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Bright as an unshed tear (BOOK REVIEW)
By Shinie Antony, Indo-Asian News Service

Book: "The Unspoken Curse"; Author: V.K. Madhavan Kutty; Publisher: Tara Press; Price: Rs.295

An ordinary woman in rural Kerala dies, but it is not an unsung demise as "The Unspoken Curse" brings her back to life in a story about neglect. Not an active, self-conscious neglect, but a passive and unconscious one that accentuates true human selfishness.

"Kalyanikutty Edathi had dark circles around her eyes even in her teens. This had been called a lack of luck, the mark of a curse. No one had understood that the tears that had not been shed had gathered there and caused that mark."

The posthumous praise for Kalyanikutty is not without its attendant pathos as veteran author V.K. Madhavan Kutty's pen deftly picks on her silent sacrifices that form the cornerstone of a traditional Nair 'tharavad' (ancestral home).

The resultant portrait for all its unsentimental delineation is a tragic one. It is a useless life when it is spent in service to those who crave service but not the servant. Kalyanikutty, who was the middle-child, a girl and dark-skinned at that, breathes her last as she did her first - in complete anonymity.

All families have one such member - who is a perfect foil for the unfolding future of the others and whose own fate is that of mutely waiting and watching. Kalyanikutty's helping hands are also those that strangle her own dreams one by one. 

Her sacrifices devour her in the end but her death is of no consequence either. Kutty's novel is all about this pungent but poignant irony.

Translated by Prema Jayakumar from the original "Asreekaram", this is a nostalgic narrative set in south Malabar with an inward eye flashbacking to nuances lost in time and the unspoken that echoes deafeningly from the past.

Barring a glaring typo at the back cover that brutally axes poetess and environmentalist Sugathakumari's quote, the book is devoid of grammatical glitches that sometimes dog translations.

Apart from authoring 16 books, Kutty, who won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award for "Journalism - A Journey", is a former editor of the Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi. He was also one of the founder directors of the Malayalam TV channel Asianet.

The columnist-journalist's last novel "The Village Before Time" was short-listed for the Crossword Award.