K.R. Meera’s magic-realism-suffused novella, Qabar , can seem like a conundrum at first, making you wonder about its true essence. But then you realise that the work defies specificity and categorisation. It is many things at many levels — at once a fierce feminist tract and a magical love story, at once a hypnotic chiaroscuro of history, memory and the occult, and a political comment on religion, identity, law and justice.
Translated from the Malayalam by Nisha Susan, Qabar is told as the first-person narrative of Bhavana Sachidanandan, an additional district judge and single mother to a boy with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The story weaves in and out of the sober reality of Bhavana’s existence and the realm of the occult and the supernatural, to which her mind gravitates.
Her real world is taken up with the cases she presides over in court, an ex-husband whose memory still rankles, her child’s condition, his tantrums that must be borne, and his heartbreaks that must be soothed.
There was a time when Bhavana adored the man she was married to, even though he was a bully who needed to feel superior to her, forcing her to make sure that she never outshone him in any way. She parted ways with him eventually, because, as she euphemistically explains to her child, he lacked “empathy.”
Abusive relationships
However, it is not just Bhavana who threw off the suffocating burden of an abusive and unequal marital relationship. Her mother had done the same. Soon after Bhavana’s wedding, she had left her husband for a “room of her own”.
“When I was your age, I thought family means heaven,” her mother tells her. “After a while, I understood that this too is a workplace. A twenty-four-hour job. No leave, no promotion… At work you might get a good service entry. At home, nothing you have ever done appears in the accounts. Only, everything else you are supposed to do.”
This is the searing realisation of generation after generation of women — that marriage can be brutally exploitative, that it is an institution where the demands on a woman’s love and service are never-ending and never enough. Bhavana is part of this reality, as was her mother before her, and even though both have broken the cage and flown out, perhaps that reality defines them still.
But then magic enters Bhavana’s life, and touched by its mesmeric, iridescent spell, her carefully held-together emotional equilibrium, her beliefs and prejudices and her understanding of what’s right and possible, crack and shatter.A petitioner named Kaakkasseri Khayaluddin Thangal appears in her court, seeking to stop the construction on a piece of land which, he claims, contains the grave or qabar of an ancestor. The moment their eyes meet, Bhavana faints. She learns later that he is a sorcerer, a mind-reader, a djinn-worshipper, and the maker of all manner of magic.
Mundane to magical
Perhaps she is in thrall to him right from the outset, for soon her mind starts leaping towards the magical and the otherworldly. She becomes almost obsessed with the strange lore of her own family — the ancestor with supernatural powers who drew his strength from two girls whose feet never touched the ground. But even magic and miracles are no proof against patriarchal savagery. The other men in the family were intent on destroying these magical beings, so they nailed and stifled the two demi-goddesses and killed the shaman who cherished them.
At some point in the narrative, Thangal the magician and the mind-reader becomes the one for Bhavana. To her, he spells empathy and understanding and savoir faire . Perhaps therein lies his real power, the real source of his ability to turn the mundane into the magical, the banal into the sublime.
Thangal represents a lot more, though. The qabar that he is fighting to protect bears echoes of the Babri Masjid that was pulled down, and his lived experience of being a Muslim in India points to religious bigotry and the ruthless divide between Hindus and Muslims that has been kept smouldering for centuries in this country.
Qabar throbs with a multi-dimensional intensity and a multiplicity of themes that may seem somewhat directionless at times. But its appeal is really that of poetry — splendorous with half-glimpsed truths. This book is a journey unbound by the usual markers and the usual answers — it’s where the real and the illusory come together and take us along in their everlasting tide.
Qabar; K.R. Meera, trs Nisha Susan, Eka, ₹399
The reviewer is a journalist
and author.
