Life in a one-horse town

In Leo Tolstoy’s short story ‘Little Girls Wiser Than Men’, Akulya and Malasha are the enterprising little girls of the title. Despite being forewarned, Malasha splashes Akulya’s pretty new frock with muddy water, which unleashes a Pandora’s Box: soon, the two families are seen on the street, shouting and cursing — with the exception of Akulya’s grandmother, who stops the warring grown-ups and asks them to look at their children. To everybody’s chagrin, the girls have forgotten what the fuss was all about, playing with a little boat they have fashioned out of bark. Wisdom has nothing to do with age, but I wager it has something to do with not taking yourself too seriously. The strength of Tolstoy’s story is that it does not need to spell out its subversion of the child-adult binary: in a classic ‘show, don’t tell’ move, the actions speak for themselves.

In ‘Paachu and the Arrogant Tuft’, the second story in Manu Bhattathiri’s debut collection, Savithri’s Special Room , we witness a similar moment, this time between grandfather and granddaughter. The feared grandfather, Inspector Paachu, maintains law and order with an iron fist in the small town of Karuthupuzha. Alas, the most heinous crime he can spot is an illicit card game being played by four locals: Joby, the town drunkard; the earnest, unemployed George Kutty; the tragic lover Shashidharan; and the entrepreneurial Mustafa. Just as Paachu is about to thrash the living daylights out of the four young men — months away from retirement, he is afraid that his reign of terror is over — his little granddaughter Priya sees him and starts laughing: an errant tuft of hair has risen on Paachu’s scalp, pointing like an antenna. Soon, Paachu sees the error of his ways and joins in.

“Loud thunders of laughter broke free from Inspector Paachu, like benevolent drops of rain showering down at long last upon parched land. His tuft, now bathed in the alchemy of the evening sun from the window, shook like a little jewel in the crown.”

Such is the magic of Bhattathiri’s little town: in Karuthupuzha, even impulsive characters aren’t creatures of pure id — their tempering influences come in various forms, such as children like Priya in the case of Paachu, grandchildren in the case of the titular Savithri, and art in the case of Hariharan the abstract painter (‘The Wife’s Leg’) or Acchu the ace singer (‘Music and Love’).

Their stories unfurl gently but insistently, each successive story expanding our idea of the Karuthupuzha ethos: a place where gossip and malice travel thick and fast, but the community is nevertheless quick to close ranks when needed, protecting those they consider their own. The roster of characters is memorable: the skinflint rice mill owner Eeppachan Mothalali, his lovely young wife Amminikutty, the idealistic idler George Kutty, the drunkard-with-a-golden-heart Joby, and old Chamel, the cynical yet altruistic pornographer; most short-story collections would be happy to have one character with the kind of depth and nuance possessed by all of them.

Indeed, so breathtakingly alive are these stories that it’s difficult to pick a favourite among them. If you put a gun to my head, I’d probably go with ‘Music and Love’, where George Kutty falls in love with Acchu, she of the angelic voice and the forbiddingly stern father (Lineman Chacko). But even at the moment he falls in love with her, he is possessed by an unshakeable feeling, that she looks “ugly” when she’s singing onstage, particularly during the moments she has lost herself to the song and is grimacing with the effort of hitting the high notes. All throughout Kutty’s future pursuit of Acchu, this remains constant: he tries to sabotage her singing career, so that her music is his and his alone to cherish.

This is an extremely slippery slope Bhattathiri is on: one wrong move and this would have been just another girl-meets-stalker story, with a predictably shrill, patronising ending. However, the story surprises readers with its exceptionally sensitive and balanced treatment of these two flawed characters — and also at the basic plot progression level; I shall resist the temptation to give away the ending because you deserve to know it only if you hang around for the preceding 30-odd pages.

It feels de rigueur to compare Savithri’s Special Room to Malgudi Days : the back cover already does that. But, to be honest, I enjoyed this book far more than I ever enjoyed Narayan’s. Perhaps this is because I felt Malgudi Days always suffered in comparison to Narayan’s novels, especially his masterpiece, The English Teacher . Being a debutante, Bhattathiri has no such baggage.

And so, the more realistic and apt comparison to be made here is with Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge , another grade-A example of the interlinked-story-cycle genre that’s seeing a grand revival in the last 10-15 years. That book won a Pulitzer, and it’s not beyond the realm of reason to see Bhattathiri scooping up a few awards before long: he and this book deserve to.

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