Happy Marriages?

By Shevlin Sebastian

During Onam, on social media, there were many photos of happy marriages and families. Husband and wife are smiling and so are the children. It gives the impression that everybody is happy.

But are they?

A former colleague told me of a couple she knew, married for over 25 years, who would step out in public, smile adoringly at each other, and sometimes hold hands. But at home, the husband remains ice cold towards the wife, does not have any physical contact, rarely speaks to her and sleeps in another room.

She told me of another couple who had a fractious relationship for 50 years. They rarely spoke to each other and slept in different rooms. When the husband died, the wife did not go to the funeral, so great was the animosity. So, why did they not opt for a divorce? She is not sure about the reasons for that.

A friend pointed out to me a photo of a couple on her mobile phone. It was taken during Onam celebrations. The husband wore a saffron juba while the wife was in a Kerala-style saree, in a pleasing beige shade. Both smiled happily at the camera. “She hates him,” my friend said. “He is a womaniser. But she has no career, hence, no income, and is afraid to leave, for a life of uncertainty.”

This illusion of ‘happy marriages’ is a staple of Kerala society.

The problem is that it is still not socially acceptable for middle-aged and older couples to divorce. So, they live with each other even though there is no love or joy in their union. The thinking is: too much time has passed. What is the point of breaking up now?

If divorce had social sanction, maybe a few would have opted for it, especially if they are well-to-do. In a paradox, Malayali society has accepted divorce among youngsters.

When a daughter wants to divorce, the parents offer support and even encouragement.

Divorces happen often, and on flimsy grounds. “He snores at night,” was one excuse. “He hid his baldness under a wig,” was another reason for the swift dissolution of the marriage.

So, in Kerala, what you see is not what you get. Behind closed doors, a dramatically different drama takes place. But the fear of public ridicule and snide remarks makes all this remain indoors. But fragments of gossip slip out when the wife might tell a friend who might tell another friend and it goes on.

So, how do you gauge whether you are in a discontented marriage?

One of the surest signs is if the husband and wife sleep in different rooms and refuse to have any physical contact.

A few years ago I went to interview a thirty-something marriage counsellor whose clients were couples in the IT industry. She said, “One of the first questions I ask is if they are sleeping together. If not, it is difficult to save the marriage.”

Sometimes, a physical touch or a hug can provide a healing balm. Just sleeping next to each other at night might help. Most problems are minor irritations that get magnified.

But the man-woman relationship rarely works. They are on two different wavelengths. What she likes and desires, he is not aware of, and vice versa. Plus, spouses get bored with each other. The sexual desire for each other has long faded away. In a consumerist culture, this boredom gets even more acute. Sometimes, husbands and wives slip into affairs. All this is simple to arrange thanks to the mobile phone. But an affair rarely brings any form of satisfaction. It ends in recriminations and sorrow.

One is not sure about the impact of all this on the children.

I know of a teenage daughter who was furious with her mother for divorcing the father. Then the girl got even more upset when the mother married again. “I can’t live alone,” she told her daughter. They rarely speak to one another. So it was a surprise to see a ‘happy’ family photo they posted during Onam on Facebook with the new husband, in a crisp white dhoti and mundu, in the centre of the frame.

Most children of unhappy marriages feel relieved when they get away from the family nest. They escape to the wider world and get busy with their lives and careers.

Maybe the time has come, that once the children have grown up and moved away, the spouses could split up in a friendly manner, and go off in different directions. Why carry on this agonising relationship till the end of time? Life is so short, anyway. Why waste it in frustration and hatred? What do they gain by sticking together?

It is devastating to see the fake drama of closeness of most marriages at social functions. Of course, body language is a giveaway.

At a wedding reception, a couple, probably married for over 25 years, stood to take a snap. The sign that all was not well with the marriage was when the woman leaned her face away from the husband. Happy couples lean into each other.

Why did she lean away? What is wrong with them?

There is an enormous elephant in the room: domestic violence.

Does he beat her up? Is she bearing up with it, for the sake of the children?

Apart from physical abuse, verbal abuse can be equally damaging. It lacerates the heart.

What are the solutions?

Counselling, of course, can help. Meditation too. An easy one like Vipassana can have a calming influence on the psyche. Finally, the time has come for Kerala society to accept middle-aged and older divorces so that people can have a second stab at this elusive thing known as happiness.

The Chattering Mind

By Shevlin Sebastian

The other day I read that, on an average, according to scientists, we think about 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day. I am not sure how they had calculated this. For a while now, I realised my mind was an endless conveyor belt of random, silly, and aimless thoughts. 

