Yellow lights of Death
Author : Benyamin
Publisher : Penguin, Rs 399
A whodunit with a twist, Benyamin’s impeccably knitted thriller — translated from Malayalam to English — is a tale that entails various collisions — personal, religious, cultural, geographical as well as historical, writes KAlYANEE RAJAN
After the thumping success of Aadujeevitham (2008) (translated as Goat Days by Joseph Koyipalli), which is running its 100th print, this is Benyamin aka Benny Daniel’s second novel to be translated into English from Malayalam, the original titled Manjaveyil Maranangal (2011). The first thing that strikes the reader is the jacket done in loud neon colours — yellow, red and turquoise — which borders on tackiness. A Malayalam-speaking reader will at once sense discomfort by the English title, which fails to capture the essence of the Malayalam original, the plural ‘deaths’ hinted in the original reduced to a singular ‘death’, while erroneously indicating ‘lights’ instead. The English title seems to be translated too literally as — Manja (yellow), Veyil (lights) and Maranangal (death). While there are no satisfactory equivalents to be found in English of the poetically rich term Veyil, which refers to sunshine or daylight, the English title here seems to conjure the image of perhaps a scary killer of a yellow traffic signal! In fact, “Yellow light of Death” reminds one instantly of the system failure that infamously plagued the Sony Play Station 3 console in 2009. Both the cover and the title are left wanting a careful and sensitive redoing, for they do little justice to the remarkably novel tale that Benyamin deftly spins in the following pages.
Calling it a “story of displacement” in an interview, Benyamin crafts a fast-paced novel-within-a-novel, continuing his constant experimentation with the form and narrative strategies. Also, blurring the thin line between fiction and reality like in his other novels, Benyamin himself and some of his real-life friends play a significant role in propelling the story forward. What begins as a typical non-serious fan-response to a successful novel of the author, soon fires into a quest, of piecing together seven fragments of the life-story of a wannabe novelist, identified till the third part of the story only by his last name Andrapper.
Benyamin and his like-minded friends, Anil, Salim, Achachan, Sudhi Mashu, Biju and Saju aka Nattapranthan comprising the close group called ‘Thursday Market’, embark upon a thrilling chase, quite like cracking the Da Vinci Code, as they sift through each fragment of Andrapper’s life to find a clue to locating the next. The seven fragments are to be located one by one — first via an email by Andrapper himself, and subsequently to be coaxed out of the different people who appear in each fragment of Andrapper's life, the fragments having been entrusted to them with clear instructions to be conveyed a particular manner to the writer Benyamin, who is to be the vehicle of bringing the strange story to light.
It all begins when the protagonist of the inside story Christy, a young man aspiring to become ‘the first novelist of the Malayalam Diaspora’, meets his classmate Jesintha, a Sri lankan Tamil, at a coffee shop, who has grown up into a “smart customs officer” now living in a posh locality, something that forces Christy to wake up and notice “the changing times” around him. later, his idle curiosity upon finding an old class V school photograph turns into a strong desire to locate and reconnect with his friends, finally becoming an obsession and as if in response, he begins running into them one-by-one, at random places.
The social-networking site Orkut plays a vital role: Christy begins his quest of reconnecting with his old classmates by setting up a community in the name of his school, St. Joseph's, Seleucia, a pursuit which changes his life forever, tantalisingly sucking him into the vortex of many intertwined histories — that of the archipelago of Diego Garcia, a city of lagoons among the islands of Chagos, where Christy’s life is set; of his own immensely powerful Andrapper family which was to inherit the rule of Diego from the retreating French but was prevented from it; and the history of early Christianity in India— of the Nasrani documents and Chaldean Syrian Christians, and their veiled rituals, all set in Udayamperoor, Kerala.
Christy’s quest is brought to a crisis as he and Jesintha witness the murder by gunshot of their fellow classmate Senthil, in broad daylight, and after identifying him for Chirsty’s benefit, Jesintha walks away with absolute nonchalance. Christy’s life is turned upside down as he tries to follow the investigation with a certain numbness: The death is attributed to heart attack, the entire shooting episode is systematically wiped clean from the public memory as well as the Public Security records. Though he is warned repeatedly to drop the case; first by his uncle Stephen Andrapper — an investigative director, and then by his father, the cold-bloodedness and shadiness of the eventuality ensnares Christy. Through his mysteriously reclusive grandfather Valayapapan’s aid, Christy rummages through the historic “Room of Forefathers”, a place most sacred to the Andrapper family house as it stored “memories of the many (Andrapper) generations” that lived before, and coming across antiques such as the “hasta-phalakam” and forbidden texts such as the "Kanyabhogasooktham" or The Rules of Virgin Pleasure.
The second unresolved death/murder that rattles and pitches a more personal stake for Christy is that of a chirpy-chatty woman Melvin, working as a nurse with the city hospital, someone who had personally witnessed the cover-up of Senthil’s body in the emergency ward, and who dies short of a formal engagement to Christy. Accompanying her body to her parental home in the mainland, Christy stumbles upon more mysteries, the connections between the Valayadathu Veedu, keepers of the Chaldaen traditions and the rituals of Mariam Seva, the invocations to the furious deity Thaikkattamma, the ‘queen of the Nazarenes’.
What follows is the racy and gripping final journey, for Christy in the novel within, and a parallel one for Benyamin and his friends in the frame novel, as they seek to uncover the ties between the two houses of Andrapper and Valayedathu. With several strongly uncertain characters including those of Melvin’s brother Meljo, the heir of Valayedathu Veedu, to the engineer Jijo, Christy’s frenzied search leads him to witness a ritual at the Veedu, whereafter more inexplicable skeletons tumble out. Was Senthil involved with the Porn industryIJ What was the link between Jesintha and Christy’s fatherIJ What was Christy’s father’s real profession and why had he gone undergroundIJ Why was the once-royal Andrapper family under house-arrestIJ And finally, who was behind the twin deaths/murders in broad daylight, which were being attributed to natural causesIJ Towards the end, Christy does get to know of all the 17 classmates he had wanted to reconnect with, all altered beyond his expectations, but at what personal costIJ
A whodunit with a twist, Benyamin’s impeccably knitted thriller is a tale of various collisions — personal, religious, cultural, geographical and historical. The innovative piece of meta-fiction encompasses plural histories which collide and merge with each other at different points. Aspirations take sudden turns, meteoric in most cases, leading to perplexing rise or fall; transforming people and lives as they’ve known it. Though the English translation leaves some scope for improvement, Yellow lights of Death, pitches a stronger case for translation of more of Benyamin’s works into English, for a wider audience to savour and relish his breathtaking craft, his own masterful and unique art of telling stories.
The reviewer is an Assistant Professor of English at a Delhi University college