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This is the story of Bhima, the second son, always second in line - a story never adequately told until one of India’s finest writers conjured him up from the silences in Vyasa’s narrative. M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Bhima is a revelation - lonely, eager to succeed, treated with a mixture of affection and contempt by his Pandava brothers, and with scorn and hatred by his Kaurava cousins, Bhima battles incessantly with failure and disappointment. He ...
Kuttiedathi and other stories is a collection of the finest stories of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, available for the first time in English translation. Ordinary middle class lives and sufferings of Northern Kerala have seldom been so engagingly told as in Nair's fiction. If the lead story 'Kuttiedathi' mixes tragic memory and domestic martyrdom, When the Doors of Heaven Open' plays out another life upon which centre a group of lives, all selfish, caring, and indifferent ...
Naalukettu (1958) is the story of a young boy, Appunni, set in a joint family (a tharavad) of the Nair caste in the author's native village, Kudallur. Growing up without a father and away from the prestige and protection of the matrilineal home to which he belongs, Appunni spends his childhood in extreme social misery. Fascinated by accounts of the grand 'naalukettu tharavad' of which he should have been a part, Appunni visits the house only to be rejected by the ...
When the winds blow wild snuffing out the lamp, it is the Master Carpenter who takes up their challenge. Some quick calculations later he raises a stone slab at a distance, and the flames burn steady. When his own heart plays games with him, the games of desire, once again he triumphs. But how does a father react, who knows that his son has far surpassed his talent, his ethos? Was Perumthachan able to accept this challenge? The legendary tale of Perumthachan, the ...