by K R Meera
PRAISE FOR THE GOSPEL OF YUDAS
‘Without veering away from the singular plot of a young woman’s obsessive quest for dangerous love, it manages all at once to capture the aftermath of police brutality, the macabre face of the state machinery, the price of betrayal and the blind sense of sacrifice that makes some young men and women decide to give up their lives for the sake of a promised revolution … A skilful achievement … Meera’s lyrical and luminous prose must be singled out for praise. She effortlessly transports the reader to the lush forests and picturesque riversides of Kerala with as much aplomb as she describes the torture of captured Naxalites. The book also brings alive the political history of Kerala … The Gospel of Yudas is a lesson in compactness. It succeeds in showing how the oft-neglected genre of the novella, when executed by an expert hand, can claim its legitimate space in the world of literature … The new translation by Rajesh Rajamohan does not disappoint … I found the translation smooth and grounded, allowing the reader to delve into the story without a moment’s hesitation about a language that does not belong’—Meena Kandasamy, The Hindu
‘The Gospel of Yudas is a reminder of the horror of that period, of just how deranged the violence became and the effects it had on ordinary lives … The Gospel of Yudas is revolutionary literature. Meera reminds us that the Emergency was not an accident of history but the logical outcome of State machinery deployed a certain way. Those brave enough to fight the State suffer terribly so that the rest of us don’t have to. What we owe them is to fix their sacrifice in our memory, in public consciousness … The Gospel of Yudas is really the Passion of Christ, a story of suffering redeemed by love. The love in this short, intense book is damaged, even broken. But it’s love all the same’—India Today
‘Takes its readers through a perfect journey into the hot, sticky, messy, grimy underbelly of human emotion … This is not a romance novel; this is a novel about the dirty, grimy, painful and black emotions of love and loss. It sucks a reader in with its calm writing only to drown her in a tidal wave of human honesty’—Hindustan Times
‘The Gospel of Yudas is a moving story that opens up an ethical discourse on issues of evil, good, guilt and redemption … Powerfully illustrates the fine line between love, revolution, power, violence and the price one pays for idealism’—Free Press Journal
‘Being mesmerised, so that you don’t want to escape, and constantly aware of other layers beyond the one you’re engaged with … such can also be the effect of reading Meera’s strange, compelling novel The Gospel of Yudas … A disquieting book, its off-kilter quality coming from its mixing of conventional narrative with allegory, hard politics with abstractions about human lives and desires … Evocative’—Jai Arjun Singh, Scroll
‘Meera’s work … is lush in violence and metaphor’—Open
PRAISE FOR THE POISON OF LOVE
‘The Poison of Love, an intense, dramatic novel written in a spare, well-crafted prose, delves into the most terrible, bitter, corrosive emotion that can pass off as love … K.R. Meera keeps a firm, economical grip on her words, and most sentences either express an emotion or move the narrative this way or that … A deep, dark tale’—The Hindu
‘Enthralling … disturbing … A book that resonates powerfully with some of our most primal impulses—a consuming love, a corrosive hatred, a need for vengeance … What stands out the most in the novella is the sheer power of Meera’s writing … Despite being translated from the original Malayalam, the book retains enough of its nuances and intensity, due in no small part to the commendable work done by translator Ministhy S., [especially] the universality of the imagery and emotions … From the horde of corpse-eating ants that trail across the pages of the book in increasingly large numbers—both literally and metaphorically—to the ravenous groups of feral monkeys that Tulsi fights with over food in Vrindavan, the images linger on in the minds of the reader in an insidious way … The key takeaway of the book [is] that [it] serves both as a warning against corrosive love and a passionate exploration of the very thing that it seeks to warn readers about’—Indian Express
‘K.R. Meera’s addictive latest novel follows the struggles of a young woman married to an incorrigible Lothario … Written with such breathless energy and foreboding that you can barely put the book down … Apart from Meera’s obvious strengths as a novelist—economy, pace and strong characterisation—she is also an expert plotter who could teach a thing or two to experienced crime writers, even … Almost every sentence either reveals something about the character or moves the action along. This, especially, is where she scores above a vast majority of literary novelists in India … The Poison of Love is a masterpiece in miniature and well worth your time’—The Hindu Business Line
