There is a reflex of distancing that takes charge when an ‘abnormal’ person claims the space of ‘normal’ people and tries to fit in. At its worst, this form of othering is established through ridicule, fear, anxiety, embarrassment, and even violence. Such stereotyped reactions in quotidian virtual or real contexts are challenged by Sandhya Mary in her Malayalam novel,Maria Verum Maria published by Mathrubhumi Books, Kozhikode, in 2018, and translated into English as Maria, Just Maria by award-winning translator Jayasree Kalathil.
Moving away from the hackneyed treatment of madness, Kalathil’s brilliant translation captures the author’s breath of fresh air to dive head on into a world of ‘people for whom time had stopped’ (p. 167) for ‘a celebration of everything not normal’ (p. 221). With the eponymous heroine Maria recollecting her unfettered life as a child in her Syrian Christian ancestral home called Kottarathil Veedu in Kerala, to her eventual proscription into societal adulthood, we are drawn into Maria’s deeply intriguing world. The varied characters in this world blur the binaries of normal-abnormal, dead-living, earthly-divine, animal-human, magical-real…to create a ‘space for madness’ (p. 110) and to generate an inclusivity sadly lacking in many of us who are assumed to be normal.