DIARY OF A MALAYALI MADMAN

Five stories by the most prominent living writer in the Malayalam language of southwestern India.

“My protruding cheekbones give me the look of a poor person, but, if you pay attention to my walk and bearing, you will see that I am from a well-to-do family.” So says Georgekutty, 22 years old. Georgekutty has one surviving brother of five, Babychayan, who has big plans for both making money and accumulating power. Worried that one cannot serve both God and Mammon—many of Prabhakaran’s characters are Christian, if often only nominally—Georgekutty wants nothing to do with Babychayan’s plan, and the sight of a villager murdered for political reasons sends Georgekutty into hiding in the wilderness. The title of this opening story in Prabhakaran’s collection, “Wild Goat,” is meaningful, for what are goats if not sacrificial victims? In the following story, a psychologist attempts to tease out the truth behind a patient’s mad—or is it truthful—ideation about a remote temple served by seven female priests. “Usually, it was people with long-standing alcohol problems or some kind of brain injury causing memory impairment who made up such elaborate imaginary experiences,” muses Vivek, who shares an office with an enigmatic doctor who doesn’t do much to help clear things up. “Pigman” shares notes with both Ovid and Orwell—and perhaps H.G. Wells, too—in depicting the strange transformations on a pig farm, while the title story echoes Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky and Gogol, both specifically name-checked, with the diarist blending onrushing existential grumbling with a delightful shaggy dog (or, better, shaggy monkey) yarn. Prabhakaran often only hints at the antecedent details behind his characters’ predicaments, leaving the reader to guess at why they do what they do, and those problems are many as they negotiate mental illness, violence, and the kind of family dynamics that can send anyone up a tree.

A collection that makes one want to have more of Prabhakaran, little known to English-language readers.