Thursday 20 July 2017

Book Review: Aan Mazhayormakal



Book Review: Aan Mazhayormakal

Planting a book entails the right time and soil. Here comes the apt occasion to plant gendered renditions on rain for the harvest. Primarily the ground which is fertile for the rain to burgeon a forest is either the landscape of memories or the mindscape of dreams. What if one opt memories of men to drench  in the rain of love, sadness, happiness, poverty, disease, prosperity or calamity before a set of audience whom she thinks as the companions of rain: let the answer hang on the air. ‘’Have you ever been to rain’’, a poet friend asked me a couple of months ago when I appreciated a poem about rain that he wrote. I replied “always”, as rain was a metaphor of “happiness” to me. When it rains outside a pluviophile couldn’t resist the urge to be the in rain and torrential rains of affection (to the rain), be it literal or allusive, would pluck us from the fever stricken world of indolence to dream fearless journeys to skies.

Published in 2015, the non fictional work, edited by T.K. Haris, Aan Mazhayormakal, serves a rainy feast to the mind where lies only winter sans sympathies and deserts of paucity of imagination. The book features the nostalgia of selected known men of letters and a few yet to be known men of experience and thoughts. Ranging from K.P. Ramanunni to Mohanlal, C. Radhakrishnan to Manilal, Dr. M.K. Muneer to A.P. Thajudheen, the list made the reader sodden in the rain of memories of V.R. Sudheesh, U.A.Khadar, Kamal, Babu Bharadvaj, Ambikasuthan Mangad, Kalpatta Narayanan, U.K. Kumaran, V. Musafir Ahamed, P.N. Gopikrishnan, Asees Tharuvana, V.G. Thambi, S. Joseph, Veerankutty and a few more. None of them expressed rainy feelings of Hemingway heroine of Farewell to Arms as they didn’t say: "It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't."  Instead, some of them spoke bluntly that they had sheer hatred as rain foreshadowed bereavement. A few lovers of rainy days smelt a seductress female in the fragrance of rain. Some philosophize, several people paint simple biographies, some appreciate rain’s sensuous appeal, a few people felt home and convey the home and some returned to childhood while creativity rains on black and white.
They created amazing equations  such as  rain is a discipline called mathematics,   rain signifies river, rain is equal to life, poetry is nothing but rain, when  rain is morning to you, rain is night to me, rain is inevitable  as marrying death, rain drops are irresistible tears, rain colours, rain has colour of depression, rain reminds that one is a man, rain in the mind could not forget a died hearth, rain climbs the mountains and finally goes to the extent of falling upward against Nobokovian suggestion that ‘one shouldn’t be angry with rain as it didn’t know how to fall upward’.
Rain sang as Kishori Amonkar to S .Joseph;  it frightened G. Prajesh Sen with the fragrance of Cycle Brand Three in one agarbatti with the silent smell of death. Sheriff Sagar tasted the sweetness and sourness of rain in his write up, when V.H. Noushad was conducting the naming ceremony of rain: he names rain as Victor George, the Malayala Manorama photographer who once aspired to release his collection of rain images as Ït’s raining”, disappeared in one of the frames of rainy landslide . Babu Bharadwaj titled rain as an impotent’s soliloquy and Mohanlal reminiscences in Padmarajan’s rain in Thoovanthumbikal. Most of the men of the book joined Akbar Kakattil who embraced rain with an amorous heart. Ambikasuthan Mangad was different and he writes about an unexplored satanic face of rain incarnated as Tsunami. In him, rain took up the role of the wailing loser, lamented the loss of his own brother.(page 67)



When a woman reads what men wrote about rain, she hopes that it will fertilise the rainy rhymes of all men and women who sense the rain in each because rain erases all boundaries and differences, Kalpatta Narayanan remarked . (Page 70)

Thus ends the reflections on rain..
Be in rain..be rain.. and..rain..
Aswathi.M.P.