The novel, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari tells the story of imminent violence in a village community.
It is Friday, the sixth day of continuing rains. A day of prayers at the mosque, a day when the rain grows colder, darker, more violent, more out of control. A morning beset by the violent rumble of thunder, crackling sparkling blue streaks of lightning, the sound of tearing hillsides. There’s a sense of immediacy to Kannanari’s prose. What will happen now? You want to read on, but you are also inclined to go back every time, for this is a book made for re-reading.
The one-and-a-half hours in a small North Kerala village community’s collective life – which the title alludes to – begin as another wet day, but fed by the streaming consciousnesses and actions of a dozen characters, the minutes swiftly swell up like a monsoonal stream. This stream of voices adds context and layers of meaning – which unpacks something as senseless as a lynching triggered by WhatsApp messages in a way that stays consistently authentic.
The kaleidoscope of confusion, arguments and mounting panic build up the narrative and throw a bagful of questions about morality, sexuality, familial love, honour and a man’s duty. Swiftly and irreversibly the story the characters live in changes, their world ruptures, though not in ways they could have dreamt, imagined or desired.
People held up by the deluge under the porch of the mosque watch the rains and the wind accelerate. As the howling wind quickens, the pitch of the story builds up imperceptibly. An unasked question is planted in the reader’s mind: Where’s Burhan hurrying off to with an umbrella in this deluge? The reader has a sketchy idea of Burhan as yet, but she knows that a collision will occur, a disaster is building up.
Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari
Chronicle of an Hour and a Half
Context (2024)
In chapter after chapter, the reader travels from the head of one character to another to gain a new perspective on the community’s priorities, angst, resentments, morals.
At heart of the tale are Nabeesumma and Reyhana, two women trapped in marriages they hate. Reyhana is having an adulterous affair with the fifteen-years-younger Burhan, whose animal presence and tamarind brown skin provokes an unaccustomed happiness in her heart.
But Burhan’s long-suffering mother Nabeesumma will be made to pay for the son’s transgressions. The righteous anger of two opposing groups of men – Reyhana’s brother-in-law and nephews on one hand and Burhan’s useless brothers on the other – is stoked by fear of dishonour. For both groups, machismo comprises not ordinary kindness and sensitivity towards women but grand acts of violence to avenge ‘the dishonour’ of a woman of their household.
On one hand there is the blubbery mess of men with puncturable egos, seething in rage, readying to exchange blows; on the other, poetry.
“The great heavy jackfruit that hung from the middle of the trunk had cracked open in two, its yellow entrails rotting. The tapioca plants looked like they had been beheaded by the blowing wind…”
The brawl in the bazaar becomes an occasion for everyone to vicariously avenge their own sexual humiliations and marital frustrations. The excited mob of men witnessing the fracas don’t know that “at the end of the day, it is hard to resist a raging mob, even if you hate mobs…”
Everyone starts rooting for a fitting punishment for Burhan’s imagined transgressions. A WhatsApp frenzy ensues, in which not just locals, but extended communities, including Middle East expats, participate virtually.
Seldom has fiction captured how some thousand tap-tapping fingers and pinging WhatsApp messages accompanied by uploaded videos can transmogrify a battalion of indignant righteous locals into a bloodthirsty lynch-mob. As word spreads through WhatsApp that Burhan is ‘seeing’ Reyhana, everyone in the community exhorts everyone else to avenge the dishonour ‘Right Now’.
“The whole Bazaar was afire with hot rumours, vitriolic with violent opinions, and all the outrageous stories of Burhan and Reyhana that seemed to lend their anger a kind of raw legitimacy.”
The more I reread, I realize that Kannanari’s words may be simple, but their arrangements are not. The arrangement of words and voices is the key to the ratcheting tension that peaks half-way, and slowly spends itself over the other half. The vocabulary and speech rhythms change for every voice, fleshing out a character’s entire life situation in a page or two.
Every character has different concerns and priorities during the apocalyptic downpour. Ahmad wants to sleep in the mosque. Chinnan wants to go out to the stream to put a fish line in an eel hole. Naseebumma is counting the thirty, dirty holes in her tarp-less roof. Reyhana, who has cut-off the relationship out of fear, on a whim WhatsApp’s an invite to Burhan to come over.
This novel announces the arrival of a writer whose deep engagement with truth is set off by an equally sensuous delight in language. The very first sentence – “He gave me five children and then he rested like God after Creation” – pulls one in. The incantatory rhythm persists chapter after chapter. Submerged in this whirlpool of anaphoric voices ringing against a mayhem-making Western Ghats monsoon, the reader succumbs, reading out the sentences aloud.
Kannanari’s artistry in matching experience to language, in finding language for the tragic senselessness of experience and in stringing words into inevitable sentences feels like a blessing.
“…and then I had gone and stood by the kitchen door, looking out at the dark rainy morning, scribbling on my mind thoughts without language.”
We read fiction because real life is not hospitable to saying things as they are. In real life, truth is often resented. The joy of a book like this lies in the felicity with which it recreates the truth in fiction – not through any uncontestable facts, but as something birthed by an all too human chain of stupidity, machismo, ordinary malice and everyday humiliation imploding in a Biblical fury of revenge.
The music of prose and the clarity of questions posed by the narrative linger on.
I haven’t read anything more beautiful and truthful and powerful and gripping than this in a long time.
Based in Delhi, Varsha Tiwary works as an auditor, and translates between Hindi and English. She also writes short stories and essays, which have appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, among others.