One day, for about thirty seconds, I noted down what I was thinking: I roamed through 12 different topics and thought about different people. It would have been more, but my mind had become self- conscious. 

When I told a friend about this, she said, perhaps, the brilliant scientist Albert Einstein would have very few thoughts, hence the clarity of his thinking. One thing is clear: the moment you stop thinking, by listening to your breathing, you enter the silence within you. But to silence the mind is a gargantuan task. I believe I spend one minute out of 24 hours in the present. The rest of the time, I am in the past or the future. 

So, in this state of pessimism, it was no surprise when I saw the book ‘Quiet your Mind by American psychologist John Selby at the Ernakulam Public Library, I grabbed it. There was an urgent need within me to silence the mind and expand the abilities of the brain. 

The book is a simple and easy read. I have taken some suggestions and have tried to implement it. The one good thing I gained from reading the book is that now I am conscious of what I am thinking. 

This slows down the mind.  

Here are some quotes from the book: 

Most of our upsetting emotions are caused not by what’s going around us, but by fear-based thoughts, habitually running through our minds. 

All human beings are constantly judging the world around them through ‘automatic’ thoughts. These thoughts judge present situations based on past experience. 

Our thoughts almost always stimulate emotional responses in our bodies. 

Our chronic thoughts: memories of the past, judgements of the present, and imaginations of the future. 

As soon as you consciously accept the truth of the moment, your heart can open, and your intuitive mind can come into play. 

You cannot change the present moment. But reality is constantly evolving, and you can take part in the evolution. 

Anger is always a response to thoughts running through our minds. 

Our thoughts influence our minds. 

The simple act of shifting one’s mental focus from thinking to experiencing changes one’s basic neurological and physiological functioning.

We should purposefully shift from a negative thought to a present-moment sensory input such as breathing, sounds and enjoyable sights. 

Conscious perceptual shifts can change your inner experience. 

In contemporary society, there is a chronic fixation upon deductive thinking as opposed to intuitive reflections. 

In order to enter the higher states of consciousness, we must shift our attention to the physical sensory realm of immediate perception. 

The shift to sensory awareness quiets the usual chatter of the mind so that a deeper intuitive experience can emerge. 

When your inner voice is habitually anxious, it thinks worried thoughts, and these generate fearful emotions, choices, and actions. 

In every situation, consider to what extent you fully process the actual perceptive experience as opposed to projecting what you expect to see in that situation. 

When thoughts stop, the body knows what to do, and does it with perfection and pleasure unknown to the thinking mind. 

The key to deep sensual release lies in quieting the flow of thoughts through your mind while making love. 

Open Vs Closed Societies

 In his thought-provoking book, ‘Open’, published by Atlantic Books, Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian and thinker, has said that a study of human history has shown that societies flourished when it was open and stagnated or collapsed when it became closed. In a closed society, there is a heightened degree of nationalism, an Us Vs Them mentality and the stifling of all critical voices. 

As authoritarianism grows all over the world and with the advent of snooping software that penetrates into the deepest levels of a person’s life, Johan’s book is an important reminder of the dangers we face. 

A section of the blurb: From Stone Age hunter-gatherers to contemporary Chinese-American relations, Open explores how across time and cultures, we have struggled with a constant tension between our yearning for co-operation and our profound need for belonging. 

Here are some quotes from the book: 

The government’s role in an open society is to protect the search for better ideas, and people’s freedom to live by their individual plans and pursue their goals through a system of rules applied equally to all citizens. 

We all have psychological predispositions that push us towards tribalism, authoritarianism, and nostalgia, especially when we are threatened by recessions, foreigners or pandemics.

By glorifying conquest and national superiority an unceasing culture of blood thirst has emerged that will end up undoing civilisations and will surely end in blood and tears. 

Openness makes us uncomfortable and we search for a kind of certainty and belonging that freedom does not guarantee. 

Two-thirds of the average person’s material worth is determined by where in the world they happen to work. If people were allowed to move to the place where their labour is paid the best, the gains to world income would be astronomical. 

Mankind has always been on the move. We have always searched for a better climate, richer soil, or mate. We have always tried to escape hunger, troublesome neighbours and violence. 

Groups that are too similar are afflicted with group thinking. 

Fire grew our brains since cooked food releases more nutrients than raw food.

