The Little Book of Goodbyes: Ravi Shankar Etteth's Parables of the Past

 IN THE LITTLE Book of Goodbyes, characters associated with the writer's history come, leave a story behind and go their way. They mainly happen in the town of Palakkad in Kerala, and it is only when, at one point, someone mentions Khasak, that you realise that this is neither fiction nor non-fiction, but a world of the in-between. Ravi Shankar Etteth has taken memory and added a layer of myth but we are never sure what is what and that is a triumph of sorts.

For Khasak is the fictional setting of OV Vijayan’s immortal Malayalam novel.

Etteth comes from the same roots but he mentions it only in allusion—that too, a signal to the material he is drawing from. At the centre of many of the stories is his grandfather, a military man, who led the crackdown on the Moplah rebellion of 1921 for the British but has now returned to his native place carrying an aura of that power. How intriguingly Etteth weaves his stories can be experienced from the first one about a dog. It sneaks under his grandfather’s bed when he is on a counter-insurgency operation, gets adopted and then, during an assassination attempt, saves his master’s life but is knifed to death. It is a story that the writer grew up with, making him want a dog of his own. One day on a walk, he is saved by his dog from coming under a car. When the vet shaves its hair for surgery, they see a “long dark birthmark on her side, which resembled a scar from a knife wound.” “I would

often wonder if Bosky was Fang come back to save me from a lonely death on a moonlit sidewalk, my eyes closing to the angry sound of a fleeing car and a shard of birdsong to accompany me home,” he writes. His dog dies too.

The stories carry the weary weight of life that is not despondency but a stoic reconciliation, an understanding of existence and loss. In one story, his grandfather and their neighbour, both from the army, have a box with belongings of one of their fellow soldiers, a Sikh, who fought with them in the Battle of El Alamein. He doesn’t return to claim it, and the neighbour asks the writer, a little boy then, to bury it beneath a tree. He takes the help of a friend, Raghu. Decades later he returns, curious to see if the box is still there. Raghu tries to dissuade him but he is insistent. When they dig it up the box is still there but empty, its contents stolen by Raghu. No one is guilty here except for time.

In another part of the book that deals with travel, Etteth takes you across the world. A passing love story in New York ends with a key to a house, a permanent invitation, that is never used because, ironically, he doesn’t want a good memory corrupted. These stories depart from family history but aren’t disconsonant. The end of the book however has a section of parables with an enigmatic Sufi expounding spiritual lessons, not quite merging into a project that has already established a clear identity. The Little Book of Goodbyes is a rewarding book with satisfying twists and bare language that allows the stories to breathe, leaving an aftertaste long after you have read them.