A Tale Of Things Timeless

By Rizio Yohannan Raj

A one-line suicide note left by a total stranger - small-time writer Avinash Suvarna - first intrigues and then reveals to young journalist Laya Thomas what it means to experience fear and abandon at once. It stirs her smouldering spirit and brings her face to face with the mysteries of living and the travails of creating one's masterpiece. The story of Avinash's life holds the answers to Laya's existential dilemmas. For Avinash was someone who walked out on Time, struggling to reconcile his writing with his life and with the ugly realities around him. Laya must understand Avinash in order to rediscover herself. It is through Laya that he will be resurrected and rendered timeless. Following Laya Thomas and Avinash Suvarna on their intensely imaginative journeys, A Tale of Things Timeless is a deeply philosophical novel about the trials of a writer and the unexpected extraordinariness of things mundane.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9789351160571

Rizio Yohannan Raj

Rizio Yohannan Raj has written two novels in Malayalam - Avinasom and Yatrikom. She has translated into English many generations of 20th century Malayalam writers, from Kumaran Asan to Anwar Ali, and was a long-time associate of the Indo-Swedish translation project. Her poetry collections include Eunuch and Naked by the Sabarmati and Other Guna Poems.

Book preview

a tale of things

timeless

rizio yohannan raj

Translated from the Malayalam by

supriya m. nair

(This English version is the author’s revision of the original text)

NEW YORK • LONDON • TORONTO • SYDNEY • NEW DELHI • AUCKLAND

For Raju

Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea

or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Have the gates of death been shown to you?

Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death?

Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?

Tell me, if you know all this.

Where is the way to the dwelling of light?

Job 38: 16-19

CONTENTS

Cover Page

Dedication

Some Words of Appreciation, Happiness, Love

Prologue

PRITHVI: The Ground Beneath

AP: Flux of Living

VAYU: Revelation of Survival

TEJAS: Fire and Illumination

AKASH: The Sound of Word

EPILOGUE

P.S. Section

About the Author

SOME WORDS OF APPRECIATION,

HAPPINESS, LOVE

This tale owes a great deal to TP Kishor, soul mate, who defied the boundaries of time and space to intimate me of the profound interconnectedness of beings. Jyoti, Kishor’s wife, wondered how I knew their secrets, strengthening my belief in the truth of tooth fairies, baby peacock feathers born in school notebooks, miracle fingers, mantras of seduction.

The intensity of this quest belongs to Raju, who has never ceased to awe me with his courage of conviction, his defiance of the easy and the comfortable, and his endurance for love.

Papa, Mummy and Rishor: You are here, each of you, inseparable from my agony, my ecstasy, my dispassion.

Acchan, Amma, Sony, Sreenu, Ramya, Devvu, thanks for touching my life.

This translation owes a great deal to many people I have met, interacted with and loved during the period between the appearance of its Malayalam original in 2000 and now; those who have inspired me to think of translation as an intense life-act rather than a mere linguistic transaction. They include my students and friends who have engaged me in serious deliberations on translation, the wonderful writers of many languages whom I have read and translated, my editors and publishers. I must mention a few names:

I am yet to find a match for Geeta Dharmaranjan’s visionary approach towards translation as a means of culture-linking India. Geeta, I cherish our togetherness.

Supriya, my salutations to you for bearing with me, for your clarity of thought, for being the generous fellow traveller that you have been. My pleasure to have known you.

I have no apt words to describe what my friend GS Jayasree’s trust means to me. Suggesting Supriya’s name as translator was one of the many rites Jaya has performed for me.

My admiration for Ambai, the indomitable sparrow, has grown ceaselessly since we first met. Our conversation—on writing, translating and communicating in our afflicted times—at the end of this book is just one of the many ways in which she has engaged me.

Unny, my true friend, love you for being there with your affection and unfailing warmth.

Dear Minakshi, thank you for the prodding, for the companionship and care. Karthika, thank you for the support.

Shuka and Amrita, I am so glad ‘The Kiss’ on the cover has connected us; Gustav Kilmt’s vision indeed links souls, nature and art in an integral bond.

Sadanand—latecomer turned my artist of recompense, visualizer of things timeless, forever comrade—Love, what else?

PROLOGUE

Writing a prologue is like going back to where one began, to look back and reflect on the path one has trodden. From here, I can only see an arc of sorts, but its tentative curvature intimates me of the unseen reality of the circle of which it is a part. This arc resembles a frenetic segment from a long journey; it attempts to suggest that one’s intangible memories, dreams, fantasies and hopes are one’s true claim to fulfillment. I have chosen this frenzy because it seems my only reliable anchor.