Some thoughts as I saw myself in a news video

 

By Shevlin Sebastian

When my sister sent a 6:49 minute video from Nanma 24 Channel, I clicked on it. So imagine my shock, when, at the 2:21 minute mark, I found myself in the video walking in a blue T-shirt, shorts and sneakers.

This was what happened. In the evening, as usual, I had gone to Attipetty Nagar for my evening jog, but found a barrier right at the entrance. So I stopped, parked my two-wheeler and walked through. I noticed a man holding a microphone in his hand.

I also observed large perpendicular cracks in the road, next to the Edappally canal, and assumed some road repair was going on.

But that was not true. The road was in the first stages of collapse. The mud beneath it had shifted, thanks to recent rains, and according to the voice-over in the news video, the road could cave in at any moment.

It was an odd feeling to watch myself from the back. I thought I looked a bit fat around the hips. But, when I sent it to a friend, known for her reassuring remarks, she assured me I looked fine. When I enlarged the image, I realised she was right.

It also raised a question for me: what do people think about me when they see me from the back and the front? What conclusions do they come to?

Recently, an aunt of mine met a few friends of hers who had seen me run. They told her they thought I was from North India.

This is partly true since I have spent many years in Calcutta.

One of them added, “Why does he have to run so much? And so fast?”

What do I think of my running?

I am not running very fast. It takes about 600 metres before I can feel my creaking joints get into some sort of rhythm.

So, what I think of my actions, and what others think of it may be the opposite.

It could be a revelation if you were to ask people: what do you think of me?

I also observe people even as I run, my mouth agape, gasping for breath and sweat dripping down my face: So, is that thirty-something couple married? They talk so much. Do married couples speak so much? Not in my experience. Why do they walk slowly? How can there be any physical benefit if they do not put the heart under strain? You need to walk fast, and pant a little if you want to gain something from this walk.

But after their walk, I am sure they would have felt they had done a good bit of exercise.

Another couple in their seventies: I always hear constant bickering between themselves as I speed past them. Looks like all affection and love have been burnt out.

What about the girl in her late twenties in a T-shirt and track pants? Does she not have any friends? Why does she always come alone? Is she married? Or divorced?

What about the pony-tailed woman, a mother of two sons who ride cycles? She is always speaking to somebody on the phone, through her earphones. So I think, ‘Who is she talking to? A woman? A man? Her mother? A colleague? A lover?’ Sometimes I think, ‘Have never seen her husband at all.’

She could say the same thing about me.

This analysis is happening both ways.

One day, a man stopped me and said, “Are you a doctor?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, a lady walker told me you are a doctor,” he said.

So we spoke. And he was a priest. I would never have guessed that because he was in a collarless T-shirt and denim trousers.

A young nursing student stopped me and said, “What is your name?”

My first name is very unusual in Kerala. So, they play the word over in their minds and nod imperceptibly.

“You run very well,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

But do I?

The standard is so low in our state and country. So few do any exercise. So, if someone does a bit, it’s considered great. My cousin from Chicago told me he runs 10 kms a day. So that put me in my place .

Another walker, Rafiq (name changed), a successful entrepreneur, in his early thirties, also put me in my place.

“For a runner, you do have a paunch,” he said.

I looked down at my stomach, not very big, but felt embarrassed by what he said.

I took it as a challenge.

I immediately cut sugar and rice from my diet. Astonishingly, two months later, my stomach is nearly flat, my trousers have become loose, and I had to increase the notches on my belts.

So happy for that put-down by Rafeeq.

I was about to say, “You come with your mother?” when he told me, “I come with my wife. You must have seen her.”

I nod, glad that the question about his mother had been stuck in my throat. Since she was wearing a hijab, I could not guess her age.

So, everybody is evaluating each other as we go about our exercises in the evening, trying to keep healthy.

Interesting, the thoughts that came up, as I saw myself for a few seconds in a news video.

No heart at all

 

By Shevlin Sebastian

Just a day before my mother returned to Kochi, after five months with her daughter and son, following my dad’s passing away, my wife went to her ground-floor flat to do a clean-up.

In the kitchen, she noticed that in the third drawer of a built-in wooden cabinet, five baby rats were scrambling among the plastic bowls and a couple of rolls of cellophane paper. She pushed the drawer shut.

Later, she told me about it. I wondered what to do. Like my wife, I feel queasy when I see rodents.

I took the help of George, a watchman of a nearby building.

He pulled out the drawer, and we took it to the side of the house.

On the other side, there is a one-acre banana plantation.

“Let’s tip them over,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, and did so.

