A father whose name we don’t know, but who is referred to as Vappa, dies on the very first page of this novel, and the narrative thereafter is painstakingly jotted down by his grieving 13-year-old son, whose name we also don’t know.
After having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Vappa decided to leave the big city and move back to the small seaside town where he grew up, perhaps to come full circle now that his body was withering away.
However, before leaving the city, which too remains unnamed, Vappa took his son to the small rented chamber where he spent years writing his three first novels. ‘We stepped into an empty room that had damp patches on the walls and a fine film of dust on the floor. The air was musty, ranked of sawdust.’ Vappa points to the spot where his writing desk used to stand. He sent the three manuscripts to a British literary agent who never responded, but to whom this current novel — written by the son — is addressed.
Dreamy sequences
Along with his son, Vappa brings his wife and one-year-old daughter to this town, the name of which we’re not told, though we may assume that it is Varkala where Anees Salim grew up.
This curious nomenclatural lacunae soft-focuses the text into one of those dreamy black-and-white film sequences of old Hollywood cinema, but in its own peculiar way gels with the general ambience of this waiting for the inevitable.
The dying Vappa is protective of his son—who of course is his only future—so, although they live by the sea, the boy is warned off the beach.
This admonition creates an aquaphobia in the narrator and becomes a foreshadowing of tragedies to come.
The Small-Town Sea; Anees Salim, Penguin Random House, ₹599.
The story is rich in such metaphorical imagery, where almost everything echoes something else. Another example: the small town has changed and Vappa’s childhood friends have grown up. One is a fisherman, another is a coconut-plucking Peeping Tom, but they have no clue that their old classmate became an award-winning novelist, because people don’t touch newspapers here. For Vappa it doesn’t matter much; in their company he indulges in a childhood nostalgia that, ironically, passes over the head of the child narrator, who is too busy trying to grasp the links between his and his father’s childhoods.
Malgudi echoes
Although too small to have a pizzeria, the town has, along with the rest of Kerala, become a global beach destination overrun by foreign tourists with pockets full of dollars. But these are ephemeral, glimpsed in passing such as ‘a long-haired, bare-chested foreigner sitting on the doorway of a lodge, strumming a guitar’.
Instead, we are invited to wallow in a distinctly Narayanesque and mildly satirical melancholia resulting from the gradual extinction of slow-paced, humdrum small-town life by the onslaught of urbanisation. The narrator even hints at the possibility of introducing a Malgudi-type sketch map of the town, as he sees it, into his text.
He explores this small world with his mischievous orphaned classmate Bilal, who spies pirate ships when he climbs treetops and has no qualms about begging cash off the white people to spend on cool drinks. The boy’s embarrassment at his friend’s antics turns to disdain which slowly but surely makes the story darker. What began with envy towards a friend and rivalry grows into bitterness, aggression, and a disturbing sadism towards pigeons.
At the book’s midpoint, we return to Vappa’s funeral but his death is belittled by the fact that only two semi-paparazzi photographers turn up. On the same day that the obituary is published, his son sees it being turned into one of those paper cones in which peanuts are sold. The only inheritance the boy has, apart from the memories he describes in these letters to the silent literary agent, is the bathroom cabinet’s worth of fragrances that he uses to keep the scent of his father alive. But his loss also leads to a sense of maturity or as he writes, ‘From here I will walk alone.’
That core of loneliness is the fulcrum for this evenly balanced plot, an existential angst brought home by the terrifying fact that the boy cannot reach out for emotional or intellectual relief to the phoney and perfidious adults who surround him.
There’s something about the sombre that simply makes it irresistible; a bit of darkness is all that it takes to lighten up any piece of fiction. In The Small-Town Sea , Salim wades out into water so deep and dark that a film adaptation of the novel could almost have been titled One Wedding and Four Funerals .
But in the final pages I see what Salim may be trying to accomplish—a Swami and Friends suitable for the darkness of the 21st century combined with an Indian response to that eternal growing-up classic, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
The Small-Town Sea; Anees Salim, Penguin Random House, ₹599.
The writer’s latest comic detective novel set in Bengaluru is the bestselling Hari, a Hero for Hire.
