Unni R.'s ‘Malayali Memorial’ review: Notes on the fragile male ego

'Malayali Memorial': By Unni R., translated by J. Devika, Penguin Random House,  232 pages,  ₹599.
'Malayali Memorial': By Unni R., translated by J. Devika, Penguin Random House, 232 pages, 599.

Summary

Unni R.’s latest collection of stories, 'Malayali Memorial', is designed to shock readers and get them thinking about the ironies of caste and gender politics in present-day Kerala

In 2022, when the Malayalam edition of Unni R.’s collection of stories, Malayali Memorial, was first published by DC Books, the cover image created a social media storm. It showed anti-caste leader B.R. Ambedkar dressed in typical upper-caste garb—white shirt, mundu and shawl with gold borders—sitting in a room surrounded by markers of Savarna privilege, with a framed photo of young M.K. Gandhi in the background.

The designer, Sainul Abid, justified the composition as being a reference to the title story, where a character, S. Santhosh Nair, is outraged to have been stuck with the nickname “Ambedkar" since the time he had to dress up as the social reformer at a school event when he was a boy.

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In a fit of despair, Santhosh bitterly complains to the narrator of the story of this legacy, which had not only turned him into a laughing stock but also caused a rift with his lady love. The combination of his dark complexion and the parodic nickname has left him feeling emasculated, threatening both his patriarchal and caste superiority.

Needless to say, no one was pleased with the artwork. But no one bothered to read the story carefully either, with its twist at the end that made an even bigger fool of Santhosh Nair. Unni stood by the designer’s freedom of expression. You’d expect little else from a man who had criticised the leftists in his home state Kerala, in an interview, for being “still bound by the sacred thread of Brahminical consciousness".

The cover of the recently published English translation of Unni’s stories, beautifully rendered into English by J. Devika, is more artfully done. It, too, depicts an upper caste man standing in what appears to be a tharavadu (family home). There is a kindi (a pitcher usually associated with Savarna households in Kerala) next to him, as it was on the Malayalam cover. But behind him looms the shadow of a revolutionary leader, presumably of Ambedkar, with one hand raised and pointing to the sky.

Unni’s stories hover in the zone of febrile magic realism and darkly comic fantasy.
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Unni’s stories hover in the zone of febrile magic realism and darkly comic fantasy. (istockphoto)

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This crafty juxtaposition, at once menacing and richly meaningful, captures the essence of Unni’s writing. If he is intrepid about sharing unpopular opinion, he does it with a style and literary consciousness that hark back to the great absurdist writers of the past. In one interview, he spoke of growing up in a house next to Kudamaloor Government High School in Kudamaloor, Kottayam, where the school’s anniversary celebrations included the staging of absurdist plays. That early influence percolated into Unni’s writing for the page and, later, for screen.

Malayali Memorial is replete with stories that hover in the zone of febrile magic realism and darkly comic fantasy. There are spiders in prison cells that collect the remnants of the tales of men on the death row, weaving them into the texture of their webs, before these cobwebs are swept away by the cleaners. A rat in a dilapidated house about to be pulled down has a moment of existential crisis. After a breakup, a woman realises that she has left her heart behind at her ex’s, who claims to have eaten it in a fit a hunger and that it is “too deep" in his system “to be ever expelled".

A librarian gets inadvertently trapped inside a book and must wait, at the mercy of a thief, to be rescued. An encounter between Satan and a priest ends with a startling revelation. “Short story writers need to have the finesse of a hunter on the prowl," Unni once said, a sentiment that aptly describes his hunter-gatherer instinct when it comes to raw material for fiction.

The coexistence of the natural, supernatural and human never feels forced in the stories. Partly because Unni’s world view is a legacy of certain ways of seeing, inherited from the literary traditions of Europe and the Americas—Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, et al. He doesn’t hesitate to cross lines of propriety. Nothing is sacrosanct, especially the innermost thoughts plaguing his characters.

In the opening story, Girl and Boy, Unni gives the reader a ringside view into the hormonal surges of a Hindu man, who is desperate to have sex with his Christian girlfriend but wants to do it in a shroud of secrecy. He is keen to lure her away to a secluded spot, away from all eyes. The twist, here, is the girl’s robust fearlessness contrasted with the boy’s flaccid timidity. He is on the edge, terrified and anxious, easily prone to tears, and abjectly pleading. When disaster befalls, it is the woman who emerges with her head held high.

As with his earlier books, One Hell of a Lover (trans. 2019) and The Cock is the Culprit (trans. 2020), Unni doesn’t let up a chance to ridicule the bloated Malayali male ego. Apart from being the receptacle for empty bombast, it is exposed as sensitive and fragile, sniffling and cowering under the thumb of powerful matriarchs, such as the eponymous heroine of Detective Ammumma. In trademark Unni manner, though, moments of bleak comedy, and even outright farce, are inches away from grim tragedy.

The feisty grandmother in the latter story recalls the 90-year-old Naaniyamma in The Cock is the Culprit, a proper shrew who tames cocky Kochukuttan, who makes the mistake of taking her on. Be it the phallic allusion in the title of Unni’s earlier novel, or the literal references to manhood in the stories, the tables are flipped on the established hierarchies of gender, especially in a society like Kerala, where progressive thinking has long coexisted with entrenched biases towards women and lower castes.

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In one of the most powerful stories, Possessed, the systemic imbalances manifest in Krishnan, the protagonist, as “a desire to hoot" at his superior at work. Even though he is able to control the urge by rushing into the washroom and vomiting it out, an odd feeling of disorientation continues to niggle at him. He projects this barely suppressed impulse to hoot on to unsuspecting others to deflect it away from himself. He even seeks the counsel of a psychiatrist, but all in vain.

Just as Krishnan seems to have made uneasy peace with his plight, Unni twists in the proverbial knife. In the concluding section, Krishnan is having a meal with his wife Padmini, when she asks him about Auschwitz and Buchenwald, names he had mentioned to her earlier. “Those were high-end hotels in Germany and Poland, a long time back," Krishnan says. “Only Jews were allowed to stay in them." Then he, who has refused to harm an ant earlier, squashes the same creature that had been climbing his arm again.

You may squirm at this imagery, deplore it as poetic licence gone too far, but it still doesn’t take away the reality of made-up histories, authoritarian control and individual vulnerability that humans are living in, and out of, Unni’s stories.

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