‘This slim novel stews in the passionate juice of wronged love … K.R. Meera’s story, stripped to its bare essentials, sounds like a typical tale of love and betrayal, perhaps leading to an avenging fury with a knife, but something sets it apart from the reel life that throbs on TV screens or the pulp fiction genre … Intensity breathes through her style and every sentence is almost anguish … The plot seethes and twists like the Ganges by Mathura, with its banks lined with widows … A novella [of] so much intensity … Ministhy is new to translating K.R. Meera but manages to wring out each drop of obsession’—Outlook
‘[A] searing love story … The brute force of [Meera’s] plots, coupled with the irresistible perversity of her characters, make it easy to turn the pages of Meera’s fiction … There is a sense of urgency in Meera’s prose that is rare in any language … [Tulsi’s] descent into black melancholy is the stuff of Greek tragedy (one is especially reminded of the venom of Euripides’ Medea), but also all too human for its vulnerability and fragility’—Huffington Post
‘The imagery that [Meera] uses is so intrinsic to the female experience, and to a sense of death and decay, themes that her stories are submerged in … The Poison of Love [is] an almost bestial exploration of a cruel love, and the madness for revenge that deforms the protagonist Tulsi … The personal never left her stories. Her heroines, Radhika, Tulsi, Chetna, even Prema from The Gospel of Yudas, seem to merge into one another in the way they encapsulate the condition of women’—Mint
‘The most striking quality of K.R. Meera’s writing is her rare ability to cartwheel with élan into wholly different cultures, and fashion a realistic narrative from her imagination of other lives … But there’s another quality I can’t possibly miss … Meera’s capacity to take a basic human experience and give it a searing transformative twist … The Poison of Love follows a protagonist named Tulsi on her journey in Vrindavan, into a labyrinth of crazed love, feverish dreams, weary widows, unstoppable passion, and corpse-eating ants, and culminates in a Medea-like murder’—Ladies’ Finger
‘Meera effortlessly transports the reader into the world of each of her protagonists, whether it’s Tulsi from The Poison of Love or Prema of The Gospel of Yudas’—Deccan Chronicle
‘Meera’s writing is fluid, disturbing, and engrossing. It takes a common theme—of love and betrayal—and uses metaphors and symbolism to turn it into an unforgettable tale of a relationship between a woman and the man she cannot forget, but must, if she is to retain her sanity … The depth of emotion and the deep understanding of human nature emerges from the book. Tulsi’s soul and heart are laid bare, her anguish becoming the pivot for her descent from a ‘normal’ life to the one she ends up leading in Vrindavan … Compelling and haunting’—New Indian Express
‘The Poison of Love is a meditation on toxic love, a key motif in Meera’s oeuvre, which includes many works that are fast becoming part of an influential and widely commentated on canon … Her works, no matter what genre (short stories, novellas, novels) brim
over with a rage and violence reminiscent of Mahasweta Devi, though perhaps unlike Devi, Meera seems to symmetrise political, religious and domestic violence as equally inscriptive on the body of the woman … If writing is raised and sustained at a high enough pitch (and Meera can sustain it for the most part for over 400 pages in Hangwoman), then that admixture of fury and grief that belongs not only to the theme but the prose itself, takes the protagonists out of themselves and into a sundered state of quasi-religious “ecstasy” (in the original sense of standing outside oneself). A power not unlike that of the saint Meera’s poetry, or indeed that of the poems of a John Donne’—Wire
‘Love and revenge with a feminist flavour … The nucleus of K.R. Meera’s oeuvre is obsessive love, and her protagonists give themselves over to it completely—and often to their complete detriment. This is where her writing differs from all versions of the same tales, which are made to seem like nothing but cautionary ones. Her heroines claim their emotions, and the consequences of having them, instead of allowing themselves to be merely victims of circumstance. Despite being set in a disturbing psychic realm, The Poison of Love’s feminist politics are taut … There’s a reason why it’s the simplest stories that get told, over and over again. Despite the macabre details of The Poison of Love, its fundamental premise of betrayal and longing are resoundingly familiar’—Open
