MT Vasudevan Nair’s ‘Bear with Me, Amma’ is portrait of a modern writer

GJV Prasad

What a pleasure it was to read this book. MT Vasudevan Nair (popularly known as MT) is a major Malayali writer and filmmaker. Many awards have been conferred on him, including the Jnanpith Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the National Film Award, and the Padma Bhushan. His literary works include short stories (the first collection was published in 1952), novels, children’s books, screenplays, travelogues and memoirs. He has said that the short story is his favourite genre. However, he will be known forever for all his works, including his films.

‘Bear with Me, Amma’ consists of nine essays (memoirs) and nine short stories based on his experiences, his family, the people he knew. In effect, we have the portrait of a major modern writer here, one which will be of interest to all readers. The memoirs are absorbing in themselves but the stories show what the writer makes of his experiences, making you wish for such works from other writers!

The book begins with a dedication by MT to his mother, his amma, who aroused his interest in the art of storytelling but never knew he had begun to publish his stories when she was alive, and who would never see his accomplishment as a writer. She is a strong presence in these memoirs and in some of the stories. A storytelling mother, one who struggled to bring up her sons single-handed (because of a wayward husband), one who was generous even when struggling to make ends meet — what more inspiration can a writer-son need?

And as if she were not enough, MT’s world was peopled with characters and events that were grist to his writerly mill. In ‘A Story is Born’, MT tells us how people and their lives inspired him to write, the most poignant of which is the story occasioned by his father’s arrival from Ceylon with a young girl. It is soon clear to the young MT that the girl is his (half) sister, and that his father has another family far away. Having always longed for a sister, but seeing the trouble this sudden arrival of one is causing in the household, MT loses her without ever having established any relationship with the girl who doesn’t speak Malayalam. Years later, he learns that she is married. The sense of loss, of life having gone by, provokes MT to write a story about this. He tells us how he went about it, how he decided who the central character would be, what the narrative point of view would be, and the other decisions he had to take before he wrote the story ‘In Your Memory’.

The memoirs also sketch for us a Kerala that has faded away. Some of this in terms of commercialisation of festivals and the effect of divisions between communities in their celebration (‘The Festival Season’), the landscape and rivers of Kerala, lost in the name of progress (‘The Nila River I Remember’), and the role of writers in constructing the culture scape of Kerala and the impact of their writing (‘The Second Footfall’. The last memoir is about a distant relative who is an alcoholic but would always turn up at the most emotionally draining moment in people’s lives, when one of their relatives is terminally sick. He takes over everything and helps them go happily and relieves the family of the burden of arrangements that have to be made. It was this person who gave rise to the story ‘Swargam Thurakunna Samayam’ (‘When the Doors of Heaven Open’) and the film ‘Aalkoottathil Thaniye’ (‘Alone in the Crowd’).

The pleasure in reading this book is ensured by the brilliant translator Gita Krishnankutty, who has made Malayalam literature so accessible to many of us over the years. Another feather in her cap.