A HAPPY BOOK FROM KERALA is a surprise. An account of a long and happy marriage is truly a rarity. The Malayali marriage must surely have its happy moments but few have made a book-length confession of it. Here is a reminiscence in pain after the spouse’s loss and even that has-n’t marred the pleasant prose in K.M. Mathew’s tribute to wife Annamma.

The last comment that stuck on the Malayali home is a barb from Jayashree Mishra: “40-Watt happiness”. Sad and slip-pery familial and social relationships have long fired the Kerala writer’s imagination.

This has been so in good fiction, pulp fiction and non-fiction. Even memoirs are tales of struggle, angst, displacement, betrayal and nostalgia over the good, old (and often in-vented) times. There seems to be a compul-sive audience for such stuff in print and on TV, which offsets the mass of gloom with a mandatory run of mimicry and parody shows. None would know this better than K.M. Mathew who runs Kerala’s largest news-paper chain, Malayala Manorama. Yet this editor in his eighties has chosen to write his first book differently. While at it, one sus-pects, he wielded the blue pencil more than his writing pen. He tells a personal story and leaves it at that. No hype, no colour and no claims of great virtues for himself, his wife or their long companionship.

Written originally in Malayalam, this translation is no fairytale of Power marrying Money or Power. The wedding itself hap-pened when the Mathew clan wasn’t still out of the woods after C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, the Diwan of the erstwhile Travancore State, cracked down on every business the family owned. The bride was a Malayali Christian who grew up in small towns of Tamil Nadu where her doctor father served. She loved a lot that was Tamil — from colourful cottons to Carnatic music.

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