Praise the Lord and What News, Pilate?: Two Novellas by Paul Zacharia, translated from the Malayalam by Gita Krishnankutty; Katha, New Delhi; pages108, Rs.120.
AT least since the 1970s, short fiction has been the most flourishing literary genre in Malayalam. While it was poetry that modernised itself first in the 1950s, it was fiction that popularised modernism through its novel perceptions of life and language. Modernism in the beginning had all the features of a literary movement: story after story took up themes such as man's loss of identity, alienation and the irrationality and angst of existence even though each one had its own individual style. A decade later, however, the writers came to their own and the genre began to exhibit great variety in themes, styles and worldviews. One of the finest writers to emerge from the movement was Paul Zacharia - known only as 'Zacharia' to Malayalam readers - seldom prolific, but ever careful and innovative. What makes Zacharia different is his vision that alternates between the tragic and the comic and his tenderness kept intact even in the most sarcastic of moods, without at the same time falling prey to sentimentality that is the bane of many compassion-driven writers. While some of his best works have already been collected in the two earlier anthologies - Bhaskara Pattelar and Other Stories (Affiliated East-West) and Reflections of a Hen in her Last Hour and Other Stories (Penguin India) - the present book from Katha publishers presents two samples of his recent work - two novellas: Praise the Lord and What News, Pilate? - each different from the other, yet comparable in certain respects.
Of the two texts, Praise the Lord must have been a greater challenge to the translator since it employs a local idiolect and community-specific usages and speech rhythms. But the difficulty does not show in the translation. Gita Krishnankutty as the translator has successfully created a parallel idiom in English by employing a simple conversational style with short and crisp sentences with a sprinkling of Malayalam vocatives like eda or madamme that imitate the tone of the original. She has equally well captured the dramatic narrative of What News, Pilate? Indira Chandrasekhar's editing too should have helped finetune the translation.
Praise the Lord is the monologue of Joy, a typical Christian rubber planter in Travancore. His mind opens up in all its naivete before us as we pass through the one-man narration. Other characters in the narrative are viewed through Joy's eyes. His quiet life among the coconut palms, rubber and cocoa trees and peppervines - sitting on his easy chair in the verandah, occasionally welcoming friends or relatives or the vicar from the church, gulping in the whisky poured out by his wife Ansy before lunch and dinner, watching the sun and the rain, seldom ever going out in his old but faithful Landmaster, supervising the work in the farm and enjoying his regular Ansy-work - suffers a jolt with the entry of a couple of lovers from Delhi. He could not refuse to secretly put up these runaways at his home since it was his good lawyer-friend Sunny - a partner in his youthful adventures - who had sent them there. The boy's family who boasted of their ancestry and wealth were against his marriage to a girl without pedigree from another sect. They had come to know the couple had left Delhi for Kerala. They had even lodged a complaint with the police and the police were intimidating relatives. They also had located the hotel where the lovers were staying. So they had to leave the place in a hurry and seek refuge elsewhere.
Love is a concept that eludes and baffles Joy and Ansy: they have seen it only in films. Annie's lovely oval face, 'give-and-take body', short hair, gleaming teeth and legs 'glistening like butter' fascinate Joy. He wonders what is special about Samkutty and Annie. But when it comes to saving them from the murderous gang that reaches Joy's house, he is helpless. This is where Ansy takes over, challenges them to go in and look for the lovers and drives them back. This is typical Zacharia: his women are always stronger and wiser than the men; they have all the courage and the cunning in perilous situations. As the lovers leave, Joy's life goes back to its unromantic routine. What fascinates the reader more here is not the story itself, but the narratorial voice - unsophisticated, estranging, lustily observant - as well as the drama that unfolds in short sequences and flashbacks. Finally when Samkutty decides not to displease his father by marrying Annie, the couple's practical wisdom works. They decide to propose a relative to the lover so that his estate may come to the family. It is through such revealing gestures that Zacharia probes the mindset of the community.
What News, Pilate? is a marvellous retelling of the story of Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ in the form of a letter Pilate writes to his boyhood friend Antonius. Zacharia seems to suggest that Pilate and Joy belong to the same brood of men who hanker after girls with alabaster legs. Antonius is his Sunny, having shared his lascivious adolescent adventures. The Roman governor has no illusions about himself: "...do my desires have limits? I have wine, women, food, soft beds, fast horses and the company of birds and animals. What can I do? History has cast all this bait my way. I nibble at each in turn and wait. The day will come when I swallow the bait and history's fishing rod casts me ashore. Dhum! Some thrashing about and it will all be over. History will no longer have any use for me." It is this contemplative strain, along with his love for animals, that redeems Pilate from total debauchery. He is also vaguely conscious of Yeshu's (Jesus) great mission and looks upon him with a mixture of awe and pity, even envy, as he is adored by beautiful jewesses.
There is sceptism too: "What sort of saviour is a fellow who can't even save himself?" According to him a saviour should have a blue-print on how to solve the problems of the world, the strength to delight in his creation of a perfect world and should live and savour the wonderful status of a saviour. "He must ensure that he has the political authority or the military backing or the magical powers necessary to achieve this end. He can't be a saviour one minute and need saving himself the next. That would be deceiving those who gather around him and himself."
Obviously, Pilate's worldly logic fails to comprehend Yeshu who to him is a poor chap speaking incoherently. Yet he knows by instinct that Yeshu is beyond this pity: "There was something in him I could identify but not touch." Later he puts this elusive something thus: "The way I understood it, he was neither a rebel nor a liar but an innocent man in search of a dream, and even in the thick of danger, he was in the grip of the dream." As in the case of T. S. Eliot's Magi in 'The Journey of the Magi', there is recognition here, but no illumination.
This sense of mystery thickens as Pilate watches the change that has come over Magdalene Mariam, his one-time bedmate, and sees how even Ruth, his intelligent secretary who knows every secret about him and yet feigns innocence and a significant character in this narrative, has probably fallen for the holy young man. It is through Ruth's reverie that we know more of Pilate's weaknesses and Yeshu's magic. She implicitly counterposes Yeshu against Pilate: "How can we ever make you understand that the joy Yeshu gave us was not what you think?... It was our hearts that he kissed like the breeze on a rose. It was our souls he entered, breaking through our allurements." Zacharia recreates the scene of Yeshu's murder and his resurrection in all its dramatic intensity. He even employs the dramatic form of direct conversations characteristic of early fiction to bring to life these scenes. If his moral concerns and awareness of the body remind one of the commitment of a Nikos Kazantzakis, his sense of drama with its humour touch calls to mind Dario Fo's comic mysteries. But more than anyone else, Zacharia has learnt from Vaikkom Mohammed Basheer, Malayalam's master story teller: his sense of humanness, his lightness of touch, his hope that even the bad will be given the benefit of doubt in God's Kingdom (as is Pilate's hope here), his basic human sympathy.
With the emergence of Paul Zacharia and N.S. Madhavan as mature writers, the art of Malayalam short story has touched new heights. They can disappoint you at times, but at their best they have few parallels among their Indian contemporaries.
