Book Review: Chronicle of an Hour and a Half

Many noted works of fiction that were originally written in Malayalam, such as Cheemeen and My Grandad had an Elephant, have been translated and can now also be read in English. And in recent years, Malayali authors have also produced some excellent works in English – Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, which won the Booker prize in 1997, is the first book that comes to mind, and then there is Kochi-based Anees Salim, who won the Sahitya Academi award for The Blind Lady’s Descendants in 2018 and who has written over half a dozen books over the past decade.

Now, there is a notable addition to this distinguished list of modern Indian English novels written by Malayali writers – a splendid new novel written by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, who is based in Areekode, near Calicut, in Kerala. Set in Kerala’s Muslim community, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half is Kannanari’s first novel and its main protagonists are Nabeesumma, the mother of five ‘useless’ sons, and Reyhana, a 40-year old woman, with a husband working in the Gulf, who breaks out against societal norms by having a brief and ultimately tragic affair with Nabeesumma’s son, Burhan.

The novel’s plot centres around how a small town reacts to the news of this affair – and how it spreads via rumours and hearsay given that the boy is 15 years Reyhana’s junior. In pre-Internet times, we can speculate that both may have managed to keep their little secret unrevealed. In Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, Kannanari’s plot introduces the Internet into the story – which becomes quite a significant event in this particular small town in Kerala – and shows how it leads to mob fury, terrible consequences and an unnecessary loss of life.

Kannanari could have chosen to write this in a standard format but by using the stream of consciousness technique – or monologues – he breaks new literary ground, even as he tells a story of how easily rumours spread in this day and age of the Internet, a world where baseless allegations fly fast and loose and the mob mentality, with all its concomitant fury and brutality, come to the fore all too easily. This, the author expresses through each of the book’s 15 dramatis personae in their own words, feelings and inner consciousness, which often reflect their parochial upbringing. The aforementioned 15 include two children as well, who closely observe how adults in their world behave, even as the children themselves cope with not being able to understand whatever it was that was happening in the cruel adult world, while still being aware that something serious was taking place.

In the novel, news of the affair between Reyhana and Burhan spreads far and wide in Vaiga, the fictional town in which the story is set, and Kannanari does a very good job of portraying a provincial town in the throes of upheaval over an illicit affair that is deemed unacceptable by sundry characters in the novel, including a hapless Imam. In the novel, Kannanari addresses themes such as love, lust, loneliness, patriarchy, boredom, impotence, women’s resilience (best epitomised by Nabeesumma) rumour-mongering, and the ugly side of the Internet, which is illustrated by the phenomenon of mob violence. ‘There were too many boys with too many phones shooting the fight with hands high in the air, pushing and pulling each other for a better view,’ the author writes in one place. A simple sentence, but one that illustrates a scene that may well be commonplace in small towns across the country.

The people participating are neighbours of the truant couple, and in the unfolding street fights, whose provenance is an alleged slap given to Nabeesumma, do not seem willing to help and bring things to a halt. In the author’s own description, ‘Everyone was unarticulate in ungrammatical fury.’ The novel ends with Nabeesumma and Reyhana reflecting on the impact of the horrific murder that has taken place in their lives. Nabeesumma lost her beloved son, and Reyhana, her boyfriend. While Nabeesumma draws on her inner fortitude nurtured by a hardscrabble life where she did everything from scrubbing dishes to rolling beedis to keep the family together, Reyhana survives an attempt at suicide, possibly due to a kind husband who was ‘just boring and innocuous like Doordarshan’ and could not sexually satisfy her, but seems ready to stand by and forgive his unfaithful wife.

One aspect of the novel that’s intriguing is the several references to 1991 as a year when it rained so heavily, which the author describes as ‘water wouldn’t cease rising and hills were sliding like sand and trees were crashing.’ For Nabeesumma’s husband, 1991 was ‘a terrible year’ in which he found himself impotent. The year as we know marked India’s economic reforms, a watershed moment for our economic history. Allegorically speaking, rain can wash away the past or the world as we know it, and one wonders whether this new voice uses that as a metaphor for sweeping changes wrought by technology/social media that cannot be, in a manner of speaking, rolled back.

Kannannari’s debut novel has some parallels with the Nigerian author Abubaker Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms, where the main protagonists are a 55-year-old woman who dares to have an affair with a gang leader half her age. It ends in tragedy when the woman’s wealthy son returns to seek revenge on his mother’s young lover. But coming back to Kannanari’s book, the story in this slim, 200-page novel takes place in the backdrop of Kerala’s incessant rains, which the author says affected his writing. In a video made by his agency, Kannanari provides a peek into his writerly discipline saying he writes for 6-8 hours on a daily basis, going up to 12 hours over weekends. Asked what he’d do if he didn’t write, Kannanari says he’d have chosen to be a taxi driver in a city where people are ‘respectful’ with taxi drivers. One wonders which Indian city might qualify.

Chronicle of an Hour and a Half is a delightful debut novel from a promising writer. The book should be read for not only how it broaches the nexus between social media and society itself, but for the writer’s sheer style, his unique way of saying things and his usage of particularly interesting metaphors. ‘They looked like wildebeest during the great migrations on the African veldts,’ he says, of people deserting a bazaar in Vaiga. It’s a book readers will thoroughly enjoy.

-Brian de Souza

Chronicle of an Hour and a Half
Author: Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari
Publisher: Westland
Format: Hardcover / Kindle
Price: Rs 375 / Rs 347
Available on Amazon