Book: Four Aleys
by Renu Kurien Balkrishnan
Vitasta Publishing
pp. 205, Rs 399
She’s a first-time novelist, but Renu Kurien Balkrishnan’s book debuted at the IAAC Literary Festival in New York. And now, Four Aleys has been launched in India as well. A story of four women called “Aley”, it’s told as seen through the eyes of the youngest among them, Little Aley. As she sees the social order of the world she has known and lived in disintegrate, Aley struggles to throw off the “little” from her name, forge her own identity and avoid treading the same futile path as her namesakes.
Renu (a creative writing teacher) wrote the story on little scraps of paper, etching out separate scenes rather than a chronological narrative. Apparently her husband collected the notes and read them on a flight to San Francisco, and was so moved that he begged her to finish the story.
“I always wanted to write a novel set in an imaginary land mirroring Kerala. The idea developed from a Kafkaesque thought I had about a friendship between a little girl and her vallam (Kerala boat). The vallam and she venture on a quest. I had this scene and I developed the book around it,” says Renu.
She adds that she didn’t have the entire story in her mind when she set out to write it. Instead, what she had were “vague ideas of a plot swirling around four women — all called Aley”. “It’s a ubiquitous Syrian Christian name,” Renu explains. “But then they began to turn into feisty women with minds and stories of their own. And I began to write them as they came to me.”
Juggling four different women characters, all with the same name, presented a unique set of challenges to the writer. How should she get to know each Aley intimately, Renu wondered. “What did they look like? Why did they do what they did? I had to know each one’s back-ground. Then other characters popped up demanding their roles to be written, and I did,” she says.
Three hours in the early mornings was when Renu would let herself be taken over by her characters, jotting down their travails in a long notebook — or while she was still in bed, “on a handy bit of paper”. “During times when the characters stubbornly refused to help me fashion their lives, I dropped writing for months at a time. Often I got back to the book by describing cooking utensils or storage jars or furniture… I took over eight years to complete it,” says Renu.
Perhaps what made her persist with the story, however, was the fact that there was at least one element of it that was rooted in Renu’s own experiences: she traces the book back to childhood memories of her parents’ sisters — all of them “beautiful, talented, with a great sense of fun”. “They never fully realised their potential in the patriarchal milieu they lived in,” says Renu, with a trace of sadness. “I wanted to celebrate the lives of such women.”
