An upcoming conversation with Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari

This conversation – with Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, author of one of the most acclaimed novels of the year, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half – is happening at Sunder Nursery, Delhi on Dec 6, at 4 pm. Please show up if you’re around. It is the first of this season’s Suitable Conversations curated by A Suitable Agency.

I read the book when it was published earlier this year, and was very impressed; but I think I have enjoyed it even more rereading it in the last few days for the discussion.

During that first reading, I had found the large number of characters – and their intersecting first-person narratives – a tiny bit confusing at first; but the book grew and grew in the telling, becoming an intense account of mob mentality and how it snowballs. The story, set in a small Kerala town on a very rainy day, is about the moralistic reactions to an adulterous relationship – between a middle-aged married woman and a young man – in a setting where matters of societal honour, the virtue of women and so on, become more important than individual autonomy or freedom of expression. It might be said that the author uses the honour-revenge motifs in Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold as a sort of palimpsest; but this is very much a narrative of its own place, culture and period. It is also, importantly, about the world that WhatsApp has built. And so, while it doesn’t try hard to be “topical”, there is this undercurrent, a constant reminder of how social media – used malevolently – moulds us in different contexts.

I caught most of Saharu’s conversation with Akshaya Mukul at The Book Shop a few months ago, and was charmed by his directness and eloquence (he apologised, unnecessarily, for “rambling”). A running theme of the event – including through his banter with the audience – was that he has a very cynical view of human nature, but it wasn’t dark by my standards. And I was glad to hear him say some things you don’t often hear at events where people are trying to be politically correct or “positive” – among them, that for an author it is important to be able to think through the perspective of the *perpetrator* (as opposed to just the victim); that literature has no obligation to address what social scientists want it to address; that in his view people are rarely anti-casteist or anti-racist despite what they profess to be; and that he doesn’t believe literature has conversionary or proselytising power. (“But we just have to give a voice to certain things.”) And a prize quote about the duplicity inherent in human nature: “Any animal that can use speech to express its feelings *will* tell lies.”

All that said, forget about the teller and trust the tale. Do look out for this fine, multi-layered book.