Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Title: The Blue Scarf and other stories Author: Anu Singh Choudhary Translator: Kamayani Sharma Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 188 There is no doubt that the Indian social system is overtly patriarchal and hence a lot of women endure restrictions of all sorts. There are exceptions like the matrilineal tribes of the Northeast. The 12 short stories in this volume by Anu Singh Choudhary focus on some women from the patriarchal societies of India, particularly North India. Originally written in Hindi, the stories have been translated quite effortlessly by Kamayani Sharma though the book does show a few signs of poor proofreading. The very first story, First Look , shows us the rising aspirations of a few women from a remote village and the futility of those aspirations in a world where even marriage is a business deal. “With this deal, we’re interested only in maximizing profits for both parties,” The boy’s father says. But the girl’s family can’t ever tou

Terror Tourism 1 in short : Jacob Martin Pathros is a retired school teacher in Kerala. He has visited most countries and is now fascinated by an ad which promises terror tourism: meet the terrorists of Dantewada. Below is the second and last part of the story. Celina went mad on hearing her husband’s latest tour decision. “Meet terrorists? Touch them? Feel them?” She fretted and fumed. When did you touch me last ? She wanted to scream. Feel me, man , she wanted to plead. But her pride didn’t permit her. She was not a feminist or anything of the sort, but she had the pride of having been a teacher in an aided school for 30-odd years and was now drawing a pension which funded a part of their foreign trips. “I’m not coming with you on this trip,” Celina said vehemently. “You go and touch the terrorists and feel them yourself.” Celina was genuinely concerned about her husband’s security. Why did he want to go to such inhuman people as terrorists? Atlas Tours, the agency which b

Jacob Martin Pathros was enthralled by the ad on terror tourism which promised to take the tourist to the terrorist-jungles of Chhattisgarh. Jacob Martin Pathros had already visited almost all countries, except the perverted South America, after retiring at the young age of 56 from an ‘aided’ school in Kerala. 56 is the retirement age in Kerala’s schools, aided as well as totally government-fed. Aided schools belong to the different religious groups in Kerala. They build up the infrastructure with the money extorted from the believers and then appoint as staff people who can pay hefty donations in the name of infrastructure. The state government will pay the salary of the staff. The private management will rake in millions by way of donations from job-seekers who are usually the third-class graduates from rich-class families. And there are no students to study in these schools because they are all Malayalam medium. Every Malayali wants to go to Europe or North America and hence Malay

The last snap I took of Brownie That Brownie went away without giving me a hint is what makes her absence so painful. It’s nearly a month and I know now for certain that she won’t return. Worse, I know that she didn’t want to leave me. She couldn’t have. Brownie is the only creature who could make me do what she wanted. She had the liberty to walk into my bedroom at any time of the night and wake me up for a bite of her favourite food. She would sit below the bed and meow. If I didn’t get up and follow her, she would climb on the bed and meow to my face. She knew I would get up and follow her to the cupboard where bags of cat food were stored.  My Mistress in my study Brownie was not my only cat; there were three others. But none of the other three ever made the kind of demands that Brownie made. If any of them came to eat the food I served Brownie at odd hours of the night, Brownie would flatly refuse to eat with them in spite of the fact that it was she who had brought me out of

Appu and Dessie, two of our cats, love to sleep under the two mango trees in front of our house these days. During the daytime, that is, when the temperature threatens to brush 40 degrees Celsius. The shade beneath the mango trees remains a cool 28 degrees or so. Mango trees have this tremendous cooling effect. When I constructed the house, the area in front had no touch of greenery as you can see in the pic below.  Now the same area, which was totally arid then, looks like what's below:  Appu and Dessie find their bower in that coolness.  I wanted to have a lot of colours around my house. I tried growing all sorts of flower plants and failed rather miserably. The climate changes are beyond the plants’ tolerance levels. Moreover, all sorts of insects and pests come from nowhere and damage the plants. Crotons survive and even thrive. I haven’t given up hope with the others yet. There are a few adeniums, rhoeos, ixoras, zinnias and so on growing in the pots. They are trying their

I’m reading an anthology of Urdu stories written by different authors and translated into English by Rakshanda Jalil. These are stories taken from the rural backyards of India. I wish to focus on just one of them here today merely because I love it for its aesthetic intensity. A Rat’s Death by Zakia Mashhadi is the story of an impecunious man named Dhena who is a Musahar. Musahar is a Dalit community whose very name means ‘rat eater.’ Their main occupation is catching rats which they eat too because of inescapable destitution. One day Dhena is tempted by the offer made by Mishrji, a political broker. Go to the city and take part in a political rally and “You will get eight rupees, and also sherbet and puris with sabzi.” Puris and sabzi with sherbet to boot is a banquet for Dhena for whom even salt in his rat meat is a luxury. Dhena is scared of the city’s largeness and rush and pomp. But the reward is too tempting. The city people who eat puri-sabzi consider people like Dhena

  Book Title: Marquez, EMS, Gulam & Others Author: Benyamin Translated by Swarup B.R. Publisher: Harper   Perennial, 2023 Pages: 214 There is a kind of fiction that shows you life from an angle that you wouldn’t ever have thought of. An unexpectedly new way of looking at situations and people. Yet what you see is real life and real people. The usual human emotions are all there. There is a touch of humour too, though it tends to be of the dark kind mostly. Not too dark either. This is the kind of fiction that Benyamin offers us. Right now a Malayalam movie [ Goat Life ], based on a novel of the same title by Benyamin, is running full house in Kerala. I watched it too with intense emotional and aesthetic involvement. I had read the novel many years ago. It is a rather sombre work that tells the story of a man who went to a Gulf country to take up a job but ended as a slave who didn’t even have the comforts that his goats had. The work was so depressing that I never rea

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics