 PHOSPHORUS AND STONE
By Susan Visvanathan
Penguin/Zubaan
Price: Rs 195
Pages: 139 | Is it time to declare a no-fiction zone in the troubled backwaters of God’s Own Country? Every writer with a Kerala connection is diving into the ancestral pond and dredging up the dirt. The latest to fish in these waters is Susan Visvanathan. Not that she does not come with impeccable credentials. She has tracked the lives of the fishing community of Kerala trapped in the ideological turmoil that rapid economic progress has brought into their lives. She’s also a writer of lyrical sensibility. In a seminal essay titled “Workers of the Sea”, there is a riveting description of the “pregnant sea” at the onset of the monsoon, a time when the fisher folk leave the fish to spawn in a band of water, so as to replenish the ocean for the next season. The evocative piece explains the tragedy of Kerala’s fishing community, as greed and commercial fishing have destroyed these practices.  Which is what makes her latest work of fiction that trawls the same territory such a basket of contradictions. The narrator is a young girl called Magda, short for Mary Magdalena, who scrounges for her living by going down to the sea when the fishermen bring in the catch. She has a rich inner world that not only includes a familiarity with Gramsci and Fanon, but Hollywood stars and a truly execrable reference to the Aussie actor Russell Crowe, whom she finds in the shape of a krait rustling in her backyard latrine. Or as she puts it: “Luckily it rustled in time—rustle krait if not Russell Crowe.” There are more philosophical curiosities thrashing about on the beach along with Magda’s romance with a man named Jesu. Somewhere along the way, there’s also a pearl waiting to be found in a luminous interpretation of the story of Christ’s resurrection. Visvanathan’s readers will have to be content even if it’s not a perfect one.
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