During the day, the mother rat foraged for food and brought it to the babies at night. It probably chose the drawer because it felt it was a safe place. The house had been empty for so long. Outside, in the grassy land, among the teak and coconut trees, there were numerous frogs, snakes, cats, dogs, and an army of centipedes, scorpions and ants. In short, there were too many predators around. I have seen crows pouncing on these baby rats.

George inserted the drawer back into the cabinet. We began searching for the hole.

It was a mystery. There were no spaces under the doors that led to the outside. We checked the windows. They all had wire meshes. But in the work area, beside the kitchen, as George removed a bucket on a cement ledge, there was a circular hole that led to the outside. I assumed it was made to put in the pipe of the washing machine so that the water could run out.

He rolled a piece of thick cloth and pushed it in a few inches. It was now tight and blocked.

“The rat will get the smell of her babies, as soon as she comes near the wall,” said George. “It will not come inside anymore.”

I thanked George, gave him a cash token, and he left.

The next morning, when I came in, I got a shock. The cloth had been pushed aside. I called George. He looked surprised, as he stared at the hole.

“It looks like because of the rains, the mother could not detect the smell of her babies,” he said. “There is also the possibility the crows ate the babies one by one. The mother assumed the babies were in the drawer. She must have made a supreme effort to push the cloth away, to get at her babies. That is the power of the motherly instinct. Since animals live in close touch with nature, they have more intense feelings than us. It is more genuine too.”

Indeed, it would have taken hours to push aside the cloth.

I can imagine the devastation the rat must have felt to see all her babies had vanished. She must have realised she made a horrific blunder by sheltering the babies inside a human habitation.

George stepped outside.

He took a small stone and placed it at the entrance of the hole.

“Because the mother has lost its babies, there is little chance it will come back again,” he said.

He turned out to be right. The stone remains where it is.

And we stone-hearted human beings remain where we are.

We have re-confirmed to the mother rat and her friends we are the most heartless and cruellest beings on the planet. 

An erotic short story set in Kolkata

Thanks to Juggernaut for publishing my short story

https://www.juggernaut.in/books/afternoon-visit

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things

The Calcutta-born and Bangkok-based journalist Ivan Fernandes has written a memorable collection of short stories called ‘Requiem for Calcutta’

Pics: The cover; author Ivan Fernandes

By Shevlin Sebastian

During the years I lived in Calcutta, I would frequently travel through Free School Street on my way to work at the Sportsworld office, near Chittaranjan Avenue. And always, I would go past a huge garbage dump. Expectedly, I took a deep breath moments before, pushed a handkerchief against my nose, and went past.

I always wondered about the group of people who lived in huts right next to the dump. How did they stay next to such filth? Did they get used to the smell? Did it make them sick? It seemed like torture to me.

 

When I began reading ‘Requiem for Calcutta’, a book of short stories by the Calcutta-born and Bangkok-based journalist Ivan Fernandes, I got some of the answers. In a short story titled, ‘The Sex-Crazed Hijra’, Ivan highlights the life of Kiran Mausi, a Bihari eunuch, who stayed next to a rubbish dump in Howrah.

 

Here is his description:

 

‘Here at least 1000 tons of garbage is heaped daily…

 

‘An NGO has reported that 80 per cent of the approximate 10,000 strong squatter community had inhabited the place for at least five generations....

 

‘Without going into details, one can imagine the quality of life here with its inhuman living conditions, unbelievable poverty, crime, vice and exploitation. This dumpsite is also home to a group of hijras, for whom Kiran Mausi is their undisputed reigning monarch. And so, this is where I first met her, in a stiflingly hot and vomit-smelling tin shed.’ 

 

In this memorable collection, Ivan has focused on a wide variety of characters, which is what makes Calcutta such a fascinating place. So, there is Abhra Mazoomder, a fanatic Marxist Bengali, who gets disillusioned as party members gradually lose their idealism and become drunk on power and corruption. The Left Front ruled Bengal for seven consecutive terms, from 1977 to 2011. And they did this by keeping an iron grip on the electorate. So, even if the party workers could not see the way the actual voting took place, they devised ways to figure it out.

 

As Ivan writes: ‘The telephone booth-style cubicles were only half-curtained off from the top, to hide the way a person stamped the ballot. But you could see the person’s legs. The CPI(M), in the long roll of the ballot paper, was listed at the top. If your poll paper was seen touching the floor, you must have voted Communist, because you let the roll drop to mark X, besides the hammer and sickle at the top.

