From a small hillock, a decapitated head bears witness to the Kurukshethra War. The brave warrior who came to fight on the side of the just and the beaten becomes a victim of treachery and deceit that form the cornerstones of all wars. As the battle roars below him, his lifeless eyes still continue to see and his gored head narrates the tales that would become myths and legends for those who would walk the earth in the future to unfold. This is the last story of Devadas V M’s Vazhi Kandupidikkunnavar and probably could be a metaphor for the death of the author even as he continues to narrate new tales that bear testimony to his own end and the new meanings his words would don in a different time and a different milieu. Here is a quirky collection of eight stories, with the plots ranging from the idiosyncratic and bizarre to the mundane and ordinary. Devadas V M | Photo Credit: Special arrangement Mob fury The first story ‘Prasnothari’ takes the reader spot on to contemporary, gory incidents of moral policing and mob fury in the country. It is the artful media voyeur who is the central protagonist of the story and its narrator. In a language scorching with satire, the plot unfolds the story of a hapless woman and her friend, supposedly caught in an act of immorality by a mob. However what has been trapped along with the duo is a strange beast, hitherto unknown and unseen by anyone. The erotic fixation of the mob, both on the stripped body of the woman and the frightened beast, soon accrue the tone of a zoophilia that reveals the rotten core of a society that seems as sexually repressed as it is depraved. Slowly but surely the narration unfolds the bestiality and hypocrisy of a civilization that traps and torments every living creature for its own gross avarice and stifled lascivious fantasies. Through a language powerful in its simplicity and satire, Devadas mocks each and every institution that should strive to protect the rights of the oppressed, from the police to the fire force to the forest conservation officers, even as he strips the cloak off our received notions of morality. ‘Nayakan’ is a story that topples the popular understanding of a super hero. ‘Vazhi Kandupidikkunnavar’ | Photo Credit: Special arrangement The star body, with its chiselled beauty, choreographed masculinity and carefully constructed invincibility, all of which could trigger off mass adulation and massive applauses, is nevertheless as racked by pain and as fragile as any human body is what the narrative seems to emphasise. That the hero is dust and to dust he returns, in terms of both physical decay and fan adulation, makes every hero a broken Coriolanus at some point of time, one whose pride comes before his fall. ‘Veruthe Varthamanam Paranju Nadannu Vazhi Kandupidikkunnavar’ gathers a new resonance in the post-flood context of Kerala. As civilisation renders hills and plains into arid rocks and pushes their inhabitants into insanity and suicide, the narrator who goes in quest of a life-giving fountain, which is now lost, imagines a tumbling deluge in a landscape where there is not even the sound of water. The last story ‘Chavusakshyam’, which is probably one of the best in the collection, is dedicated to the memory of Rohit Vemula, who fought against establishments and finally yielded to death, saddened but not defeated, as his legacy vouches. This is the tale of Barbarika alias Belarsen alias Khatushyam, another warrior wronged in history and whose death is plotted through a conspiracy. Grandson of Bheema and Hidimbi and son of Ghatotkacha, he comes to fight a fair battle and lend his services to the oppressed. But nothing in Kurukshethra is fair, and Barbarika falls to the ruses and guiles of the master conniver, the ace politician Vasudeva. As the Surdarshana Chakra tears his head asunder from his body, his only wish is that he be allowed to witness the battle whose sole victor, according to him, is Krishna. It is a poignant tale of betrayal of the valiant, the defeat by deception of the just and the best. In a world where ignorant armies clash in darkness, Barbarika becomes a symbol of light, of the enlightened who have penetrating wisdom but who need to be silenced, to be a mute witness as the lesser ones win battles and claim their laurels. Pushing the envelope Combining the mythical and the modern, here is a short story collection that pushes forward the art of storytelling, experimenting, innovating and inventing new patterns and structures for the short story. There are stories where the author uses the Whatsapp chat format as a new technique for telling stories in the digital age. The story weaves into its structure Googling and other online activities that an average mortal is addicted to, in the process resurrecting the genre to new possibilities in the age of incessant digital consumption. Devadas opens up new horizons for the Malayalam short story by narrating the fragmentary and fractured nature of our realities. A fortnightly column on the best of fiction in Malayalam literature. The writer is Professor, Institute of English, University of Kerala. Vazhi Kandupidikkunnavar Devadas V.M. Mathrubhumi Books Rs 150

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