Book review: The Story That Must Not Be Told by Kavery Nambisan

Kavery Nambisan’s The Story That Must Not Be Told opens with tremendous promise. It places before the readers, a narrative of human situation that involves urban India where the ultra rich and the abysmally poor have to inhabit the same space. It raises issues of humanity, of hygiene, basic facilities, education and medical care, those which an educated, urban citizen cannot sweep under the carpet. It stabs one’s conscience as to what he can do to better the condition of the under privileged.

One such person with conscience is Simon. He is a widower, living alone in a vast, thriving city, next to an equally thriving slum, Sitara, which has a life of its own. Sitara, “individual opinion decided if it was a township, shantytown, refuge, haven, ghetto, slum or a tourist home for the woebegone”. The slum pervades the whole novel like a nameless entity, encompassing every object; animate, inanimate, under its cloak while waiting impassively for life to continue. One day, it gets annihilated without leaving any trace behind while its inhabitants scatter and scramble to re-build their lives, somewhere else, with new beginnings.

Nambisan gives us endearing and enduring characters. Each character is so finely sculpted that they appear on the scene with a strong presence and fade away as strongly yet leaving behind a lingering essence. Of all people that populate Nambisan’s novel, Simon’s character, full blown and painted in light and dark shades, appeals to us the most. Simon is a complex, insecure, rebellious and lovable old man who we love to hate and like in turns. We are privy to his every thought and feeling that makes him distinct from other people around him.

One day, Simon’s philonthropic streak is awakened when he discovers that his errand boy Velu and other workers from around the building are from the slum. He wants to do something for them and others like them. In this regard, we can understand Simon's desire to donate a water cooler or his visit to the slum school. His daughter’s journalist friends ridicule him behind his back for donating the water cooler. When he overhears it, he feels helpless as he realizes that they are right and his effort of help is at best pitiful. He laughter, his happiness are tinged with regret. He wants to do more but in the process, treads on the sensitive toes of the slum lords. Allauddin Baqua responds bitterly, “You want the people here to accept kindness on your own terms. You do it as a favour, as an apology for being rich.” Baqua confines him and his friends inside a house, and extracts hard labor from them in order to teach the meaning of suffering that slum dwellers undergo every day. Traumatized, Simon realizes that he is very weak, both physically and mentally.

Simon’s quest for happiness starts first with the choice of Harini as his wife and later with his gastronomical delights. Everything comes to an end with a series of incidents; beginning with the loss of Harini's manuscript. Simon has always dreamed of taking risks, but having grown up in a family who had a flair for hypocrisy, he had to lead a life of false prestige. Over the years he had lost the urge to please his father. He was attracted to Harini for her unspoiled charm and her pursuit of higher purpose in life. Simon himself is weak and laid-back while Harini is confident, dynamic and dedicated to her principle of austerity. Simon gets crushed ultimately under his dominating but idealistic wife. After her death, his life gets lonely. He has a son and a daughter who live their own lives. He becomes fonder of his cat Thangu than his son and daughter. He feels free and liberated after his wife’s death. Yet his guilt and duty finds appeasement in getting his wife Harini’s manuscript published. As luck would have it, as he returns home from his son’s house, with the manuscript in his bag, he misses his train and loses his bag. The manuscript is never found, nor his equilibrium of mind. Though Simon is 72 and retired from life, he finds fresh mis-adventures as days go by.

We don’t know whether to laugh or to feel sorry for Simon, when he flirts with his daughter-in-law’s mother in rebellion and feel that at least she is wiser and savy. She hides her antipathy towards her children’s bossy ways. She realizes their selfish ways, yet she loves them and contrives ways and means to get invited to spend some holiday time with them. We are at our wits end, when we see Simon, quarrelling with his son, daughter or his building secretary. His anger is of a sly kind which does not confront openly but irritates the opponents. It is the anger of the impotent, which fears rejection if open rebellion is revealed. He is so pathetic that he cannot confront his son or daughter-in-law openly and intelligently but always raises their hackles by scandalizing them. His tongue gives him more pleasure than his liver, kidneys or heart. When he rebels against the salads bristling on his plate; it is that, he actually bristles against his son and daughter-in-law.

