Not Only The Things That Have Happened

by Mridula Koshy (Artist)

A woman relinquishes her four-year-old son to tourists passing through town. Losing him, she loses the story of her future. A world away from her, the boy becomes a man without the story of his past. Decades on, the mother struggles on her deathbed to find the story that will release her from life; the son’s struggle is for the story that will allow him to live.

Not Only the Things That Have Happened is a novel about the stories that make us and break us and then remake us.

The novel takes place over a thirty-six hour period, travelling between far-flung places, characters, the past and the future. Time is a character here, revealing that though the story of our present is always told for us, the story of the past and the future is ours to tell.

360 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2012

About the author

Mridula Koshy is the author of If It Is Sweet(Tranqubar Press), a collection of short stories. If It Is Sweet won the 2009 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2009 Vodafone Crossword Book Prize.

She lives in New Delhi with her poet-schoolteacher partner and three exceptionally wonderful children.

She was many other things before she became a writer: a cashier at a Kentucky Fried Chicken,swap-meet sales clerk, backstage dresser at fashion shows,waitress who set a table cloth on fire, polisher of silverware in the back room for many months afterward, writing adviser, a professional advocate of multiculturalism (it was the late 80s), a painter (not of the fine arts variety), receptionist at a law firm (fired for losing phone calls), collator of tax forms, union organizer, community organizer, reading fairy at the library.

Reviews

[Aditi Radhakrishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book...it's in three parts looking into an event in the past and building the story of people's lives before and after that event.

[Karthik Parthasarathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my third book of the year thus far, and in a way, this book chose itself rather than me choosing it. I had gone to pick Freakonomics and while searching for that book, stumbled upon this book. I didnt know what to expect, however I liked the front cover of the book and the way it was done and eventually picked up this book.
The one liner of this book is a pretty straightforward one. It is all about a mom who had to relinquish her little boy to a couple by way of adoption and the son who was relinquished. It is about her past, her present and at times the future as well. The book is split primarily into two parts, one set in Kerala when it talks about Annakutty, the leading lady of the story and the other in the US, when it deals with the story of the son. The prevalent situation of the times and the troubles that they had to go through, has been vividly portrayed in the book..
The most interesting, and at times confusing, part of the book is the way the author has chose to provide the narrative. She intertwines the past through the memories of Annakutty , her step mom Saramma, her step sister Tessie baby and Tessie's daughter Nina. The narrative goes to the past in their memories, the present about the current happenings and the future as envisioned by them. The second half of the book is narrated from the boy's perspective intertwined with his adopted parents' thought process. None of the changes in narratives are differentiated based on time line or any other indicator and it is upto the reader to identify the tone of the narrative, chapter by chapter and then go with the flow of the story. This was by far the most intriguing aspect of the book.

Overall, this wouldn't be in my bookshelf as the most favorite book, but it definitely gave me a different reading experience. After the initial few pages, I had to really push myself to continue with the book, but after a point, the story started flowing and reading it became easier. Definitely a good start to my reading year and a good reading experience.

[Veturi · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Not only the things that have happened” has an intriguing kinetic typography sort of a cover page and an endorsement on its back by Jeet Thayil (Author: Narcopolis) that it is an “intimate, epic, haunting” work, so it was easy for me to pick it up. But more impressive things about the book are to be found and cherished within these two hard covers, where Mridula Koshy narrates a touching tale about not only the things that have happened, but also the things that are going to happen in the lives of a mother and her son estranged while he was four.

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