khayaluddin Thangal who has Sean Connery’s body and Kamal Haasan’s eyes, after which nothing is the same anymore. From the rainbows that blind her so that she needs hospitalisation to the raining of flowers that has Bhavana feel ‘a sense of completeness in someone’s absence’, this is a life-changing meeting, each bringing in back-stories of a tomb and sundered sisters. The surefootedness of the plot and the brilliant translation from Malayalam by Nisha Susan weave together something altogether magical.
No nook of the nation is untouched by toxic masculinity, but Kerala and its unique brand of masochism needs a telling of its own. Especially when combined with female smarts that can see through this and triumph in the smallest ways. Bhavana’s mother and Bhavana are able to walk out and start anew. When Bhavana is mesmerised into love, it is respect he talks of, the respect denied to her so far in personal ties.
She wants to be his student, but he says, “There is no training in sorcery. Only devotion… This is an art form. All arts involve give-and-take of emotions between people. There is no training for any emotional transaction. Only devotion. What you need to learn is that it is not a deliberate decision, it is an inspired intuition.”So Meera gives us a hero who can read minds, and what we know soon enough is that it is she as a writer who can read our minds. Telling us a story we needed to hear right now.