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Sequels and portfolios
THE DEVADOSSES, Mahema and Manohar, just don't give up. She, a quadriplegic ever since being involved in a car accident over 25 years ago, continues to write and draw with the help of a hand splint, and Manohar, fighting for years now Retinitis pigmentosa that takes him every day closer to total blindness, continues to create those meticulously drawn sketches and landscapes that have made him a well-known artist. And together they are still writing books; though it's Manohar's name that appears on them, Green Well Years and the books to be launched on Wednesday are examples of a true team effort all the more splendid for the comfort this indomitable couple have been to each other through all these years of debilitating physical struggle.
To be launched are Poem to Courage and Dreams Seasons and Promises, both paperbacks, but the former a pocketbook, the latter larger formatted. Poem to Courage is a distant sequel to Green Well Years, an auto/biographical novel that begins with the narration of a crippling accident and tells a poignant story of all that's happened since. At the end of those years spent in and around that huge square irrigation tank (why `well', I've never found out) with its green-mossed walls, Sundar and Gabriel and Hameed and the others muse about "the simple, yet glorious" setting they'd spend their boyhood in. But "adolescence is coming to an end and the magic (of boyhood) will soon be blown away." Happy memories will, however, remain of what was recounted in Green Well Years. The sequel skips those and several other happy years and then deals with love, tragedy and triumph.
Dreams, Seasons and Promises is a scrapbook of the years in between, of the photographs, sketches and paintings that Manohar — no longer masquerading as Sundar — had sent Mahima or had recorded in those years of love, marriage, college and young parenthood. The illustrations, a `portfolio' Manohar calls them, are accompanied by a commentary that provides the personal Devadoss team touch. And word and illustration together reveal another facet of Manohar — Manohar, the book designer. Perhaps he should begin to do that professionally — instead of advising battery-makers on chemistry, and others on technology.
With prices attractive, these two could well be the best sellers of next week. Better still if all three are re-worked together as one novel, they could well attract the same attention as The House of Blue Mangoes, another novel from the same milieu.
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