A tale of intrigue

C. P. Surendran's novel Hadal is a fictionalised account of the incidents that conspired around the 1994 ISRO spy debacle.

May 25, 2015 06:03 pm | Updated 06:03 pm IST

C. P. Surendran.

C. P. Surendran.

On October 20, 1994, the Kerala police arrested a Maldivian woman, for overstaying. The incident triggered a series of events that morphed into a spy case in which an ISRO scientist was accused of handing over blueprints of rocket engines to a foreign woman. Before it settled, the unsavoury dust-storm had wrecked the career of two senior scientists, brought down the morale of the space organisation and forced a chief minister to step down. Eventually, the accused were exonerated and the Maldivian “spies” — Mariam Rasheeda and Fousia Hassan — were released.

In his latest book, Hadal , C. P. Surendran has fictionalised the story whose echoes have never really died down. Considering the contours and colours the case acquired, the journalist-poet-novelist is perhaps the best for the job. Ahead of its Chennai launch, the author shared his thoughts on the book, the climate in the publishing industry and his view of where writing stands today.

In 3000-odd years of creative history, English has been periodically infused with fresh words by those such as Eliot, Joyce, Orwell, Marquez, Shakespeare and Rushdie, he said. “Digital technology and social networking have made the language phonemic and moved it into sound without life interjection. This results in ‘massified’ thinking and writing and market-democratisation where characterisation, sentence formation, spelling and shared experiences are no longer sacred. With more writers than readers around, you have to be an engaging performer to get the crowds,” he said.

Hadal follows the how of Mariam’s indictment, a crowd-sourced falsehood that left a lot of people deeply hurt. In a larger sense, it’s a fictionalised representation of our society. The title is derived from Hades, the netherworld kingdom in Greek mythology.

If the analysis and shaping of the story were joyful, getting it published was a pain. “Publishers were taking political decisions, not literary ones, when they said that the market is not open for a victimhood story,” said Surendran.

“A woman who is presumably a spy and who is involved with a scientist makes for an interesting combination, but the incident led to a diplomatic row,” said cinematographer and filmmaker Rajiv Menon, who was in conversation with the author at the launch, adding that Surendran was brave to write it. He pointed out the journalistic elements in the narrative: in observations like, “Soda bottles with blue marbles in their necks and bright yellow lemons balanced on their mouths”, asides like the incident of deported parents, poetic touches in the imagery — “tattered body of the omelette” in a breakfast-eating episode — and the novelist’s sweep in including the absurdities “that hold a mirror to life around us.”

The styling was a conscious effort to reflect the varying tangents of thought, contextualisation of incidents and the churning in the story, said Surendran. It’s certainly not the usual kind of writing; his challenge was to communicate the phantoms, mediators and the conspiracies without boring people. Asked about the genre, he said that categorisation collapsed since the story couldn’t be compared to anything else. Rajiv pitched in by saying, “I call it a poetic spy tragi-comedy.” The words are visual, he added. The setting itself is not in any particular state — it straddles arid Thirunelveli and green Kerala. The story is both salacious and heart-breaking, and tells us what it is to be a foreigner in this land.

As the evening drew to a close, Surendran suggested that Rajiv make a movie out of the book. Amen to that?

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