Anees Salim and the swansong of a quaint small town

“…(her) breath like dead moths, fell on me at regular intervals.”

Pace. What does pace do to a narrative? The Russian formalists advanced the key insight that literature defamiliarises the ordinary, and by some alchemy, makes it appear like a discovery. Sometimes, it is to place the lens of observation so close, much like in Georgia O’ Keeffe’s vein, wherein the object under scrutiny leaps at the viewer with such force of minutiae as had not been noticed before, in the process morphing into a new object altogether. At other times it entails narrating the experience at a pace that completely alters it. Like “The Small-Town Sea” by Anees Salim that recreates the quintessential small town where the everyday lengthens into looming shadows, lurking in the street corner for weeks, becoming fodder for gossip, making familiar, and while offering a womb-like intimacy, also destroying with its brazen intrusiveness.

The entire first half of the narrative in “The Small-Town Sea” is given to the impending death of the terminally-ill father Vappa, a failed writer, who, in a true poetic flourish, moves his family to Bougainville, a near dilapidated bungalow by the sea where they wait for the in-articulate-able. So, it is essentially a wait for death, punctuated by several near-deaths, rumoured deaths, false alarms and close encounters of a deathly kind. And in using delay as a mechanism, he mimics a sense of lengthened time in small towns. Citrus odours intensify sadness, in an undeniable tribute to Marquez. Humour seeps in where you least expect it. Flashes of morbidity flicker unexpectedly in the mundane. Without knowing that one is humour and the other is morbidity. And without the writer fussing over either. The narrator, a boy, notices everything without the hypocrisy of the grown-ups, experiencing loss and death without the padding of adult defences, crashing down on the nails of experience. Loss and abandonment is evoked in a raw, unsentimental way. Sentimentality, a sometimes helpful attribute he shuns (or hasn’t cultivated yet), and that is precisely what intensifies the narrative, and breaks your heart.

Then there is a marked stamp of self-referentiality. “The Blind Lady’s Descendants” is an expansive suicide note and the mildly autobiographical “The Small-Town Sea” is a winding letter to one Mr Unwin, a London-based literary agent. Needless to say, it’s not benign. Salim’s father, who worked in the Middle East was a failed writer. Salim, too, waited for very long to get a publication deal and those fears might have been accentuated, being based in the small town of Varkala where opportunities were few and far between. The weight of the unwanted legacy of failure was another liability: the horror of attracting a destiny you have fought across generations to keep at bay. The vocation of writing can be treacherous that way.

Important things are always happening outside their confines, the small towns can, at best, lend them mileage through gossip. So this fear of being elided as inconsequential is constant. At best you can be part of the mass rally when an important leader does a sortie and an impersonal wave of the hand at the teeming sea of humanity. And later both the leader and venue is mythologised to a cult status borne by that rare brush with importance. There is no doubt that this inability to publish for a considerable time fostered fears which could have been disruptive but Salim refused to give in.

Salim paints the small town with the incisive detailing of a topographer, the boys biking through dappled tracts of coconut groves, the heartless cliff, bananas in people’s backyard, the clay streets together evoke a peculiar, unchanging landscape. Small town in the lineage of a Narayan or Naipaul, as an inward-looking, self-sustained unit could itself be on its way out, along with the amalgam of its unique responses developed to questions of life, a fountainhead of stories, given the all altering influence of media in these times. In a way, the Indian small town is already moving into the space of memory and nostalgia.

Salim’s reticence is in news. Like a private act of dissent in a world that is increasingly becoming driven by social media, where there is a compulsion to be constantly seen and heard, Salim has declared an avowed abstinence from award functions/events. In so doing the litterateur brings back the focus on the “word” and eschews the trappings of a burgeoning new “Literati”. This choice is an act of courage today. And this is the wry in him, along with the vulnerable in equal measure.

Anees Salim has been recently awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Blind Lady’s Descendants.

The author is a teacher