‘There are undercurrents of Greek tragedy … [Meera] shows political, religious and domestic violence as leaving equally deep scars on the body and soul of [a] woman … Meera is an expert plotter, each sentence reveals something new about the character and moves the action along, but nowhere can you anticipate what is coming next. Ministhy S.’s translation from the original Malayalam evokes the breathless energy of Meera’s writing … Love, Meera shows, is the other great equalizer besides death. She blurs the line separating love and death by presenting both to be forces that bring out the suppressed perversity of human feelings’—Telegraph
‘The Poison of Love is an ode to loss and suffering … Instead, it presents a world of violence, physical and emotional … Brace for a rollercoaster ride’—Financial Express
‘No one writes about searing love like K.R. Meera does, and this novel proves it again’—Scroll
PRAISE FOR HANGWOMAN
‘Meera is at her best when she examines the lives of her women characters … The writing is strong … an epic novel’—outlook
‘A daring book, for the panoramic sweep of its canvas, for the sheer audacity of its narrative logic … for its irreverent play with the paradoxes of life—Love and Death’—The Hindu
‘This striking novel includes within its majestic sweep the enigmas of the human condition … Stunning images bring out the depth and intensity of Chetna’s spiritual development, and stand testimony to the author’s consummate writingstyle’—Deccan Herald
‘Meera achieves a vision of [Kolkata] that is both acutely observed, almost anthropological, in its minute detailing and, at the same time, mythic in its evocation of the city’s decaying, decrepit majesty … One of the most extraordinary accomplishments in recent Indian fiction’—Indian Express
‘An absorbing novel’—New Indian Express
‘One of the strongest voices in contemporary Malayalam literature … Meera plays with the reader’s anticipation masterfully … The novel is extremely atmospheric … Meera turns the entire city into a haunted house’—Open
‘The book heaves with violence, is lush with metaphor and shocks with details. The reader can only gasp at the surgical precision with which Meera describes the act of hanging’—The Hindu Business Line
‘An immense, intense coiled rope of a novel … There are chillingly clear-eyed vignettes and moments of razor-sharp dark humour … If Aarachar, the original, was—plot, stock and barrel—“Malayalam’s ultimate gift of love to Bengal,” as its translator J. Devika puts it, its English translation is no less a bonus for showing us, its non-Malayali, non-Bengali readership, the dazzling interstices of her story, instantly recognizable across time and space’—India Today
‘An incisive critique of the barbarism of the death penalty … [The book] gives us a glimpse into the inner lives of those who have been deputed to execute it through generations … A vast and riveting sweep of time, locked into the gritty interstices of the contemporary—a pastiche made of fact and fiction, news bulletins and nightmares’—Mint
‘Stunning … Meera weaves history, romance and the politics of the present together into a narrative of incredible complexity … J. Devika’s translation is superb, and she captures the rich detail of Meera’s Malayalam: descriptive, textured and evocative … Reading Meera, in Devika’s meticulous and inspired translation, we experience the author’s spectacular ventriloquism. And we are also reminded of the tradition that Meera comes from, which she has burnished and transcended with her epic novel’—Caravan
PRAISE FOR YELLOW IS THE COLOUR OF LONGING
‘Interesting, challenging’—Mahasweta Devi
‘[Meera’s] stories cover an amazing range, and in each her idiom is inseparable from the plots and characters … Each story invokes the inner violence of contemporary society in Kerala’—Caravan
‘One of the most powerful voices in contemporary Malayalam writing’—Mint
‘A literary heavyweight’—Indian Express
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE GOSPEL OF YUDAS
K.R. Meera is a multi-award-winning writer and journalist. She has published short stories, novels and essays, and has won some of the most prestigious literary prizes including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the Vayalar Award and the Odakkuzhal Award. In 2015, she won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award for Aarachar, widely hailed as a contemporary classic and published by Penguin Random House India (PRHI) as Hangwoman. More recently, PRHI published Meera’s The Poison of Love to immense acclaim. She lives in Kottayam with her husband, Dileep, and daughter, Shruthi.
