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Shobha Warrier pays homage to M T Vasudevan Nair, the legendary writer and filmmaker who passed into the ages on Wednesday, December 25, 2024.
Sethuvinu ennum oraleye ishtamundayirunnullu; athu Sethuvine maatram (Sethu always loved only one person, and that was Sethu.)
Sumitra accused Sethu of harbouring such a disgusting thought, for being self-centred and not caring about her feelings.
Those were the days when self-love was considered abominable.
The first time I read MT's Kaalam was as a school student, at an age when I could not decipher how someone could love himself more than he could love anybody else.
But that one line by Sumitra, uttered scornfully to Sethu resonated with me throughout my life.
Today when I read the news of the passing away of M T Vasudevan Nair (I feel so awkward reading his full name in print as he is just MT to all of us, his readers and Keralites), this one line came back to me.
To me, MT was not just a writer whom I adored and revered from my school days; he was a very important part of my growing up years. (I am sure it is the same for so many others of my generation. I do not know how it is for the generation after me.)
No other writer, perhaps no other individual, had such a profound influence on me and my thinking when I was growing up.
The characters created by him were so real that they spoke to me, they opened up a new world and new thoughts in front of me. In the process, they made me think and look at life from a different perspective.
It was his characters who made me aware of what existential anguish is, much before I was introduced to Sartre, Camus or Kafka.
As a person who grew up in a nuclear family, it was from his books that I learnt about how it was to live in a joint family, how it was to have an absent father, how painful it was for a child to wait for the day his father visited home, and how distressing it was for the child to have a conversation with a stranger who was his father.
As a child I used to wonder why the tharavad was an awful place to be for all his protagonists. It had the smell of sadness, misery and disease.
The tharavad offered them only pain and distress while for me, it was a joyful place to be during the summer vacation when all of us cousins gathered and had only fun from morning till evening.
Through MT's characters, I was exposed to an agonisingly sad reality, a social system that had to be condemned and discarded.
It was many years later, in 1996, that I had the opportunity to meet him in person, rather an unexpected opportunity to share a dais with him.
He had won the Jnanapith award, and the Malayali Samajam in Chennai (Madras in those days) had organised a function to felicitate him. As I had happened to get the Lalitambika Antharjanam award for the young woman writer that year for my short story collection, they invited me also.
Needless to say, I was very nervous and anxious to speak in front of the person I had idolised all my life.
Shamelessly, I declared on stage that my teenage hero was not Kamal Hasan or Sunil Gavaskar but a writer called MT. Perhaps it was cheeky of me to say so, but it made him smile.
Almost thirty years have passed, but I still cherish that evening when I could share a dais with him.
Yes, MT as a human being must have left this place but the books he has written, the characters he has created will never leave any of us who had the good fortune to enjoy them.
When I read that he was very ill and admitted in hospital, the first image that came to my mind was a scene from the 1994 film Sukrutham, written by MT himself.
Ravishankar, (touchingly played by Mammootty) a journalist survives cancer and comes back to his office to start working again. But he finds his cubicle taken over by somebody else. Then he locates his obituary written by his colleagues inside a drawer.
The realisation that people have moved on to a world without him wrecks him.
He then edits his own obituary and leaves the office to permanently leave the world that no longer need him.
It was one of the most heart-breaking scenes I have seen in a film.
I wonder what would MT have written if he were to write his own obituary.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com