At another level, Simon deserves our love and sympathy as it not too much to ask for peace and quiet in ones own home. He bought Vaibhav apartment with the intention of spending his last years in a peacful atmosphere; of finding happiness there. Instead, he finds only noise and pollution starting from early morning with the sound of tin cans dragged around by the street dogs to the noise of bull dozers, thundering on the whole day.

The residents of Vaibhav colony depend on the services of slum dwellers for domestic work, outdoor work or the cleaning of the sewage yet they want to eliminate them after getting their work done, like some noxious weeds. Not all residents are so heratless, though. The people in the building are divided on allowing the slum-dwellers to live their lives undisturbed or eradicating them totally from the vicinity like so much of vermins and insects. Simon makes a stand, which he had never done in his entire life, even when it was expected of him in his life or was necessary with his wife. He manages to mobilise like minded people in his building complex to make the voice of justice and compassion heard. But he is not able to hold back the overwhemling tide of hatred and prejudice which culminates in the annhilaton of Sitara. He too loses out personally as his sole companion and his life; his cat Thangu, is mauled by the slum dogs. All his valiant efforts to rehabilitate the badly mauled Thangu turn futile. Simon is devastated.

Irony evokes the pathos of distressing laughter in us, as when the school teacher swamy, doubles as a butcher while the doctor prince is self taught compounder; while Dr Saha's cow Kamdhenu has a deluxe shed with a fan and its own human attendents to brush its teeth and wash its skin with beauty soap, the patients at the clinic endure on expired drugs, cheap medicne and tap water. Similarly, Mr Benny from Madras goes talent hunting and brings Chellam and Ponnu with promises of bright future but who end up building others homes, while having to live in a shanty in the slum.

Kavery’s language is witty, sharp and idiomatic. She captures even the minutest details in its clarity. The colloquial words that she uses, the details that she furnishes to the characters, adds authenticity to the story. The characters bloom in front of our eyes. She creates a kind of word-picture. Her story evokes sympathy and pathos; especially the disillusionment of Chakra or the sad tragedy of Thatkan. The nobility of school teacher Swamy or the futile efforts of Simon to save Sitara is moving. Simon comes across as very human and weak as we all are in our apathy towards raising our voice, or making it heard or holding on when signs of defeat appear on the horizon. Her language, prying into the soul of the characters, “fashioned into a low-hung bun of convoluted whorls, (which) resembles dung waiting to descend from the backside of a cow.” “Why worry? What-what when-when will happen, that-that then-then will happenay happen”, makes it unique. When kavery says of the mind set of Simon, “grazing through gardens of gas inducing greens and yellows”, it sounds hilarious.

Kavery’s eye for detail does not fail her or her narrative finesse falter when it comes to delineating the characters inhabiting the slum. She blazes forth strongly when picturizing the pathos of poverty, the exploitation of children in hazardous employments, the unsavouriness of smuggling of wine that is distilled illegally or the dignity in the lives of the impoverished. The hopelessness and struggle for survival in the characters of Thatkan or Velu who want to rise above their circumstances; the panache of Chellam, the slyness of Ponnu and the poignant need of Sentha first for education and later for companion are etched out vividly. Nambisan sketchs with credibility and honesty, a multitude of characters like Chellan and Kittan who struggle to span respectability and the humiliating materiality of their lives. Inspite of ourselves we see them as human beings rather than as slum dwellers or as nameless human mass.

With the eye of a seasoned artist, Kavery weaves into the story, politics and pathos, very judiciously and realsitically. One cannot dispute that corruption and politics has seeped into the life blood of human system and a slum, as vibrant and pulsating with life as Sitara is, will invariably be in the grip of political-lords. Slum-dwellers conveniently get converted into vote banks. Inspite of it, kavery threads the natural pathos of her protagonists with her didactic efforts, through the needle of her narration. Her attempt always focuses on keeping up the pace of the narration while juggling the various sub-plots. She retains reader’s interest till the very end. Simon learns that acts of kindness, however true, achieve nothing when confronted by the larger needs of social reality. When he undestands it, it is too late and Sitara and Thangu are no more. His condition is something we can empathize with as we too forget that small acts of kindness are just a grain of sand in the vast desert of social actuality.