He was officially M.T. Vasudevan Nair, but peers close to him and friends of the same or older generation called him Vasu; others generally used his initials “MT”. He chose the last for me when, in the 1980s, I wrote to him from Delhi to ask how I should address him. “MT”, he replied, would be fine.
You did not so much write to, or meet with, MT as commune with him, if he let you. You did not even need to meet to keep the connect continuous and going. As far back as I can remember, this has been so. He would reach out, occasionally, as if from a seamless past, with a request that had the assurance of an order: to participate in the literary event he convened each February at Thunchan Parambu in Tirur where Thunchath Ezhuthachan, the paterfamilias of the Malayalam language, was born. You went because it was an opportunity to comply; to reaffirm your bona fides to yourself.
Or, more often, you dropped in on him when you were in Kozhikode. Put thus, it seems too casual a manner of speaking. Imaginably, you did not drop in on Gandhi at his ashram because you were passing by Sabarmati. The comparison may sound disproportionately stretched and would no doubt have prompted that downward curve of his lip to one side in a clear smirk of disapprobation. But then, there was the hint of a pilgrimage when you “dropped in” on MT, earlier at his office in Mathrubhumi where he was editor of its weekly magazine, and later at his home “Sitara” which a narrow alleyway in the town led to, or, towards the end, the apartment he had leased near his home as a hideaway where he spent his afternoons ideating and being determinedly mentally productive.
It was in this apartment that my friend, the writer and documentary filmmaker O.K. Johnny, and I, had a near epiphanic encounter with MT the last but one time I “dropped in” on him in Kozhikode. I was not sure if I was imagining it, but there had been, I thought, a poignance about the way he called out my name when he saw me and held on to my hand on the previous two or three visits. But he had been his usual terse self in terms of the spoken, or unspoken, word. It was as if, although he had nothing much to say, he wanted you to stay.
But this time it was different. Although not in great health, he was in high spirits—it was a time when all of Kerala had been celebrating his 90th birthday—and he grew uncharacteristically voluble as the afternoon progressed: about his passion and craving to read and how difficult it was to read now because of the strain, the failing sight, the eyes that watered; how anguishing, too, not being able to write and record what the heart and mind, which remained fecund, came up with…
Nostalgia, MT’s catchment zone
As if to escape or move away from this harsh reality of his present, he lapsed into his comfort-cum-conflict catchment zone of nostalgia from which he has, over the last six decades, summoned up story after story whose characters and situations and crises became part of the psyche as much of the average Malayali reader as of Malayalam’s literary cognoscenti. His difficulty, the difficulty of an accomplished and consummate author reduced to struggling to be just a simple reader and writer here and now, rekindled memories of his childhood and soon he was transporting himself, us in tow, to his village in Palakkad, recreating the topography of River Nila and its banks and the hues of the verdant and green paddy fields that stretched beyond.
Having conjured up the setting, he proceeded to vivify the local atmospherics and people and zoom in on his protagonist of the moment—himself as a boy of school-going age craving to read but unable to get hold of books. There was no library either at school or anywhere in the vicinity. It was the poet Akkitham who came to his succour by allowing him access to his collection of books. The boy MT would regularly trudge to the poet’s home in Kumaranallur to quench his thirst for reading.
The boyhood setting thus far was not unfamiliar, MT himself has spoken about it in interviews and on public occasions. But then the story takes a turn, or a spin is more like it, moving from nostalgia into a time warp. Apropos of nothing, a girl enters the picture, and the telling becomes more stream-of-consciousness.
She is described in meticulous soft terms. She wears anklets, the lilt and chime of which whisper her approach. And she is right there, walking before him, as he makes his way to his rendezvous with books at the poet’s home. Her lush flowing black hair is kept loosely in place with two long wisps from either side brought together and tied in a gentle knot, in the manner of the simple lyrical braid of the Malayali poetic imaginary… he was describing it as if he were writing it. And then, as if growing self-conscious about being the protagonist himself, he quickly introduces, invents, a friend accompanying him on this walk, ostensibly to read with him, at the poet’s house, but really in pursuit of the teasing bewitching feminine presence walking before them… and so the narration proceeds into a metaphoric plane of a journey and its end purpose.
