Review: ഒരു തെരുവിന്റെ കഥ | Oru Theruvinte Kadha

ഒരു തെരുവിന്റെ കഥ | Oru Theruvinte Kadha by S.K. Pottekkatt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Oru theruvinte kadha (The story of a street), as the name implies is the tale of a street, located in real life as Mittayi theruvu (Sweetmeat Street), in the Kasaragod district in Kerala.

Malayalam writers, like their counterparts in India, as well as around the world, have a penchant of falling in love with a particular place or local where they were born or spent a lot of their life in. Be it the fabled land of Khasak in O.V. Vijayan’s ‘Khasankinte Ithihasam ഖസാക്കിന്റെ ഇതിഹാസം Khasakkinte Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasak)’, or current day Mahe, immortalized by M. Mukundan in ‘മയ്യഴിപ്പുഴയുടെ തീരങ്ങളിൽ Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil’ (On the banks of the River Mayyazhi). Add to that another, from Malayalam’s beloved globetrotting travel writer S.K. Pottekkatt.

Strangely I’m reminded of a phrase from the 2012 cult classic ‘Dredd’, describing Mega City One,
‘You know what Megacity one is, Dredd? It’s an f***ing meat grinder. People go in one end, meat comes out the other. All we do is turn the handle’.
Weird comparison right?

But in a way, in a much less grotesque and more sobering manner the street where the tale, or tales are being told is a microcosm, a revolving door of human mannequins. Stage actors, who play the lead roles in the plays of their own life, and once their performance is done, vacate it for the next performer.

The street is indeed a conglomeration of countless such colorful characters. Those compatriots who grew in a rustic pre-information era locality might relate to what I am referring to. Everyone of us had that one person in the locality, an eccentric character through birth or circumstance, who was the object of novelty. The ‘Omanjis’, the ‘Thatta kaiyan Kittans’, ‘The Shravu Aayishas’, ‘Koonan Kanarans’ and such. Pottekkatt, either through his real life interactions of imagination, consolidated their stories into an interconnected weave.

We are told an anthology of tales, of the rich and the poor, or the educated and illiterate, of those happy and those suffering, some struggling to make it through each day, others leading a carefree life. All of these threads whose nexus is the street, all either live there, pass through it, or are connected to it in some inexorable way. Be it the street urchins who turn the market into their lodgings once dusk settles, and scamper around it when the sun is up in search of food remains and money. Or the uber rich, who have no reason to venture into the street, but, in the cover of darkness, approach it while masquerading themselves, in search of the pleasures of the human flesh, and trying to satiate some unspeakable dark desires.

Another constant shared by all of the characters, is the inexplicable advent of death, the tactless stage clown, who manifests itself at the most inconvenient times. It takes away a player in the stage, while the rest are indifferent to this loss, having been turned numb by the unpredictability of existence. Or rather, it would be more appropriate to say that they are concerned with more immediate issues, such as finding the day’s sustenance, and meeting the familial woes of life, or even those who have it all, trying to fill something lacking in their hearts.

While we start with tales from different characters, in time the person who would serve as our window into the street is made apparent, as the newspaper salesman, Krishna Kurup, or Kurup for short, and ‘Vishamastiti’ owing to his penchant for embellishing the stories in the papers to make them sell out. Much of the stories which we spectate are either directly involving him, or have him as a spectator, much like us.

In each chapter, we learn of a new character, with different personalities, whose entire life is summarized quite briefly and snippets are given as windows into their lives. Oftentimes, their stories intersect, ending in misery for one, and fortune for the other.

The stories end as abruptly as they start, with yet another day at the street, for these tales have been advent even before we started reading, and will continue much after us. Such is the human condition.