The language is simple, the narration cinematic, the translation competent, and if you follow along with your critical faculties turned off, you might like this book.
The history of this book says much about the book itself. First published in Malayalam in 2020, it sold less than 20,000 copies in the first four years. Then, when the author turned up at the Kerala Literature Festival, sales took off: it sold over 1,00,000 copies in the following months. What caught the public’s attention?
Some of the answers to this question lie in the author’s own description of himself: he calls himself a storyteller, not a novelist. You don’t read his book like you read a novel: instead, you visualise it as you go along. Ram, formally Sriram, from a technologically backward farming family in Aleppey in Kerala, arrives in Chennai to write a novel and to do a diploma course on directing movies. On his first day in college, Ram runs into Anandhi, the receptionist, who upbraids him for being late and tells him she won’t let him attend his classes if he’s late again.
It’s a sort of rom-com. Boy meets girl. Boy seems sloppy and weak, girl seems domineering and violent. Boy and girl hate each other. Over time, boy begins to see life from the girl’s point of view. Hate turns into empathy and then romance.
Boy and girl find new depths of strength in themselves. They blunder past the inevitable social and other obstacles towards the equally inevitable feel-good ending.
Along the way are events that can only be described as unlikely. One, in Anandhi’s landlady’s house, involves a powder that causes an itchy rash, and an old beehive that breaks, resulting in everyone around — Anandhi and Ram included — being stung badly enough to take a couple of days to recover.
Also along the way are some memorable characters. There’s Malli, a transgender, whom Ram meets on his first ride in a commuter train, and who demands money from him. The first time, Ram pays up. The second time, he resists, and Malli ends up taking his last hundred-rupee note anyway, ripping his shirt in the process. Malli tries to return the money in a tin box telling him it’s spit, and he throws it away. Someone who sees this picks up the box, opens it, and finds in it some money and a note, and returns it to Ram. That’s the beginning of an accidental friendship.
There’s Paatti, an old widow who lived alone for a while after she lost her husband, and has since begun to take in lodgers, the first of whom is Anandhi. Anandhi then brings some of Ram’s fellow students to Paatti’s lodge, and one of them gets Ram to visit the lodge…
There’s an air of mystery to Anandhi — the police are after her, and she has learnt some kalaripayattu, the Keralite martial art — that she reveals through a diary. It involves a younger brother who’s gone missing from Sri Lanka. He escaped Sri Lanka in a boat that went to Australia instead of India, and Anandhi is here to raise a large sum of money so she can go to Australia to trace him.
The language is simple, the narration cinematic, the translation competent, and if you follow along with your critical faculties turned off, you might like this book.
Ram C/o Anandhi
By Akhil P. Dharmarajam
Tr. Haritha C.K.
HarperCollins
pp. 303; Rs 399