Rajesh Rajamohan is a translator and IT professional. His translation of N.S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery won the Vodafone-Crossword Prize for Best Translated Fiction in 2011, and was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize and longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. His other translations include Karmayogi, the widely acclaimed biography of E. Sreedharan. Rajesh lives in Pennsylvania, USA, with his family.
ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Yellow Is the Colour of Longing
Hangwoman
The Poison of Love
K.R. MEERA
Translated from the Malayalam by
Rajesh Rajamohan
PENGUIN BOOKS
CONTENTS
The Gospel of Yudas
Acknowledgements
Glossary
About the Author and the Translator
A traitor can never sleep. His hunger is eternal; his thirst, insatiable. The burning inside his body won’t be doused even if he immerses himself in water. No matter how hard he tries to drown himself in alcohol, he still remains intensely conscious.
These were the lessons I learned from the life of Crocodile ‘Croc’ Yudas. Diving to recover dead bodies was his vocation. Every village had someone whose job it was to dredge corpses from the deep. In our lake, dead bodies raced among themselves daily to find their way to the surface. So ‘Croc’ Yudas had no respite. As soon as he brought a body to the shore, he’d collect his wages and walk off to the moonshine joint.
There, he’d drink to the brink only to saunter back to the lake in complete control of his wits and submerge himself up to his neck in the water. On the lake’s shore, hemmed in by the valley where violet butterworts and brown-eyed droseras bloomed, he had a windowless shack that looked like a morgue. Below the flight of stones near the shore, where he’d land the cadavers, womenfolk would gather in the afternoons, their skirts hitched above their breasts, the fabric hugging their wet bodies as they washed clothes or scraped skin with incha-scrubbers while bathing. It was during these afternoons that he took classes for boys on t
he art of lovemaking.
In those times dead bodies surfaced in the lake face down. I don’t know how it happens now. The pale lifeless bodies would rock about on the lake’s turgid green, heaving surface like a stalk of plantain or a white crocodile. ‘Croc’ Yudas would glide towards the shore with the corpse as his float. Gasping for air, he’d beach the body, its bottom half still lying in the water, and perch upon the washers’ rock to light up a ganja beedi. When he emerged from the lake, his ashen body would turn a morbid blue. The smoke from the joint would cast a strange light around him. He’d poke at the corpse with his left leg to turn its face around for the benefit of the cops. ‘I bumped him off,’ he’d announce proudly. ‘Write this one on me.’ The officers would ignore his words, provoking him to reel off a volley of abuse: ‘Pay heed, you mongrels! Long Live the Revolution! Naxalbari Zindabad! Arrest me if you dare!’
Nobody paid much attention to him. Except me.
The year was 1985. Although I was only a five-year-old when the Emergency was declared—an event of which I had no grasp or memory—and Indira Gandhi had called it off a long time ago, the state of emergency continued in my home. Commands like ‘Less talk, more work!’, or ‘Discipline makes a great nation!’ glared at me in the face. I was not permitted to laugh or play with other children from the time I was a little kid. I dreamed every day of a Naxal who would have the audacity to liberate me. In our feudal home—our Naalukettu—before I went to sleep in my room under the yellowed ceiling made of Anjiliwood, I’d chant silently, ‘Naxalbari Zindabad!’ Every time the cattle twitched their legs in the stable, or the haystacks moved, I would await his arrival with bated breath. But my ardent chanting didn’t help! No Naxalite ever came. Nobody annihilated the fascist machinery that smothered me. The amorous hormones in my body clamoured to take on fascism. I couldn’t be in love with anyone less than a Naxalite.