Nalukettu – A Magical Text from M.T Vasudevan Nair

Nalukettu – A Magical Text from M.T Vasudevan Nair

After seven years, my hands accidentally fell on the novel “Nalukettu” from the inside shelf of my library unit. In certain instances, we feel obliged towards our short memory. As I started to read, 5th time of re-reading, I slowly started to extract real pleasure as if approaching a new fascinating novel.

           Many celebrated texts glorified by the critics not even possess the quality of single round readability. Still, they are famous and excited as admired works. How many adore and empathize with the characters portrayed through these novels. I am pointing on the so-called new generation writers of Malayalam fiction. The only benchmark a text should be appraised is its quality of readability. Face Flatter, give, and take compliments doesn’t make a text to transcend time.

           As before, when I entered the novel, tears gushed out from my eyes at several instances. When Appunni threw out from his ancestral home, it was a strange and abnormal feeling evoked like the ultimate loser in life. The darkest emotion of being isolated and ostracized that too shown through the eyes of an eight-year-old kid multiplies the agony. 

The Protagonist Appunni is a scion of a wealthy and aristocratic traditional family in a village. His mother married a man of her choice that, too, from a lower caste against the family wishes oust her forever from their family tree history. Appunni’s father dies when he was a toddler and grows with her mother away from the protection and prestige of the matrilineal home Appunni belongs to. The novel captures Appunni’s struggles and rise in life while everything else surrounding him falls to decay.

           M.T is modest and straight to the heart writer, who carves his text with his magical words. The degeneration and the collapse of the matrilineal joint family system that transforms to the nuclear family and the social changes happening around the milieu of the story act as the subtle plot with the action plot.   

           After the close of the recent unique reading experience of Nalukettu, while closing the book, it assured me I’d come back again to perceive the poignant characters and their emotions stacked in between the pages.