God's Mischief

As post-colonial Mayyazhi (Mahe)—where ‘history and time flowed with the water under the rusted iron bridge’—tries to come to terms with its new-found independence, young men leave to seek their fortunes abroad. And many of the older generation, orphaned by the departure of the French, struggle to eke out a living even as they remember their days of plenty under their foreign masters...

Caught up in their suffering, Kumaran Vaidyar does everything he can to keep the people of his beloved Mayyazhi from starving, but entrusts his own children to the care of his beloved wife, who is no more. Meanwhile, Father Alphonse waves his magic wand and changes pebbles into candy and waits for his good-for-nothing son to return. Through all this, untroubled by the woes of the elders, Shivan, Shashi and Elsie spend an idyllic childhood in sunny, sleepy Mayyazhi. Until the day of reckoning catches up with them and they pay the price of growing up.

‘Mukundan’s two seminal Mayyazhi novels, On the Banks of the Mayyazhi and God’s Mischief, are, at one level, the saga of Mahe (Mayyazhi) with its legacy of French colonialism. At another, they are, despite an exuberant parade of myths and legends, a chronology of the futile search of the exiled through the crowded alleys of history. Mukundan has...made Mahe into the Malgudi of Malayalam literature.’

—S. Prasannarajan, Times of India

’Mukundan’s novels provide a reading of the history of colonialism unavailable in a historian’s œuvre.’

—Prof. K.N. Panikkar, Interrogating Colonialism: Novel as Imagined History.

‘‘ ‘Mukundan’s two seminal Mayyazhi novels, On the Banks of the Mayyazhi and God’s Mischief, are, at one level, the saga of Mahe (Mayyazhi) with its legacy of French colonialism. At another, they are, despite an exuberant parade of myths and legends, a chronology of the futile search of the exiled through the crowded alleys of history. Mukundan has...made Mahe into the Malgudi of Malayalam literature.’ —S. Prasannarajan, Times of India ’Mukundan’s novels provide a reading of the history of colonialism unavailable in a historian’s œuvre.’ —Prof. K.N. Panikkar, Interrogating Colonialism: Novel as Imagined History.