Jeyamohan wears many hats as a prolific and popular writer: he has been a novelist, short story writer, literary critic, biographer and screenplay writer of blockbuster Tamil movies such as Ponniyin Selvan. As a bilingual writer who writes in Tamil and Malayalam, he has been fearless in speaking out his mind on issues of public interest, despite the backlash they often generate. He remains an accomplished storyteller with an eye for details and a strong social commitment as evidenced by stories like ‘The Elephant Doctor’ and ‘A Hundred Armchairs’.
Jeyamohan’s forays into detective fiction have yielded the six stories collected in the volume, set mostly in Kerala. Ousepachan, the garrulous raconteur of these stories, has a captive audience in his intimate circle of friends made up of Sreedharan, Kumaran Master, Palaniappan and a Kerala-born Tamil author who looks like Jeyamohan himself. Being a retired police officer, Ousepachan has a fund of crime stories which he embellishes with his imagination.
It must be Jeyamohan’s interest in the mysteries of the human mind that has prompted him to investigate the underworld of crime. In his preface, Jeyamohan remarks, ‘But more importantly, what forms the crux of these stories is never a simple crime: each tale reaches into the dark recesses of the human heart and uncovers the deep-seated venom in it.’ The dramatic dialogues, the unusual settings and the unexpected twists deepen the cinematic quality of the narrative which finally terminates in a sense of waste and avoidable suffering brought about by human greed, lust and vengeance.
The story ‘Gunning’ takes us to the shady world behind the glitter and glamour of the circus shows. The story is a study in human frailties and the nemesis that befalls those who think of themselves as invincible. As a scriptwriter, Jeyamohan has mastered the art of dialogues, and this adds to the momentum with which the narrative flows forward. In the male-dominated circus world, women artists are mere exhibits, but in ‘Gunning’, it is the women who have the last laugh.
Jeyamohan’s knowledge of Travancore history and its labyrinthine intrigues inform two of the stories, namely, ‘The Wolf’s Trail’ and ‘Kaimukku’. The former has a story line that will sound familiar to readers of Malayalam fiction revolving round ancient joint families (tharavad) with rivalries, vengeance, curses and mental illness running in the family for generations. It is a dark world of collective guilt which has its roots in the feudal past of rampant criminality and treachery which refuses to be exorcised, despite retellings in every medium from folk-ballads to celluloid dramas.
‘Kaimukku’ is about a talented young man from a lower caste ending up as a criminal due to the caste discrimination he faces in the engineering college. The young man tells the police officer who knew his father from his days of grinding poverty: ‘Higher education in India goes hand in hand even today with high social class’ (p. 209). The story is a stringent critique of our modernity, which conceals its caste and religious prejudices under the garb of merit and entitlements.
Jeyamohan has a way of yoking disparate events or phenomena together, as ‘One Million Footsteps’ reveals. From the unusual skills of Khalasis to retrieve objects submerged in deep waters to a leading Muslim family which controls the smuggling along the entire north Malabar coast: all these are brought into play in a narrative that shifts its tone and temper at every turn, as in a popular Tamil movie.
V Iswarya, the translator, writes that the character of the patriarch in the above story, ‘his geniality, charm and generosity wrapped in an icily impersonal sense of justice’, unsettled her deeply. She has captured the brisk pace of Jeyamohan’s storytelling with its colloquial variations. Her first attempt at translation, it deserves compliments for its competence and fluency.
These stories are dotted by stock characters and situations: stunning beauties and sharp shooters, reckless criminals and sudden coincidences. On deeper analysis, one can see that it is the complex social circumstances that transform perfectly genial human beings into criminals.
The differently abled character of Rahel in the story ‘At the Roots’ reminds the readers that not everything in the world can be rationally explained. That story ends with the scene of an elephant approaching an autistic boy and caressing him affectionately before withdrawing quietly, as the guards with guns look on in astonishment. That is a visionary statement of grace and beauty that balances the world of crime and murder.
EV Ramakrishnan is a bilingual writer who has published criticism in Malayalam and English, and poetry in English. He is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award for his critical work in Malayalam, Malayala Novelinte Deshakaalangal.