A Crazy Novel

Jayasree Kalathil, Sandhya Mary, and the book

Book Review

Title: Maria, Just Maria

Author: Sandhya Mary

Translator: Jayasree Kalathil

This is a crazy novel. It is hard to find a normal human being in it. There is more than one place in the narrative where we are told that every human being is insane to some degree. I won’t disagree with that. However, there are certain standards or wavelengths which are generally considered to be ‘normal’ if not sane and it is that normalcy which keeps the world going. Sandhya Mary’s debut novel flings a huge question mark on that normalcy.

As I was reading this novel, I was constantly reminded of a joke that Albert Camus narrates in his brilliant essay on the meaning of life, The Myth of Sisyphus. A madman is sitting by a swimming pool with a fishing rod in hand. Seeing his serenity, his psychiatrist [I think in Camus’s own version it’s just a passerby – but I find the psychiatrist more appropriate] asks him whether he has caught any fish. The madman’s answer: “No, you fool, this is a swimming pool.”

Nothing can illustrate the absurdity of life as best as that anecdote. Maria, the protagonist of Sandhya Mary’s novel, is just like that madman in the story. She has no idea what she wants from life, but she will keep fishing in a swimming pool knowing that there is no fish in there.

The novel describes the childhood of Maria in about half of its pages while the rest is a look at Maria at about the age of 30. Unlike her siblings, little Maria was brought up by her grandparents, especially Geevarghese, her grandfather, who is little more than a drunkard. Maria has seen all the sordid world of Geevarghese and his like, including the toddy shop where he spends much of his time. Maria liked that sordidness of life much more than the orderliness at school and other such places.

Maria’s mind roams around in a surreal world populated by a speaking dog, speaking parrot, Saint George who goes on a world tour, a Jesus who has gone black and is ready to fight for another revolution… Even the real people in that world are not quite normal. Look at Kuncheriya, Maria’s great grandfather whose only ambition is to live a ‘good’ life and thus ensure a seat in heaven. But he wants to live to a hundred; heaven can wait. Moreover, his religion has nothing to do with doing good to others; it’s all about his own heaven – both here on earth and there in the next life.

Mathiri, the great grandmother of the family, wants to rewrite the Bible. But she doesn’t know to write. She learns it eventually and the first thing she does after that is to rewrite the Bible on the walls of the house using charcoal pieces. Her thinking is highly ecumenical: it merges characters from Hindu mythology with those in the Bible. For example, Kumbhakarna becomes biblical Jonah in her story.

When Kumbhakarna was travelling in a boat, he fell asleep. All he ever did in his life was eat and sleep. Since he was as huge as an elephant, the boat capsized. A whale mistook him for an elephant and swallowed him. But the whale could not digest him; it developed an acute stomach ache. A doctor performed a surgery and took out Kumbhakarna who then claimed he was really Jonah. A curse had transformed him into Kumbhakarna.

The novel distorts everything. Every character in it is a distortion.

Who is sane in this world? That seems to be a fundamental question that the novelist raises. Is the ruler who attacks a neighbouring country in order to capture its lands sane? Are people who make national borders which pit some people against others sane? Are our gods and saints sane? Are our religious and moral stories sane?

Life, for Maria and most others in the novel, is as chaotic, irrational, and meaningless as portrayed by Kafka, Beckett, and Camus in their works. We, the readers, are provoked out of our comfort zones into a highly disturbing milieu which, we soon realise, is not entirely fictitious.

The novel made me laugh a lot; it has plenty of humour, dark though it is. But the novel also disturbed me not a little. It is a highly unsettling novel. I’m not sure, in the end, whether I would like to read the next novel by the author notwithstanding the fact that I liked this one. 

PS. I read the Malayalam original