 

‘If you voted for the Congress Party, which was towards the bottom of the roll, your ballot paper was seen not touching the floor as you would raise the roll with one hand to stamp it with the other. Then, of course, you were given a sound thrashing on your way home, irrespective of being male or female, young or old.’ 

 

In another story, Ivan writes about Colleen Rachael Houghtin, who spent her life looking after dogs. The tale focuses on the Anglo-Indian community. Sadly, this community has dwindled because of constant migration and inter-marriage. But who can forget their zest for life, their simplicity and their God-given talents in so many fields, but most notably in music and sports. Many of my close friends in school were Anglo-Indians.

 

Some famous Anglo-Indians, who had their origins in Calcutta, include the the singers Cliff Richards and the late Pam Crain, and the hockey player Leslie Claudius, among many others.

  

Ivan has also written about the Chinese through the life story of — hold your breath — Will Lim Fang Shung Zhangzhao Kan Phin Wun. It’s an unforgettable story with a sad ending. And there is the tale of Raqesh Dalpat Prahladka, a Marwari doctor, who was so inspired by Mother Teresa that he worked for the poor full time. For the Marwari community, which has such prodigious business acumen, to have a member do something like that as his only profession and not make money as the primary occupation, it would have been amazing, to say the least.

In a poignant narrative about Sikh police officer Ekampreet Singh Dindral, who married a Muslim, Ivan’s description of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Calcutta following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards was harrowing:

 

‘This time we saw Inderjit Singh, the elderly Bank of India durwan from across the street, kneeling in the middle of the road, his clothes torn, and without his turban, his long hair all over the place, his face bloodied, an eye as big as a potato, hands folded begging for his life as a mob of about 50 people pulled at his hair, kicked and beat him to an inch of his death shouting, ‘Sala gadhar madarchod bhosri wala’ (arse f…..g treacherous Sikh, born from a rotten c...t)”

 

When asked about the title, ‘Requiem for Calcutta’ Ivan said, “It’s a past that I yearn for. It’s a past that I cherished. It’s a past that cannot be replicated.”

  

The diaspora, which tends to be nostalgic about their homeland, has been enthusiastic about the book. Copies have been sold in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, but also in lesser-known countries like Cyprus and Malta, as well as in France, Spain, and Italy. “It got a mention in ‘The Telegraph’, Calcutta, by a reader who described it as 'a must read book that takes you back in time,’” said Ivan.

 

The writing is so vivid that one got the impression these people are real-life figures. Ivan said he wanted to tell a story not only about a single person but also about the particular culture from where he or she came from. “These are ordinary people doing ordinary things in an extraordinary way,” said Ivan. 

 

The book, however, has a drawback. The publisher missed doing the final proofreading corrections. So, readers will have to overlook a few errors. Ivan promises to make it error-free in the next edition.

 

This is galling for Ivan because he has been a journalist for over two decades. For the past 20 years Ivan has lived in Bangkok, where he is currently the Managing Editor of the online English edition of La Croix, a Paris-based French daily newspaper. It provides content on politics, society, religion, culture, education and ethics.

 

Asked to compare Bangkok and Calcutta, Ivan said, “Both Calcutta and Bangkok are old cities, with Bangkok tracing its roots to the 15th century. Although never colonised by a European power, Bangkok has powerful European cultural influences. Being a tourist hub, Bangkok has a strong cosmopolitan appeal. Tourists come from all over the world.” 

 

Bangkok also has a large Indian-origin population who are Thai citizens but have kept alive their cultural traditions. “So it’s easy to get Indian food or feel like being part of the local population,” he said. “In both cities, the local people are proud of their language and culture.”

 

The biggest dissimilarity is development. “While Calcutta and Bangkok can be similarly chaotic with large crowds, street vendors, neighbourhood markets, monsoon flooding, and traffic jams, it’s the social indicators that make Bangkok superior,” said Ivan. “In Bangkok, there is much more development in city infrastructure, transportation, health services, civic amenities, and cleanliness. It has a greater sense of a positive appeal to human dignity that shields poverty rather than wearing it like a badge of honour as done in Calcutta.”

 

His first book has whetted his appetite. Ivan is now working on a novel that is also set in Calcutta. “I am still grappling with a proper plot structure, characters, the beginning, middle and an end, even though I have already written 50,000 words!” he said, with a winning smile.

