Of Poe’s Law, possession, delusion and devotion
Nareshan is the milkman of the fictional town of Karuthupuzha. As the owner of two bony cows and father to three children, he worries about the never-rising price of milk and is paranoid about the large milk corporations encroaching upon his business and livelihood.
So when his daughter Sarasu comes to be possessed by the demon-god Chaathan, he does what any rational person would do: He offers undying loyalty and obedience, revamps his wardrobe, sets up a consultations schedule, and does what every god needs; some good oldfashioned PR.
Poe’s Law, a bit of wisdom thrown up by Internet culture, holds that online sarcasm on religious views cannot be distinguished from sincere expressions of those views unless they are clearly marked with emoticons or other cues. In the absence of those, the sarcasm could be interpreted as real, or worse, misused by extremists and fundamentalists. Manu Bhattathiri’s satirical take on a small-town oracle is so on point that I worry we might soon have people looking for Sarasu and this fictional town so that they can seek guidance and present offerings.
Apart from world-building, Bhattathiri has excelled in creating characters with parallel secret lives or dubious motives. They include Ponnamma’s son Nanu, who dreams of visiting America to be united with a porn star, the driver Mathai who dreams of being a lion tamer at a circus, Dasappan with his political ambitions, and Sarasu herself who dreams of being an English teacher.
One of the veins of humour that the author taps into is the possibility of there being multiple explanations for events and the reactions to them. Sarasu yells at Nanu to get out at their very first consultation for a reason that is very different from the one her father proposes, the one that Ponnamma thinks of, and from the one Nanu himself comes up with. Here, the author uses ambiguity to great effect to create mirth.
The humour in The Oracle of Karuthupuzha is finely balanced by Bhattathiri’s portrayal of Nareshan’s family slowly cracking under the pressure of running an ever-expanding business. He captures with great nuance the toll it takes on the wife and daughter. Nareshan’s wife, Kalyani, is constantly rankled by the underhand tactics he uses, including claiming to have seen Ashokan’s hands shake as a result of his excessive drinking. He forces Sarasu to continue her consultations by dangling the promise of an education in front of her. Nareshan, himself unequipped to deal with his emotions, is prone to bursts of excessive cruelty that shock his family. It is these flaws that pull Karuthupuzha from its fictional realm and into reality, and allow the reader to become invested in the characters.
Bhattathiri juxtaposes the innocence of an idyllic town with human guile. Many characters are deceitful: Nanu’s uncle uses the memory of his dead father to control Ponnamma and keep her from remarrying; Nareshan, Kalyani and Ponnamma use underhanded tactics to force the marriage of Sarasu and Nanu. The only two characters untouched by this streak, Nanu and Sarasu, are both stripped of their agency, ridiculed, and in pain.
The only part that falls flat is Bhattathiri’s criticism of smalltown evils, including marriage brokers, the incessant demands of marriage, and the spreading of rumours. The descriptions of behaviour and explanations of motives have nothing new to offer and needlessly delay the plot, taking away from an otherwise tightly written novel. The Oracle of Karuthupuzha does a great job of meshing together shades of madness, possession, fantasy, delusion and devotion. It reminds us that, as convoluted as people are, attempts to understand them could lead to even more convolution, and that there is a moral dimension to how we define normalcy. Bhattathiri’s characters demonstrate the human obsession with understanding everything, our need to explain, to make meaning where perhaps there is none. It is a great joy to witness the gap between cause, effect and explanation being put to such hilarious use. It is to his credit that we have an imaginary town that holds up so accurate a mirror to our reality.