It was a suicide that triggered the writing of this novel. To be accurate, the suicide note left by a stranger. It read: ‘With the surety of what lies beyond death’. Before I happened to read that strange line quoted in a later memorial piece by one of Kishor’s poet-friends, I, as night editor in a newspaper office, had come across a tiny obit filed by a local newspaper agent that introduced TP Kishor as a wannabe author. I did not know anything more than what I read in that single column obit and the newspaper articles until I met Kishor’s wife Jyoti and the rest of his family a few years after the publication of this novel in Malayalam. I had not even read his stories that were posthumously published in book form when I met Jyoti. What Kishor had said in the few words that he left behind before embracing death had told me all that really mattered.

My hero, Avinash Suvarna, is not TP Kishor. Yet Avinash embodies the restless spirit of Kishor, and that of many other questers like him from the past, present and future times. I think, what sets such men and women—holy fools them all—apart is the way they inspire all those who come across them, to imagine— think beyond the apparent, confronting fear and abandon alike; cross even the gates of death with the power of imagination.

The five sections in this novel take the names of the elements as they trace the journey of Laya Thomas, a seeker separated in time and space from Avinash but one with him in spirit, through which she discovers Avinash Suvarna and rediscovers herself. As it was painful to return to the memory of writing this novel, I had, for many years, resisted the idea of translating it. When the offer of this publication came, I was sure that I would not want even to try doing the translation myself, because I did not want to relive it all. All the same, in the ten years that passed after the publication of Avinasom in 2000, life had changed so much for me; I had become a nomad of sorts, jumping jobs, interacting with a wide variety of people, extending the tip of my searching self. So, even as one part of my mind trembled at the idea of a return, there was another side of me that wanted to see this intimate text as an in-between text, and most importantly, was eager to find out how this text could matter to a new time and space. This curious part of me wanted to enter this text as I would enter any other text as a translator who is primarily concerned about making an old text relevant to a new context. For this, I wanted a ‘faithful’ translator, who would deliver me a literal translation and save me the agony of reliving the original pain.

Supriya, my translator, has been a delight. She helped me enter this text with the detachment I required to make this English version possible. As I read Supriya’s translation, I clearly saw that as a reader of English, I was not within the history of style within which my own novel has existed all through. I had to bring about a change that would at once make this text relevant to a contemporary reader of English, and retain its openness to transtemporal interpretations. And, I chose to rewrite the translation of my own work done as faithfully as possible by my translator.

A conversation on writing, translating and communicating in our afflicted times with my friend, Ambai—Tamil writer, researcher and archivist—is included as a P.S. to this English version of Avinasom. As I tell Ambai, with my insider’s sense of security, I have exercised my freedom here, deconstructed myself, and thrown myself to the other world of translation, thus paradoxically establishing a connection between two dissimilar texts, the translated text and its original.

I am a captive of wonderment as I yet again follow Laya on her road of finding. This version of the text makes me see: I have no authorial claims over my protagonists; I still do not know what awaits Laya Thomas at the point I take leave of her. Here I am, at the end of yet another road, joined with a reader who is beginning the same journey as mine, imagining, imagining….

PRITHVI

THE GROUND BENEATH

ONE

In a couple of weeks since Avinash Suvarna killed himself, articles showering posthumous praise on him began to appear in most newspapers and magazines in Kerala as if something exceptional was suddenly sighted in the dead man.

At the daily where Laya worked, it began with a human-interest story. Later, as the legends began to do the rounds, they also carried a full-page Sunday feature by poet Akhilan who described his late friend as an illumined spirit. A compensation of sorts, when one considered how the man had to depend on a semi-literate newspaper distribution agent’s three-liner to gain entry into an obituary column!

Laya still remembered the night at the desk, when they chanced upon the news of Avinash Suvarna’s death. Night-editor Philip K. Thomas hollered out from his cubicle as the half-baked obit copy reached his table: ‘Has anyone heard of one Avinash Suvarna?’

‘What?’ Babu K K, who could doze off in the narrowest gap between two tasks, was shocked out of a nap.

‘Avinash Suvarna,’ Philip repeated. ‘A story writer, it seems. It’s hard, though, to say if it is katha or kathak from this crap! Why can’t these nincompoops get someone who knows the alphabet to write the obits at least?’

While Philip’s irritation about the badly spelt copy met with peals of laughter, Sasi Nair went back to the dead man.

‘Did you say Suvarna? Sounds like a Marathi name.’

‘Marathi? No chance,’ Ravi Kumar said, going over to Philip’s cubicle and reading from the copy. ‘Looks like he was a Tamil Brahmin. See his wife’s name: Bhagyalakshmi Iyer. Poor thing! Maybe this chap had an intercaste marriage. Or, could it be a pseudonym? Fancy! These writing hopefuls, they will do anything to attract attention. The worst is when the local suckers take up the case of every cultural aspirant giving up the ghost,’ he continued, even as the desk roared with laughter. Ravi’s condescending manner was famous, and he always rattled off many opinions at a time.