Memories of my uncle and the ancestral home

 

By Shevlin Sebastian

Pics: Mathews Vadakel; the Vadakel family in the 1940s; the Vadakel House; Foliage where the Vadakel House used to exist

Mathew was my mother’s youngest brother. He had come to Calcutta from Kerala in the 1960s to earn a living. He worked as an accountant in a private firm on Chittaranjan

Avenue. On Saturday afternoons, he brought a chocolate bar for me. It was something that I looked forward to. If he was in a good mood, he took me for a spin on his motorbike.

He drove fast, and I had to cling to him, my arms around his stomach, my cheek pressed against his back as I looked sideways at the road that seemed to speed past us. He was a gentle person, silent and calm. 

One December evening, in 1969, my parents took my elder sister, a younger brother and me by train for a holiday to Kerala, to meet my grandparents, both from my mother’s and father’s side, to spend time with cousins, to enjoy Christmas and to be in touch with our roots. 

My uncle stayed behind.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be the worst Christmas for us. On December 24, my uncle had gone for a celebration with a few of his friends at a bar on Amherst Street. After midnight, Mathew was returning with two other friends on his bike. On Chittaranjan Avenue, he had to swerve abruptly to avoid a car and hit a lamppost at full speed. He rose several feet up in the air and landed in a crumpled heap on the pavement. His friends suffered injuries too. But my uncle had suffered a fatal head injury and died a few hours later at a hospital.

When the news reached Kerala, it was like a thunderbolt. Who could have imagined that my 24-year-old uncle, so alive and lively, was dead? For my grandmother, it was the biggest shock of her life because Mathew was her favourite child. At a family meeting, they decided that my father and grandmother would go to Calcutta for the funeral. We stayed behind — my mother and the children. 

My mother told me to pray for Mathews Uncle’s soul. So, I knelt in front of a framed picture of Jesus Christ, a white halo behind his bearded face, hanging on the wall in my grandmother’s house, and prayed for the soul of my dear uncle.

But my grandmother took years to recover.

On every Christmas Eve, she took out his blood-spattered maroon pullover, which she had brought back from Calcutta and cried over it. I still remember the pullover with its dark bloodstains. Sometimes, she cupped my face in her palms and said, “You look just like him.” This could be true. All my relatives said that I had the face-cut of my mother. 

My grandmother lived in a large house that her husband had built in the town of Muvattupuzha. On the ground floor, there was a spacious hall, with four bedrooms on the left and the right, a bathroom, a dining hall, a kitchen, a verandah, and a room where she stored her food stuff.

On the first floor, there was a large hall devoid of furniture. Since the building was shaped like an E, there were two bedrooms on both wings, apart from the bathrooms, one of which was big, almost like a spacious room. In this house, which once housed nine children and was a babble of noise and activity, there was now a silence. The children had grown up, got jobs, married, and moved elsewhere.

My grandmother lived a life of going to church, being active in social service activities and hosting her children when they came home with their growing families for the holidays. My grandmother was very generous. When we would leave to return to Calcutta, she would give me a gift of Rs 100 or Rs 150. In the 1970s, it was a lot of money. I felt so happy, even as I gave it to my mother for safe-keeping.

There were so many memories of that house.

Of how, on hot, silent summer afternoons, I would wander up and down the empty hall and wonder about life and what it meant. Sometimes, I climbed over the balustrade of the balcony and walked by the side, holding onto the railing. I felt scared and thrilled at the same time.

Cousins came over. I remember playing cricket with Joseph in the courtyard. The bat was made of a coconut branch, and it would make a ‘thwack’ sound when you hit the ball. We had good fun. 

I also remembered my grandfather, Abraham Vadakel. He was a short, squat man with a broad face. Always dressed in a white shirt and dhoti, he sat on an armchair facing the door. It was open throughout the day, but he could not see.  He was afflicted with glaucoma when he was in his mid-sixties, and gradually lost his eyesight.

My grandfather was a man of habit. He got up at 5 a.m., said his prayers, went to the bathroom, had his bath, and later, his breakfast. He had two small round tin boxes on a table placed against the wall near his armchair. One contained cigarettes that had been cut into half, while the other contained sweets.

He had a sweet tooth, so he ate sweets throughout the day. When I was a child, I tried to steal them from the tin while he was sitting there. But he had sharp ears.

“Who is there?” he said in his gruff voice.

Inevitably, I said, “It’s me.”

He smiled and said, “Take a sweet.”

He did not mind me taking sweets, but I had to tell him first. So, it became a challenge for me to take it without him knowing. I doubt whether I tasted ‘sweet’ success more than twice.

