MATCHBOX

Review of “Maria Just Maria” by Sandhya Maria, translated by Jayasree Kalathil, published by Harper Perennial (2024).

“Maria Just Maria”, Sandhya Mary’s debut Malayalam novel, translated into English by Jayasree Kalathil, is brewed into a potent hot-mix of giddy revolts against binaries and the very idea of sanity. In Maria’s tale, that equally belongs to the space in which she grows, Mary liberates the reader, dislodged by the “normal” society, and inoculates the beauty of madness. The story builds a collective, that is accessible to everyone who has struggled to fit in.

The novel opens to a woman, branded by her Mama as “Maria who had wasted her life; Maria who had wasted her time”, in a psychiatric hospital. Yet Maria describes herself as normal adjacent, divorced in pursuit of happiness, accurately articulating madness as the state of being that is most suited to who they are. The narrative swims in overlapping realms of memory, buoyed by multiple narrative voices, through madness, childhood, and dreams.

The unreliability of Maria’s recounting is only revealed towards the end, charting madness as a consequence of survival, vindicating her assertion of being mad without a reason. The story dives into unsnarling the cause and core of madness, proving that it is no aberrance, only a state of unapologetic being. It is also a story, that grows with generations of Kottarathil Veedu, of how we are not products of perception, but of what we choose to remember.

Sandhya Mary writes about Maria and a woman’s world with an authentic sense of belonging, and Jayasree Kalathil’s translation augments the empathy and ingenuity of Mary’s frame narratives in this coming-of-age tale. In all its splendour, this tale evolves through marriages and deaths: a home where chatty animals choose not to talk or bark when they felt like it, saints haunt in dreams, amidst lingering shadows of the Emergency, god-fearing communists and Anna Valyamma’s dementia.

However, this world seems inaccessible at times, never fully touching the minds of Mama, Papa or her siblings in detail – the reason for their malice or the roots and closures of a bitter home. Yet the absence of some narratives secures their stories, perhaps an exploration of a different kind of madness.

Sandhya Mary’s Maria checks all boxes for being “immoral”, yet she is not touted as a feminist icon, and her memories are not celebrated for resilience. Maria is broken, barely managing to live through a home steaming with mutual resentment, indelible isolation, and clinging to the remains of herself beaten to mush by a violent education system. Even at the end of it all, she remains “Poor Maria”, who, according to her maternal grandfather, should have been born elsewhere, in some other world.

The humour is subtle, sits like a slow melting toffee throughout the story, whether with Chandipatti (Maria’s dog), Ammini (the talking parrot) or Anna, Maria’s great-aunt and a source of comic relief in occasional appearances. Most characters are in fact situations, and amusing ones at that. Even divinity comes with a tint of absurdity and mirth, through Geevarghese Sahada, a pesky patron saint of the land, and Karthaveeshomishiha (Jesus Christ) himself, with a new found fervour for revolution. There is also a disillusioned Kuncheriya, Maria’s great-grandfather, who held out hundred years on earth awaiting heaven, only to have Karthaveeshomishiha call the Bible a “stupid kunthappanaatti”. But the humour does not negate the story’s identity as one of damages and aftermaths.

This work also becomes a tale of love and its absence– of confused lovers, first loves and those who love without asking. It is full of absences as well, the lack of powerful love in marriages, and realising that love does not accompany relation. Geevarghese, Maria’s maternal grandfather, is unable to love his wife, a singularly gorgeous devout Christian, finding it elsewhere in a toddy shop with an intense love for Kali, a woman who elopes with Thimman. But his love lies in a slumber under the cashew tree, where Maria plays ‘bus driving’ waiting for Kuttappayi, her first love. Appachan’s immense love for Maria is what grounds her and enlivens him. When Brontë writes, “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”, it goes for whatever binds these twin souls, a sense of bonding that is beyond the reader’s comprehension, arising from madness, and in fact making it divine. Then there is also Aravind and Maria’s love, and Becker and Federer, making an appearance with her ex-husband and other lovers. 

The child narrator of this bildungsroman dissects families and marriages, albeit unintentionally. Most marriages are damaged, and Maria finds bullies in her siblings and pure hatred for her mother, which she voices. It is almost painful to read, every time she refers to her parents as “their Papa and Mama”. Unlike her ancestral home, Maria’s parents’ house makes one uncomfortable, as if you are afraid of being caught stealing laddus, jalebis and cakes stored in glass jars. Papa is a shadow and Mama does not make an appearance unless for thrashing or asking Maria if she needs anything. It is only understandable that the child thinks she never had a home of her own and that even if she were to live for a hundred years, childhood would be “the single most torturous period she endured”. These homes are reminders of invisible origins of insanity, cautioning against drawing binaries and quickly ousting anyone who struggles to fit in. 

There are also other memories, part of Maria’s self and absent in others’. These dreams or misremembered events, one can never know, are perhaps rungs in Maria’s spiral. When the inaccuracy of her recollections is revealed, without Maria ever accepting it, it is reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s protagonist in The Yellow Wall-paper, a character who finds liberation through illusions. Both characters stand by their visions and the society is quick to mark them mad. Madness is casually introduced in the first chapter through Aravind, a character who would seem closest to sane. Yet as the novel grows one can only wonder if his love for Maria is itself madness, the densest of all. Even when Maria begins her swirl into a messed-up head, the moment is not dramatic, normalising and accepting the presence of lunacy. Madness is at the core of this novel, yet Sandhya Mary does not anatomize it, only calls for a little empathy.

  The work is also ripe with political undercurrents, of the Emergency, a dark-skinned, dark- haired Karthaveeshomishiha aching for a revolution, Kelan, the sole social reformer of their land, and Sheena, a Syrian -Christian who was a Communist. The text also operates as a social commentary on Kerala’s society and the oppressive ways in which the idea of the family imposes itself on the actors. A close-reading of Kottarathil Veedu reveals how men and women have lived to be victims of this toxic streamlining. Women are doubly disadvantaged as they are also fighting patriarchy and moral-policing. 

As Aravind puts it, “Maria does not have a male or female point of view. Maria only has a Marian point of view” This best explains the course of events in this book, Maria’s point of view and that of all those who share the warmth of her love and madness. The novel disregards lucidity and is home to subtle revolutions. Maria loves with confusion, has no children, drinks vodka and at the end of it all, Maria is not an iconic, pathbreaking woman- she is just Maria, conversing with Chandipatti and chiding Karthaveeshomishiha.