Laya was sitting next to Rajeev who was making the page on which her last story of the day had to go. She liked to check how her stories showed on the pages. She thought it made a difference to the experience of reading, the way a story was laid out.

‘Laya, have you heard of this chap, Suvarna?’ Philip asked her amid the racket. ‘God forbid, if he was a somebody, it would make things hard for me.’

Even as Laya shrugged that she had not heard that name before, proofreader Raghavan Nair chipped in to say that he vaguely remembered having seen some of this Suvarna guy’s stories.

‘I’d better not take chances,’ Philip said as he titled the matter— ‘Writer Avinash Suvarna Passed Away.’

The whole thing created a din in the next morning’s editorial conference. Even the small newspapers about town had carried the news of Avinash Suvarna’s suicide, complete with his passport photograph. The Resident Editor was visibly agitated that the desk missed the news of the writer taking his own life.

‘Obituaries, matrimonies and local stories—those are our lifelines,’ he seethed. ‘A minor omission or error can affect the circulation figures. People are more interested in the issues of their neighbourhoods than in international affairs. If we fail to give them what they want they will look for other options, which are aplenty, of course. That is about the loyalty of the reading public these days. Well, some of you seem to think that journalism is all that you have learned in school. But let me tell you, if we don’t understand the pulse of our readers, we can all soon close shop and go home.’

The Resident Editor also voiced his concern about posting youngsters at the night desk. He was evidently worried about the reaction from the head office. Had there been any senior editor on duty the previous night, wouldn’t he have known that Avinash Suvarna was the rising star among the campus writers of the ’80s? What a shame no one here even knew that it was a suicide!

‘This is the trouble when you have a name to sustain,’ the RE finished. Laya noticed that his voice had the ring of a certain conceit. He sounded like a poor relation reeling off the glories of a great house.

‘We are supposed to be the biggest newsmongers in town. But don’t we miss out on some news!’ A special correspondent’s remark received some nods of approval from the senior editors.

‘There is no point in putting all the blame on the desk,’ the young News Editor came out in defence of the night desk. ‘It is not possible to keep track of every drifter just because you are a journalist. Let’s face it, how many of us here knew of this guy before this? Please, can we stop bickering and think of what can be done now?’

The next day, predictably, the newspaper’s regional page carried the first of the human-interest stories that were to appear in the press about Avinash Suvarna. It said how the man’s job as a clerk in the state secretariat was at variance with his ambitions as a writer; it also featured an album photograph of a college-going Avinash receiving the first prize in a short story contest organized by a reputed literary magazine. That item invited many letters to the editor, and everyone at Laya’s office said Avinash’s time had finally come.

For another week Avinash Suvarna lay rather steeped in silence, as he did before his passing. He stirred again when the magazine that held the short story contest in which he had come first long back, carried an article by its illustrious editor about the young writer of promise they had discovered some years back. The editor quoted from a few of Avinash’s published stories.

That was the beginning. Soon an eminent critic wrote about Avinash in a literary journal. An academician who had taught Avinash in college, he reminisced how Avinash’s early stories had struck a deeply melancholic chord. Articles in other journals followed. And, apart from the write-ups on Avinash, some magazines and newspaper supplements reprinted his stories.

As Avinash Suvarna began to gain such rare media attention, Laya wondered why they remembered him so fervently after he ended his life. Of course, a writer committing suicide was news enough for the media to celebrate for a few days. But Avinash was not a noted writer. There were numerous instances of lesser-known artists killing themselves, trapped in illusions of greatness. One such guy who led an uneventful life and wrote a few stories, an ant that crept among the grass in the backyards of literary enterprises, how did Avinash Suvarna create news after his rather unsensational suicide?

Avinash’s posthumous popularity puzzled Laya. Yet, on reading Akhilan’s Sunday feature, which quoted from Avinash’s suicide note, she had begun to think of Avinash as a mystic of sorts. ‘In my proud faith, I walk into the knowing beyond death.’ She was awestruck by that last utterance. Could her mundane times really breed such transcendence?

‘Avinash belonged to another world.’ Akhilan’s words came back to her over and over, enchanting her, haunting her. ‘Even the fondest thoughts about his dear ones could not hold him back from its glorious vision. His fervent yearning for that world, his struggles to reach there, were more profound than his love for his family.’

In the next couple of weeks, Laya went on a searching spree for the back issues of magazines that carried Avinash’s stories in the ’80s. She also collected a few articles on him. She regretted that he wrote so little that no critic would consider him worthy of any serious study beyond the fleeting encomia. Here she was, no longer able to think of Avinash Suvarna as a deadman or a minor storywriter. As she searched out his stories and read them, Avinash began to suffuse her thoughts with a certain luminescence. During her most private moments, he turned into a miraculous ray of light plumbing the depths of her grief-stricken heart.

