M Mukundan’s You: A Novel presents a complex tapestry of death-in-waiting and the lived experiences leading to that moment. The protagonist-narrator convenes a press conference to announce his death: ‘I shall die on the sixteenth of next month, a Monday…. This is all I have to tell you. Please inform your readers of my impending death…. I’ll die on the sixteenth and it won’t be by suicide.’ While this is received with apathy by the public, it invites the readers to be part of an exploratory, existential and psychological narrative. Like the young rookie journalist, Paru, the readers are drawn into the life course of the protagonist-narrator, Unnikrishnan, who refers to himself as ‘you’. Unlike a second-person point of view that presents the plot in an objective manner, the protagonist’s reference to himself as ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ projects a self-reflective trajectory that not only reveals a detachment from the past but also a persistent attempt to meet life and its vagaries directly.
The novel is divided into two books. Book One presents a linear bildungsroman narrative in twenty-one chapters. While the action begins in the present in the opening chapter, ‘Your Death’, it traverses in a chronological manner to trace his childhood, student days, friendship with Balan, occupation at Kalyani talkies, his reading, his life as a writer, his writer’s block after the runaway success of his novel Digambaran set in the context of the Malabar Rebellion and his decision to take a vacation from life. This decision not only takes him away from his family and friends but also lands the family in trouble with the police.
The disappearance of the protagonist is existentialist but not nihilist. ‘You could not live without writing. But you were unable to write. What was the way out? You loved life as much as the sea loves the shore. Your grouse was that life did not reciprocate even an iota of that love. The thought of suicide had never occurred to you. How could someone with a lust for life end his own life? Instead, you began to seriously consider the option of taking a vacation from life and going somewhere else.’ Witness the sensitivity with which the author captures the angst of an individual even while preserving the dignity and meaning of life! This showcases the essence of the writer’s contribution to modernist sensibilities in Malayalam literature. On the part of the translator, it requires sensitivity to the nuances of words, tones and voices in the text. The translator Nandakumar has done complete justice in this respect.
Book Two presents the return of Unnikrishnan to his place of birth. Even though people and locations have changed, the protagonist-narrator decides to settle down in Karikkat. He’s surrounded by his friends and family, yet he chooses to set his own rhythm for his daily existence. When he’s diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, he chooses to opt for legally approved euthanasia, a cause that has defined Balan’s career as a doctor. Book Two traverses Unnikrishnan’s rebirth to his final journey. The poignancy with which the sequence of events has been portrayed raises important questions regarding the meaning of life and death.
On the one hand, the narrative foregrounds the question of choice available to an individual to shape one’s life and more importantly, death. This is succinctly captured in the epigraph from Dr Heidi Henson. ‘None of us choose to be born, but we should have the right to choose when and how we die.’ While the protagonist-narrator exercises his choice, readers are also alerted to change the way in which mortality is viewed and interpreted. An emerging concept in the field of biology is the ‘third state’. It refers to the capacity of the cells in dead organisms to survive and transform into new life forms. This ‘plasticity’ defines the adaptability and resilience of the body in response to the phenomena of life and death. The writer has effectively captured the ‘third state’ in terms of in-between spaces in the human psyche.
One way by which the narrator explores human beings is through his extensive reading. Even while he devours books by Gandhi, Rumi and Kafka, he is hooked on to Malayalam books including those by Thakazhi, Kesavadev, Uroob and SK Pottekat as well as Russian and continental literature by Gorky, Sholokov, Dostoevsky and Camus. ‘You felt like a famished man in front of whom a full plate of rice and mackerel curry has been placed.’ This apparently eclectic choice of writers and works foregrounds the affirmation of the human in the face of adversity and amidst the vagaries of life. The real feat of the novel You is the way in which it seamlessly dovetails the best thoughts in nineteenth and twentieth century classics to a regional twenty-first century novel.
V Bharathi Harishankar is Professor and Vice Chancellor, Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and Higher Education for Women, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.