“One writes because one cannot but write.” Mathew Vincent Menacherry is tad sceptical if the statement makes him pompous. But that's the only way he can explain being a writer.
“For the longest time that's what I wanted to do, what I meant to do,” says the debutant author, who all along has run a family business in Mumbai, even when writing asserted its right on his time. Mathew's first work of fiction “Arrack in the Afternoon”, a Harper Collins release, brewed considerably within the author (for about eight years), before hitting the stands. And it spilled out a gloomy tale spiked by bouts of humour. Mathew's protagonist Verghese Konnikara is the archetypal loser. A failed poet and a confirmed alcoholic, his mainstay is inaction. Except for his one action — a failed one at that of killing himself — Verghese through the novel, is nudged and pushed into the limelight and manufactured success by people who have envisioned for him vital roles.
In the Capital to promote “Arrack in the Afternoon,” the author says, “What I have tried to do is a satire on the modern day society, a mirror to it.” The novel travels through today's obsessions — instant celebrity hood, Page 3 culture and spiritual, moral vacuum. Along the way, it also peels off a city – Mumbai – Mathew's “Big City,” through dance bars and underworld.
“When you are writing a satire, you take on a stereotype and lead it to its natural conclusion,” says Mathew. So the stereotypes — of media persons, Page 3 personalities and government employees.
No hometown staple
Mathew, with a title like “Arrack in the Afternoon,” also brings on an inevitable influence of his life — Kerala. But to the writer's credit, he steers clear of the Kerala staple running unbridled now, except of course, arrack. “The Kerala I have written about is what I have seen and experienced for over 35 years. It is not something read in a guide book,” he says.
If many writers have talked about autobiographical strains in their first novel, Mathew is quick to jest, “I would be in jail if it was autobiographical. I felt the compelling need to write and I always knew the beginning and the end. You start out with what is real and create a fantasy out of it, grounded in reality.”
Mathew has gathered together stories, experienced first-hand and narrated to him, to make the novel's fodder, especially when recreating Kerala of the 1950s. “My primary concern was that it should ring true. Mostly the stories I have heard are from my immediate family. My aunts are wonderful story-tellers,” says the author who has lived all his life in Mumbai.
Now, the umbilical cord cut off with his first book, Mathew looks back candidly and the lessons learnt. “Since it was the first book, I was learning the process of writing and also doing it in the midst of a hectic and demanding job. I might have understood the process much more now.”
“Right now, I think I am a much better writer than I was eight years ago. At every point you are trying to get better. Specifically, I could have used a lot fewer bad words in the novel. A few people took offence and it was needless for me to use them,” Mathew is honest.
However, writing is what Mathew is sure about. And he always remembers a poetry workshop he attended at Yale a while ago. “We were told at the workshop, if you want to be a writer, you have to WRITE.”
Along the way, he has also realised, “I don't want to glamorise or make it dramatic. But writing is a very, very lonely and difficult process and the road at the end of the day for the vast majority of writers is not great.”
But, Mathew is well-entrenched in his second novel, curiously titled “Of all the Gin Joints”, a take-off from the eternal Casablanca dialogue — a love story based in Goa. Booze, meanwhile, keeps the thread of continuity!