Avinash’s stories did not present any extraordinary characters, Laya noted. Sankaran Potty, a spiritual exile burdened with domestic responsibilities. Others, like Nakulan who got into an affair with his brother’s wife or Raghu whose licentious life had made him a victim of venereal diseases. What marked those stories was the fire in the words that formed them. A fire that purged everything, even its own melancholic core. Laya wished for that light to blaze on forever, but she knew that Avinash wrote way too little for such a reward. Perched on the ramparts of the practical world about her, Laya despaired: aren’t people remembered for one work, one sentence, one phrase?

Those days Laya was all ears for the stories floating about Avinash. She listened to the tales they related at her office, at the press club, among friends. Those were stories of passion and hate. About his irresolute lifestyle, his ardent friendships, the pain he caused his family, his curious wanderings, his readings, his frustrations with his mundane job at the state secretariat, his literary aspirations…

Avinash Suvarna was a man who lived between the extremes of love and revulsion, Laya thought. The stories of his ardour exhilarated her. The stories that reeked of bitterness made her cheerless and desperate as if Avinash was someone she knew closely. She could not understand how this man whom she had not once seen or heard of when he was alive could agitate her so much. Yet, she was sure of one thing: his life, which she had remade in her imagination, with the bits and pieces of news and fiction that lay scattered about her, now looked like an illumined thing, almost a star.

Laya imagined that Avinash’s was a fiercely passionate life— he could not but sear those who stood close to him. He was the insensitive son who broke his mother’s heart, driving her to death. The irresponsible husband and father who neglected his wife and children. Yet, he flamed in the memory of his dear ones who lamented that he was at odds with the hard world. Laya doubted if anyone, even those who loved him unconditionally, had ever gauged Avinash Suvarna. Could he have revealed to anyone all the heat that ate away his core?

It saddened Laya no end to think that no one would ever consider Avinash anything more than a minor writer. His posthumous fame was fleeting, she knew. Why was she letting this rather insignificant man befuddle her thus? Why was this dead one becoming a haunting presence in her life? Yes, his stories had reminded her of some raw truth, an indecipherable intimation of what she herself was. Yet, with an awe rising within her, she thought of the writers who had transcended their ages, their languages and their selves to become legacies of the world at large. If only Avinash had expressed all that was in his mind!

Despite her disquiet about Avinash, Laya thought his death was inevitable. Even if he had written profusely and had become renowned, at some point he would have invited death to his side, she thought. His death note was enough to mark him from those who chased success. Its words felt like wounds of nails in her heart. At times they opened themselves and bled, awing her, making her wonder what lay beyond death. It was impossible, the way she was identifying with this dead man. Did her distress about Avinash in some way reflect her anxiety about her own future as a writer? Did she confront her own impossible yearning when she encountered Avinash’s fate?

Often during such times of doubt, Laya would see a vision of Avinash smiling at her from an obituary column as if he were chanting the ‘Sermon on the Mount’: Happy are you when people insult you and persecute you and tell all kinds of evil lies against you… This is how the prophets who lived before you were persecuted.

That vision always made Laya fall on her knees and weep with devotion: ‘Lord, was his confidence misconstrued as arrogance by this callous world? Son of Man, did he too know his role as you did? Son of God, is this dead man showing me the passion with which you had given away your life?’

TWO

After a particularly monotonous day of inaugural ceremonies and press meets, Laya reached home late to find an anxious Narayani Ettathi at the gate.

‘You’d better give up this job. Running around for twenty-four hours! How will you ever settle down and begin a family?’ the old woman said.

Laya gave her affectionate landlady a quick hug and went in to have her shower. After dinner, watching Laya take out her palette and brushes, Narayani Ettathi said, quite annoyed, ‘Ah, now for this! By morning you are sure to make a scarecrow of yourself. Young people should get enough sleep. Why am I wasting my old voice over this girl!’

Laya smiled at Narayani Ettathi and walked to her painting corner. Narayani Ettathi brought Laya her jug of water for the night and went back to her room while Laya began furiously to fill the canvas with white. Cloud white.

It was past midnight when Laya woke up with a start. Was someone trying to raise her head from the desk?

‘How many times have I told you to close the book and lie down when you feel sleepy…’

Narayani Ettathi’s voice reached Laya’s ears as though from a distance. She had left her painting half way to read a novel and then had fallen asleep with her head resting on the book. She stretched in the chair and looked out of the window. Starless night. The crescent moon quivered in the dark.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ Narayani Ettathi went on as she began to arrange the scattered books on the table. ‘And, what a way to sleep! When I saw light in your room, I thought as much! You have