Tomichan Matheikal's blog

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 tr...

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 ...

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...

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha...