“Love is a touch smelly as well”

“Don’t ever look back; there will be blood and tears all along the path”

These words of MT (M.T. Vasudevan Nair, the famous writer) were downright brilliant; they brought an entire realm of expressive experience into us. He was always fond of the ‘white spaces’ between words, and talks about them a great deal - About that shadow land which lies between the terms and his expressions filled those gaps and filled our hearts with unmixed feeling. Perhaps none else could have understood the vital importance of those words at that time than us.

I came in to the scene long after he wrote those words, but the feeling was still alive.

We were a poor society then, trying to find our feet after the independence without anything to fall back on to. Our homes and economy lay in tatters. Our young were then like beggars on our own land. No jobs around and no hope of finding any in the distant future. Our wants were great, our determination greater and our exploits for them were almost global in character. In our excursions to all parts of the world to find wealth we only had one thing on our minds, that of coming back to this very land and saying a few terse words filled with feeling to all those who had discredited us before. I know it is all very childish, but that was how we were, none are intellectual giants when it comes to personal feelings.

We were very angry at the world and were willing to sacrifice everything to win the bloody fight to the top. We had made ourselves immune to our own inner core, our emotions and our blood ties. We were ruthless and very, very egotistical.

One character in a movie script written by the same author spat fire when he was asked whether he thought he was god, after his triumphant return from the distant lands:

“Yes I am God; I am the God of money!”

And that statement sealed the argument for ever on those turbulent times in our past.
I think these were all part of our process of growing up as a society. The Malayalee sensibility was never the same again, he brought to us the words we longed to speak then, words and emotions of an uncertain period in our social and political life. None of the younger generation would be aware of the immense force these words had on our psyche. They would think they are emotional and sentimental and boastful.

And they are emotional and sentimental alright, for that matter, what is not emotional and sentimental in our lives? They are what life is all about. A cold and practical approach to it might satisfy some, especially those living in the modern times with its accent on the brutal principles of buying and selling (the market place). I know that the times have changed; the present generation is able to use empty spaces alone to convey a wealth of meaning! They don’t even need words to do that! I have sadly experienced it recently!

Not that it is bad, no; it might also be a new mode of expression and communication which might later make all language superfluous. It might be a good thing too, if we can transmit thoughts and emotions in a condensed format like that.

All the same, the most beautiful words that I have ever seen (they are expressions rather than words, they are like soundless entities) are those created by Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, another great and original writer in our language. He often used exclamation and question marks alone to convey meaning, some what like in the following construction.

“Why are the poor kids so agitated?”

“? ”

“I thought you knew”

“! ”

A lesser writer (like me for instance) might have said. “The other man looked up questioningly” and “there was surprise on his face” or something like that instead.

He was great, Basheer, all other writers pales into insignificance before him. He was sometimes crazy in life but was immensely wise with words. They were simple words (I quail when I have to use the expression simple, the damage certain friends have done to the word is terrible!) I still can’t remember his short story “The Birthday” without being greatly affected by it. It is a repository of every thing that adversity does to you, and all through it his wonderful love for humanity shows like silver light.

He was a wanderer in his younger days, seems to have enacted several roles including that of a professor and a Sufi saint (without any qualifications for those trades) in his life successfully and perhaps that of a pickpocket too! There is a story of his about a gentleman pick-pocket who had returned his purse after a chance conversation with him on a street about his predicament. A Critic in our land chuckled that he would not be surprised if that pick pocket was Basheer himself.

Basheer was alive then and never denied it! He had such an immense wealth of experience than any of the other writers had in his time, he had been truly around, and those jaunts sobered him to the real wonder that is human life. Those who haven’t seen the very depths of human existence can’t write like he did and I am convinced of it. (Interestingly reading the first few chapters of Adolf Hitler’s Mien Kamf can give you a good description of what poverty can do to man!)

No wonder he was somewhat insane, it was a genuine sickness that he caught from living sincerely. He was so direct and honest that we lesser souls often shudder at that which we see in his works. He sometimes has a very disquieting style I have only found in Dostoyevsky. His book Shabdangal (Noises, or Voices) would be banned in any snobbish society even now. None dared to venture on that line in our language after him.

He was terribly funny sometimes. He says somewhere that “love can be a little smelly as well” and that is priceless, and don't ask me why!

I like these two for what they wrote and what they conveyed in between their words and lines. There is whole literary theory based on Dwani (evocation) in this land. It is old and it is in Sanskrit. They believed that the text is just a garb for something else. Some of our contemporary writers do not need to study it, for none can beat them at it, it seems!