Phosphorous and Stone
susan visvanathan
Zubaan-Penguin India, Rs 195

Susan visvanathan’s new novel is the story of Magda and Yesu, two young people growing up in a fishing village in Kerala. Their lives are very different, but they are drawn together first by childhood companionship and then by love. Magda, whose full name is Mary Magdalena, is the daughter of an itinerant philosopher with an interest in ecology whose travels leave him with little time for his daughter. Her mother, who was a mathematician, has died after a long illness acquired by dipping her hands, literally, in Minerva’s sacred lake. They were a once wealthy family now living a shabby-genteel life in the village.

It is Magda’s aunt Amai who now looks after her, managing with the little money that Magda’s father sends home every now and then, going to the extent of even selling the exotic cheeses and chocolates that he brings them as gifts. Magda spends her time on the beach and in mystical reveries about the Gospels.

Her childhood friend Yesu is the son of a rich moneylender. While Yesu’s father is repulsed by the sight of poverty and squalor, Yesu himself has become a young leader of the fisherpeople and has ambitions of studying law in order to better help them fight for their rights.

Phosphorus and Stone is the story of Yesu and Magda, but it is also the story of the ways in which issues of class, religion and family heritage play out in this little fishing community as it struggles to survive against the pressures of bigger commercial interests. Magda remembers the story of Ouseph, a young fisherman who dares to ask for pensions for the fisherpeople. Beaten on the head with a stick for the impertinence of this demand, he stands in the sun and rain, refusing to eat, goes to jail, and dies a day later out at sea. “A wax and limp figure, spirit floating on the waters forever free.”

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