Cutting through Cant
Catherine Thankamma, long known as a translator of Malayalamliterature, steps into the spotlight with her debut short story collection, ‘AKind of Meat and Other Stories’
By Shevlin Sebastian
The road to Catherine Thankamma’s house in Kochi leads to acul-de-sac. So, there is little traffic. There are trees all around. Asexpected, it is very quiet inside the house.
Catherine is beaming as ‘A Kind of Meat and Other Stories’(Aleph Publishing) is gaining lavish praise from early readers.
The book runs to 206 pages and contains 20stories.
In Catherine Thankamma’s first story, ‘A Family Affair’, amatriarch correctly predicts who stole a bag of jewellery from her house,approaches him, and tells him to return it. The writing is simple andaccessible.
In the subsequent stories, Catherine captures powerfully theethos of the Syro-Malabar Catholics of Kerala (total worldwide population: 55lakh). Catherine uses Malayalam words for dialogue and description. Onecharacter Eli Chedathi said, ‘Ente karthaveeshomishihaye’ which means, ‘My LordJesus Christ.’
In another story, five-year-old, Saira, of a family rentingone part of a bungalow in Chandigarh tells the house owner that they eat beef.This leads to tension between landlord and tenant.
In the story, ‘Madhu’, Catherine captures the lower-castediscrimination faced by a woman garbage collector in North India. Though moststories are only a few pages long, they evoke deep emotion in readers.
Her subjects include the effects of communal riots, collegetransfer politics, learning disabilities of children, mental illness, and ayoung gazetted officer, treated with barely disguised contempt, gingerlyhandling a polling booth. All the stories are told from the viewpoint of women.It’s the subtle, vicious quarrels that happen between women beneath the gaze ofmen.
The writing can be searing. Here are a few lines from‘Silence and Slow Time’, which focuses on the impact of vascular dementia: ‘Thesurgeon never warned me you could end up like this; that the part of the brainthat made you, you – your imagination, your intellect, your wit, yourlinguistic skills – might be severely damaged by the haemorrhage.’
In a later part of the story, Catherine writes, ‘How do Icome to terms with the new you? Your blank stare fills me with guilt anddespair; I ache for that precious thing, now lost forever. I know your eyeswill never light up again. Should I be relieved that you didn’t die on thetable like that young mother, so full of life, who unlike you, enthusiasticallysigned the consent form for surgery and left behind two young children? Thisdead life, how can it be better?’
In ‘Blood Sacrifice’, she describes the violent attack on aMalayali nun in Bandipur, Chhattisgarh, in harrowing detail. Here are a fewlines: ‘With a snarl of fury, the hairy arm seized the crucifix from the tableand swung it at Sister Karuna. Crooked blood lines coursed down Sister Karuna’sface, as she fell backwards. He kicked her aside.’ The miscreants raped heryounger colleague, Sister Anne.
And in the extraordinarily powerful story, ‘Pieta’, whichdepicts Jesus’s mother Mary as an ordinary woman, the author writes, ‘Is itpiety that you feel when you hear of paedophilic priests molesting children, ofbishops raping nuns, of clergymen arguing vociferously on how to say the Mass,then hear the same wrangling fraternity declare from the pulpit, “Let us followour Lord and not throw stones; let us pray for truth and justice to prevail.”’Unbelievable!
Catherine adds: ‘What is he [Jesus Christ] in truth, but afigurehead for a mammoth corporate managed by hard-headed managementgurus?’
This is writing wielded like a scimitar cutting down cant andhypocrisy with a powerful slash.
Catherine says that she had been writing short stories forthe past 30 years. Only a few have been published. Since both her husbandJoseph and she were in transferable jobs, he in a bank, while she was anEnglish teacher in government service, many a time, she had to handle things onher own. Bringing up her two daughters, looking after the household, andmanaging her own career, time was always in short supply. As she said, “Therewas just no time to think about writing.”
But Catherine loves to watch and listen to people and hearexchanges. “When something struck me, I used to write down points,” she said.“And then, over the course of several months, I wrote stories around fleetinginstances, occurrences, chance encounters, and exchanges. The focus-drivenbrevity of the short story is the best medium for me. So, I kept writingthat.”
In 2015, after her daughters had grown up and Catherine hadretired as an associate professor, she finally had time for concentratedwriting.
Interestingly, she sits on a wooden chair in her bedroom,places the laptop on her lap and does the work. When she looks up, she can seea collage of photos of her late husband Joseph, who died in 2011, hanging on anearby wall.
“Joseph was such a jovial person,” she said with a sigh. “Myhusband always encouraged me in my writing.”
Asked why she had focused quite a few stories on theSyro-Malabar community, Catherine said, “I belong to this community. On thesurface, there is piety, church-going and community gatherings. But underneath,many of the family relationships are toxic. I wanted to show the darkunderbelly.”
But in the end, she says, the book is a celebration. “Icelebrated the quiet resilience with which women face reality,” she said. “Myhusband's death has taught me that we are clueless of what the future holds forus. What little agency we have is how we should confront the reality lifethrows at us.”
Apart from being an academician, Catherine has been a notedtranslator of books from Malayalam to English. The first was ‘Kocharethi’ byNarayan, which won the Crossword Book Award in the Indian language translationcategory in 2011.
The others include ‘Pulayathara’ by Paul Chirakkarode,‘Susanna’s Granthapura’ by Ajai P. Mangattu, and ‘Aliya’ by Sethu. Sethu.Another book, ‘Ayyankali: A Biography’ by M. R. Renukumar, will be publishednext year.
Asked about the striking cover, Catherine said, “I found itinteresting, the juxtaposing of the word meat with this very earthy image of abanana flower, about to unfurl, with a caterpillar crawling on the edge of aleaf.”
Undoubtedly, Catherine has made a stunning debut, and is onher way to becoming an important voice in South Indian fiction writing.
(A part of this article, appeared in interview form, in theBooks Section, Hindustan Times Online)