Even as we were being drawn into this display of instantaneous creativity, which was as fascinating as it was uncharacteristic of the man, we had to, seeing how the effort was clearly tiring him, forcibly cut short his ruminative flow and rise to take our leave, much to his disapproval. I had hoped I could get to hear the rest on my next visit, which took place less than a month and a half before he passed away. Johnny was there this time, too, and also the writers Paul Zacharia, N.S. Madhavan, and M. Mukundan, and Mathrubhumi’s Shreyams Kumar. But by then MT was back to being his taciturn self and, although quite clear-headed, he was physically far weaker. The story, or the mirage, or the story of the mirage of the beautiful, beguiling girl remained incomplete.
If his boyhood readerly crisis was mitigated by Akkitham’s library, his writerly career, too, had teething troubles other than the creative. The financial circumstances of the joint family were so straitened that it was an effort to find the small sum it took to post a story he wrote to a magazine for possible publication; writing by the light of the wick lamp up in the attic at home kept his mother on edge because of the oil, a dear commodity, being consumed. In any case, he hardly shared what he wrote with anyone in the family except his elder brother’s wife who recognised the spark in him and encouraged him. After school, he had to wait a year before enrolling in college because a sibling had to join a course of study that was seen as a better bet at landing a job; the family could not afford two tuition fees at the same time.
When he eventually joined Victoria College in Palakkad, the doors of not only the college library but of the literary world in Malayalam opened for him. In his final year at college, he wrote a short story, “Valarthu Mrigangal (Domesticated Animals)”, for an international competition held by Mathrubhumi in association with Hindustan Times and won the first prize, which was proof of the rise of a writer of great promise on the horizon. The promise was clinched with his very first novel, Nalukettu (Quandrangular Courtyard House), published in 1959, which went on to win the Sahitya Akademi award. Its theme of a crumbling matrilineal Nair joint family household was to set his thematic leitmotif and unleash the first of his rebel protagonists, Appunni, struggling with that degenerating system. At a time when, in the 1950s and 1960s, the socialist realist mode was incentivised as the relevant creative form, this individuation, this withdrawal into the travails of the inner self, was at once an outlier and a breath of fresh change.
Three years later, Asuravithu (“Demon Seed”, also later made into a film scripted by MT and directed by A. Vincent) threw up the even more agonised Govindan Kutty whose conversion to Islam in the end does not end his inner conflict. And so it goes, through Kaalam (Time, 1969), with the self-centred, narcissistic Sethu; an agonising, bitter and vulnerable Bhima in Randamoozham (The Second Turn, 1984), a take on the Mahabharata; well until the solipsistic Sudhakaran who performs his own atma pindam (last rites by one for oneself) in Varanasi (2002). He stuck to his furrow, though it was by no means a lonely furrow, because he had, very early on, become a writer-star the like of which Kerala has not seen since. There were, apart from 10 novels, 23 short story collections and about 50 film scripts/screenplays. The Jnanpith in 1995 was a natural culmination and well-merited recognition of such a unique literary voice and output.
Though less satisfied with his role as a filmmaker (he directed seven films), the first film he wrote and directed, Nirmalyam (1973), which won the National Award for Best Film and fetched its protagonist, P. J. Antony, the National Award for Best Actor that year, has a plot and treatment which have proved to be at once formidable and forbidding. The Velichappad’s final act of defiance, on learning that his wife has developed a quiet relationship with a helpful Muslim trader to make ends meet at home, of spitting at the temple deity before whom he routinely performed his ritualised possessed dance as an oracle of the divine word, has made the film untouchable for the state media, including Doordarshan where it used to be earlier shown and seen in its true light and perspective. It is a yardstick, without meaning to be one, of where we have culturally arrived.
(Sashi Kumar is a journalist, film-maker and media thinker and initiator who launched the Asianet TV channel and subsequently founded, and chairs, the not-for-profit public trust Media Development Foundation, which runs the Asian College of Journalism. Courtesy: Frontline, a fortnightly English language magazine published by The Hindu Group of publications headquartered in Chennai, India.)
