‘The Remnants of Rebellion’: The whiff of revolution

Revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely, so gentle. Or so reads the pamphlet from a bookshop, Marxist Publication, in Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew’s new book ‘The Remnants of Rebellion’.

Ponnu has crafted revolt, but embroidered it in a sweeping family saga set in emerald green verdant Kerala. There is love, revolution, revolutionaries and what is always irresistible — an inherited house with secrets. It is a book that you sink into as the world rushes by — lush, vividly written and soaked in the monsoon of God’s Own Country.

Aleyamma, with dreadlocks and a “starving” artist, is left an Estate House by Appacha, her grandfather. The house on the hill, with 15 rooms and polished red oxide floors, is where he had spent a year as a superintendent on a rubber plantation with his dog that looked like a wolf. The soil is blood red and “ripe and ready like a pimple on the verge of bursting”.

Escaping Chennai — and heartbreak — she arrives at the house desperately mourning her grandfather to unravel her own life, and why her mother refused to let her see her grandfather after she was eight.

The house — modelled on the lines of a dak bungalow, and now converted into a homestay — is the backdrop for the book. “There is a story written on the wall,” writes Ponnu. “But it is only a slice of the real tale — a censored adaptation of the actual one which… was too ghastly to be told to the boarders.”

The Englishman who planted the estate, built the house. The furniture and artefacts were imported from England. Charles Hitchcock was murdered by a disgruntled tapper in his sleep along with his wife in their four-poster bed. The locals believe that Hitchcock and his wife still haunt the house. “As is it with old houses, especially the ones where there were murders or dubious deaths, Estate House spews out stories that can be chronicled in a fat book of fables,” she writes.

Ponnu spins out a yarn richly imagined and adds a shot of truth, creating a tapestry that is a complex and layered story of three generations.

She weaves in history, nuggets of the past, blending it into the texture of this cinematically told story, so there is communism, caste, Naxalism, and even love jihad. It flits through back and forth in time. So, she stitches in ‘Wagon Tragedy’, a grisly incident when 64 bodies tumbled out of a goods wagon — mostly Muslim. They had been stuffed in by the Malabar Special Police, a Nair-dominated brigade to crush the Mopilla Rebellion.

Ninety men had been crammed into a windowless cabin and gasped for air. But it is not the only one. In her telling of stories, Ponnu adds the darker aspects of history of caste, of discrimination, of fractures and of friction.

There are many rebellions of the past that Ponnu wraps up in this atmospheric, ambitious book. The personal, the political and the historical. The whiff of revolution is always in the air, like the smell of coconuts in Kerala. She wraps in a story of family, of mothers and daughters, of betrayals, of love gone sour and of friendship.

She conjures up a galaxy of characters that linger long after the book is over — there is Eesho, her Appacha, born on Christmas, and in many ways the hero of the book. He giggled when he was baptised — and doves appeared on the church roof — and married Kochuthresia for love. His mother Mollykutty, who loved him the most and hid a duck’s egg in his rice for her favourite son. Georgekutty, his brother, who stole chickens from the neighbours and drank. And Krishnan, Appacha’s best friend who taught Aleyamma mathematics, laughed with him and then looked after him when he got Alzheimer’s. Or even Duke, wolf-dog.

Littered with side characters who are deftly etched, whether it is Elsy Chedatty, who cooks like a dream and looks after the homestay, or Amma, her mother who pressed down her Kolhapuri chappals on the accelerator and drove her away from her grandfather when she was eight — the universe that Ponnu brings alive pulsates with life.

This is Ponnu’s first book, years in the making, and it shows. These are stories she has lived with and characters that she has clearly lovingly crafted. At a time when fiction, and especially Indian fiction, is far from its blooming phase, Ponnu brings in a new voice.

This summer has been a rather good one for fiction in India as another fresh-voiced writer, Uttama Kirit Patel, with ‘Shape of an Apostrophe’, has blazed onto the literary map. And it is welcome.

— The writer is a literary critic