What They Really Sought

The carcass of a whale washes ashore. A motorcycle goes up in flames. An ageing sailor carries a shotgun to a wisdom house. The sun gleams from the laptops facing the sea.

And thus, stitching together the fragments of lucid dreams, my novel Seekers took shape. For the most part, it lacked coherence.

In Seekers, the inhabitants here are neither participants nor spectators. They live on the edge — of their own making, out of their own compulsion.

We find Ved, Peter, and the others who have partaken of the feast of duality as the distance between the coast and the hinterlands widens — and so does the longing for a new order. The protagonists are caught in the transition phase of the cliff town they find themselves enclosed in as much as they navigate the local mafia, the politicians, the landscapes, the people, and their own ulterior motives.

I envisaged Seekers as a feast of reckoning for which people arrive without ceremony. There is rum, fish, and tapioca, and there are people who have failed to abstain from them.

Ved and Peter have landscapes and institutions in common. They have people in common. And yet they differ — even though they never come face to face.

Peter steered a sinking ship to a coastal town, but was charged with abandoning it. He has since lived the life of an outlaw in the very coastal town, or cliff, he arrived at without ceremony.

From thereon, he establishes himself at the cliff town, every now and then crossing swords with the local land mafia and the inhabitants.

Ved is the caretaker of the low beach resort Peter acquired through what is claimed to be forged documents. Ved arrived at the cliff town (though this is not mentioned in the novel) after he stumbled upon a book that was written by a drifter who lived in the cliff town back in the 70s.

Both Peter and Ved cross paths in their individual pursuits for certitude, but they rarely acknowledge it.

I reckon the real success of a work of fiction could be measured not through its commercial viability but from the manifestation of an author’s intent. On this basis, Seekers is still a ‘failure.’

The characters in my work are far from what they were supposed to be. Ved, the central character, was supposedly Nietzschean. But as the narrative takes its course, he is visibly passive, and Nietzsche was anything but stagnant. He was always on the move, with or without good health, never giving in to lethargy.

But Ved is consumed by complacency as he navigates a changing world and a shifting landscape. For Peter, it is a matter of bridging the contradictions between principles and reality.

Some central elements that were introduced, reintroduced, and exhausted have, in some way or another, bring a sense of belonging to the book. Tapioca cultivation. The Kerala horizon. Rum-stained glasses. Floral tiles. Carcasses. The fields. They all belong to a certain region and time zone, and within everyone. They keep showing themselves perhaps at the most undesirable moments in the novel, and at repetitions that evoke the mundanity of the everyday.

They are not disconnected from the land, either. When we visit a tourist place, we view it for what is been advertised and not for what it stood for. In Seekers, the narrative opens up to the political, social, and philosophical undercurrents that defined the course of a landscape that changed at its own pace.

There are two distinct landscapes here: the coast and the hinterlands. And there are two central characters: Ved and Peter. The characters, though fewer and passive, bridge the distance.

There is a scrapped scene in which a wounded and outlawed Peter looks on as his good old motorcycle is set on fire at the low beach resort. He does not attempt to douse the fire. He does not join the passersby attempting to do it. He sees the fire, he sees the sea, and he walks away.

Perhaps this is where Seekers finally arrived, despite my intentions for it. The characters, too, arrived late. I began with the idea of reckoning. I ended up with its aftermath, of people continuing to eat, drink, desire, and compromise. Most of all, to seek. 

(The writer is a journalist and author hailing from Kochi. Seekers is his first novel.)