My mother would read the newspaper aloud to her father from end to end every morning. This was something she enjoyed doing. Years later, when I would ask her to explain to me a news report, since I don’t know how to read Malayalam, she would start reading it the way she did to her father. I feel bad saying this, but I would immediately interrupt her and say brusquely, “Just give me the gist.” 

The dining room in my grandparents’ home was a narrow hall with a large table, with chairs all round. I still remember my grandfather sitting at the head of the table and having porridge in a white bowl. And there were the rest of us, my grandmother, my brother and sister, my mother, and my two aunts who lived nearby.

One aunt, Philomina, was married to an engineer, worked as a professor of biology at a nearby college, and had three children, while the other, a nun, Sr Mary Carmel, was a teacher in a nearby school. While Philomina would later become the head of the department, Sr. Mary ended up as the principal. 

All of us sat at the dining table and ate and talked and enjoyed ourselves. A moment frozen in time. Who could have imagined then that deaths in the future — of my grandparents and Philomina — and the march of time would dissolve the scene altogether, never to be replicated. 

There was always this unforgettable image at lunchtime: my grandmother would make balls of rice with her fingers, dip it into the curry and throw it straight into her mouth. She had perfected her aim: it always went in without missing.

Outside the dining room, there was a pipe placed over a thick cement slab on the ground. There was no washbasin. When you washed your hands, the water fell on the slab and slid away into the mud of the courtyard. Because of the water falling constantly on it, the slab had green moss growing on the edges.

There was also a golden container, called a kindi, which was like a mug, with a thin, long, curved snout and you filled it up and went to the steps which led to the courtyard and washed your feet, again allowing the water to run off into the mud. 

This sandy courtyard was long and narrow. Across from it, there was a cattle shed, with a couple of cows, a hen’s coop, and a bathroom. Now this bathroom was strange: it was a large room, with a tiled roof, the walls painted a light blue, and instead of a commode, there was a hole in the ground. You sat, resting your feet on two upraised cement bricks, and the waste fell quite a distance. Apparently, there were pigs which lived underneath which ate whatever you left them. 

In later years, my grandmother installed commodes in all the bathrooms.

My grandmother was the second wife of my grandfather. With his first wife, he had five children, before she died of typhoid at the age of 30. My grandmother was only 20 and my grandfather 45 when they got married. Why did a young woman marry a widower with so many children?

My mother told me there were financial difficulties in my grandmother’s family. So they agreed to this marriage because my grandfather was a wealthy lawyer with a reputation of being a good man. So, my grandmother married my grandfather and began having kids of her own. The first, the eldest, is my mother. 

Thereafter, she had three sons and a daughter. Incidentally, two sons followed the footsteps of their father and went into the legal profession. While one, George Vadakel, became a judge of the Kerala High Court, the other, Joseph practised for several decades in the same court. 

Years later, my mother told me that her mother never discriminated between the two families. She treated everybody the same. It worked. There was no friction between the two sets of children. This revealed a maturity far beyond her years.

But it must have been a hard life for my grandmother because the age difference was so much, and it must have been difficult to handle such a big household at such a young age. But she managed it well and efficiently. Once, she told my mother that no matter what happened, husband and wife should never argue in front of the children. My mother told me how true it was. In the 18 years she lived with her parents, before she got married, she had never heard them argue. But decades later, when my grandmother was old and trembling, her husband having long passed away, she told my mother it was a difficult marriage and left it at that.

All these memories got triggered when, in September 2020, my aunt Philomina, at age 77, died in Muvattupuzha. My mother and I attended the funeral. On the way back, I stopped the car so we could have a glimpse of the ancestral house. 

Imagine our shock, to see that the house no longer existed. Instead, the entire area was blanketed with plants and grass. It was a translucent green because recent rains had washed away all the dust. My cousin had sold the house earlier. And the new owner had kept it the way we remembered it. But it was resold recently.

The newest owner did not find the traditional design useful. So he demolished it. It was a thorough job. Nothing remained.

As I stared at the green expanse, I could feel my heartbeat quicken. It seemed to me a building of memories I had constructed inside me about the house collapsed in the undulating waves of sorrow I felt. 

My 85-year-old mother stood next to me staring silently.

There was a look of devastation on her face.

The incredible stories of a small town

Sebastian Mathew makes a sparkling debut with his novel, ‘The Solitude of Guilt’

By Shevlin Sebastian

One morning, a few years ago, when Sebastian Mathew woke up at his home in Kuwait, he recited four lines of a Hindi poem he had learnt when he was in class six at the St. Joseph’s school in Kozhikode. The poem was about Yashodhara, the wife of Prince Sidhartha who later became Lord Buddha.

