Cutting through Cant

 

Catherine Thankamma, long known as a translator of Malayalam literature, steps into the spotlight with her debut short story collection, ‘A Kind of Meat and Other Stories’

By Shevlin Sebastian 

The road to Catherine Thankamma’s house in Kochi leads to a cul-de-sac. So, there is little traffic. There are trees all around. As expected, it is very quiet inside the house. 

Catherine is beaming as ‘A Kind of Meat and Other Stories’ (Aleph Publishing) is gaining lavish praise from early readers. 

The book runs to 206 pages and contains 20 stories.  

In Catherine Thankamma’s first story, ‘A Family Affair’, a matriarch correctly predicts who stole a bag of jewellery from her house, approaches him, and tells him to return it. The writing is simple and accessible.

In the subsequent stories, Catherine captures powerfully the ethos of the Syro-Malabar Catholics of Kerala (total worldwide population: 55 lakh). Catherine uses Malayalam words for dialogue and description. One character Eli Chedathi said, ‘Ente karthaveeshomishihaye’ which means, ‘My Lord Jesus Christ.’ 

In another story, five-year-old, Saira, of a family renting one part of a bungalow in Chandigarh tells the house owner that they eat beef. This leads to tension between landlord and tenant. 

In the story, ‘Madhu’, Catherine captures the lower-caste discrimination faced by a woman garbage collector in North India. Though most stories are only a few pages long, they evoke deep emotion in readers.

Her subjects include the effects of communal riots, college transfer politics, learning disabilities of children, mental illness, and a young gazetted officer, treated with barely disguised contempt, gingerly handling a polling booth. All the stories are told from the viewpoint of women. It’s the subtle, vicious quarrels that happen between women beneath the gaze of men. 

The writing can be searing. Here are a few lines from ‘Silence and Slow Time’, which focuses on the impact of vascular dementia: ‘The surgeon never warned me you could end up like this; that the part of the brain that made you, you – your imagination, your intellect, your wit, your linguistic skills – might be severely damaged by the haemorrhage.’ 

In a later part of the story, Catherine writes, ‘How do I come to terms with the new you? Your blank stare fills me with guilt and despair; I ache for that precious thing, now lost forever. I know your eyes will never light up again. Should I be relieved that you didn’t die on the table like that young mother, so full of life, who unlike you, enthusiastically signed the consent form for surgery and left behind two young children? This dead life, how can it be better?’

In ‘Blood Sacrifice’, she describes the violent attack on a Malayali nun in Bandipur, Chhattisgarh, in harrowing detail. Here are a few lines: ‘With a snarl of fury, the hairy arm seized the crucifix from the table and swung it at Sister Karuna. Crooked blood lines coursed down Sister Karuna’s face, as she fell backwards. He kicked her aside.’ The miscreants raped her younger colleague, Sister Anne.       

And in the extraordinarily powerful story, ‘Pieta’, which depicts Jesus’s mother Mary as an ordinary woman, the author writes, ‘Is it piety that you feel when you hear of paedophilic priests molesting children, of bishops raping nuns, of clergymen arguing vociferously on how to say the Mass, then hear the same wrangling fraternity declare from the pulpit, “Let us follow our Lord and not throw stones; let us pray for truth and justice to prevail.”’ Unbelievable!

Catherine adds: ‘What is he [Jesus Christ] in truth, but a figurehead for a mammoth corporate managed by hard-headed management gurus?’ 

This is writing wielded like a scimitar cutting down cant and hypocrisy with a powerful slash.

Catherine says that she had been writing short stories for the past 30 years. Only a few have been published. Since both her husband Joseph and she were in transferable jobs, he in a bank, while she was an English teacher in government service, many a time, she had to handle things on her own. Bringing up her two daughters, looking after the household, and managing her own career, time was always in short supply. As she said, “There was just no time to think about writing.” 

But Catherine loves to watch and listen to people and hear exchanges. “When something struck me, I used to write down points,” she said. “And then, over the course of several months, I wrote stories around fleeting instances, occurrences, chance encounters, and exchanges. The focus-driven brevity of the short story is the best medium for me. So, I kept writing that.” 

In 2015, after her daughters had grown up and Catherine had retired as an associate professor, she finally had time for concentrated writing.

Interestingly, she sits on a wooden chair in her bedroom, places the laptop on her lap and does the work. When she looks up, she can see a collage of photos of her late husband Joseph, who died in 2011, hanging on a nearby wall.

“Joseph was such a jovial person,” she said with a sigh. “My husband always encouraged me in my writing.”  

Asked why she had focused quite a few stories on the Syro-Malabar community, Catherine said, “I belong to this community. On the surface, there is piety, church-going and community gatherings. But underneath, many of the family relationships are toxic. I wanted to show the dark underbelly.”

But in the end, she says, the book is a celebration. “I celebrated the quiet resilience with which women face reality,” she said. “My husband's death has taught me that we are clueless of what the future holds for us. What little agency we have is how we should confront the reality life throws at us.”

Apart from being an academician, Catherine has been a noted translator of books from Malayalam to English. The first was ‘Kocharethi’ by Narayan, which won the Crossword Book Award in the Indian language translation category in 2011.

The others include ‘Pulayathara’ by Paul Chirakkarode, ‘Susanna’s Granthapura’ by Ajai P. Mangattu, and ‘Aliya’ by Sethu. Sethu. Another book, ‘Ayyankali: A Biography’ by M. R. Renukumar, will be published next year.

Asked about the striking cover, Catherine said, “I found it interesting, the juxtaposing of the word meat with this very earthy image of a banana flower, about to unfurl, with a caterpillar crawling on the edge of a leaf.” 

Undoubtedly, Catherine has made a stunning debut, and is on her way to becoming an important voice in South Indian fiction writing.  

(A part of this article, appeared in interview form, in the Books Section, Hindustan Times Online)