“The minute he learns she is pregnant, he walks off,” says Sebastian. “She adjusts to life without him and brings up her son Rahula. But she always has this underlying fear of him returning. There is a lot of turmoil within her about how it would be.”

Yashodhara’s story resulted in a character called Susan forming in Sebastian’s imagination. “Her husband had abandoned her, but now she has the apprehension he is coming back,” says Sebastian.

So, he embarked on a novel. Sebastian wrote for one year and then got stuck. So, he concentrated on his career as an ophthalmologist at the Al-Bahar Eye Centre.

One evening, he was having dinner at home with his family: daughter Naina, son Manav, and wife Tessa.

Suddenly, Tessa said, “Have you given up on writing the book?”

Sebastian said, “No, I haven’t.”

“Then you need to get back to it,” she said. “It’s your passion. You should start writing again.”

So, Sebastian made another attempt. He would sit at his desk daily at 4.30 p.m. and write for two hours. “There were days when I hardly wrote anything,” he says. “Then I would edit the earlier stuff. But on days when I felt inspired, I would write 1500 words.”

The result, after nine years, is the riveting 297-page novel, available of Amazon, called ‘The Solitude of Guilt’. It tells the story of a plantation owner Chandi Mappilla and his family members Susan, Elikutty, Rahul and Susan’s husband Gautam.

The first few lines of the book grab the reader’s attention:

‘I am Rahula.

‘Rahul, snot-face, Big Bore, retard, walking vegetable, cabbage-head, the unfortunate, the ill-omen, the disaster, the accident, the mistake, the silent.

‘It is strange I was born the day my father beat my mother nearly to death. I was born eight weeks early; trauma has a way of setting things in motion. The fact that the foetus survived the assault, and its aftermath was called a “bloody miracle” by Dr Markose, the senior doctor of the village.’

The writing is beautiful and immersive. You feel yourself sinking into the milieu of small-town Kerala.

Readers have responded well. On Amazon, Sandeep writes:

‘A very well-written novel set in Kerala…. each character has been well drawn out, brought to life with vivid descriptions and is sure to strike a chord with you.

‘From the peaceful village of Pullussery to the bustling city of Bangalore and then to the tranquil coffee estates of Madukuzhy, the author has successfully handled the transitions across geographies, just as he has with the generations, with ease.’

Sebastian arrives as a fully formed talent. His voice is assured, confident and resonant.

Asked the meaning of the title, Sebastian says, “We are all alone in our guilt. It is not something we can share. All the main characters have some level of guilt, but they deal with it differently.”

Art student Dia Thomas has done the eye-catching pen drawing on the cover. It captures a naked and pregnant Susan, lying on a forest floor, with foliage all around, her head resting on her palms, while there are bloodstains on the forehead, cheeks, neck and arms. But rising behind her and attached to her body is a butterfly wing.

“It’s a metaphor,” says Sebastian. “She has wings but cannot fly.”

Sebastian is also wondering whether he can fly, too. The world is changing. He knows that the readership is going down for literary fiction. “There is a lot of competition from other mediums, like TV, online, mobile and streaming,” says Sebastian. “There are other avenues for reading, like a blog, for instance.”

The concept of buying a book is going down. Even bookstores are closing down. “Somebody told me that a large bookstore chain like Barnes and Noble in the US is going through a crisis,” says Sebastian. “They are shutting down a lot of their stores. This is a global trend where book-reading is becoming less popular.”

Despite that, the number of writers has increased. “I would say Arundhati Roy’s huge international success with her ‘The God of Small Things’ made a big impact,” he says. “In the last twenty years, there have been many people who have been drawn to the literary genre.”

As a first-time author, Sebastian had a trying time to find mainstream publishers. “Publishers are looking for books that will generate sales,” he says. “What happens to good literature? I am struck by [Kochi-based author] Anees Salim’s story. His first two novels were rejected. But the third one got published. It received rave reviews. Then people looked at the first two. Eventually, these were published, and all three got recognition and awards.”

Sebastian is sure that a lot of good writing is being missed. “But I don’t know what the solution is,” he says. “Maybe, major publishing houses should do something similar to what is there in the business world: corporate social responsibility. So, publishers should have a division which only looks at new writing, vetting unknown talent. The aim is to bring out good literature and not bother about profits.”

Apart from online, the book is available at all Crossword stores across India.

As for his future plans as a writer, Sebastian, who is attached to the National Health Service at Boston, England, is working on a collection of short stories.