A 185-year-old recluse haunted by the past, a teenager who seeks something more than her family’s wealth and a mansion, overgrown with weeds and memories feature in Yalpanam: A Novel, the long-awaited new offering by author Shivani Sivagurunathan.
Set on the fictional Coal Island (smaller than Langkawi but bigger than Penang island), regrets and disillusionment clash, swirl and dance among the old walls, staircases and gardens of a secluded villa, built by a British planter on a small hill many years ago.
In it, Pushpanayagi lives – or rather exists – having seemingly long given up on the world.
But fate has more in store for this Banyan woman and it is about to arrive in an unexpected package of an 18-year-old neighbour, a forlorn young girl searching for meaning, connection and things she cannot yet name.
Coal Island, approximately two hours and 45 minutes from the Petronas Twin Towers in KL, is a familiar setting to Shivani’s readers.
The laid-back isle served as the setting for the university lecturer’s first novel Wildlife On Coal Island, published back in 2012.
A collection of 11 short stories, the book showcased the darker inner workings, beliefs and intrigues of Malaysian life through the lens of everyday people and familiar local animals.
The island itself is presented as an unhurried place with a hint of modernisation on the horizon, as it is set to welcome its first shopping mall.
Shivani herself grew up within a somewhat similar small town vibe in the tranquil coastal town of Port Dickson.
“I remember being very conscious that I was in a small town against which an “elsewhere” – often KL – existed and to which my friends and I compared what we felt was our drab small town fate.
“But the insularity of a small town had its perks, especially for the exploration and expansion of creativity. Interwoven with the daily routines were big pockets of time where we had to get creative. Bored? Invent something! Read something! Look at the wildlife!
“So, my friends and I created many things: games, drama scripts and dreams,” says Shivani.
Her first novel, she goes on to say, was the result of a creatively fertile period and after it was completed, Shivani remembers feeling elated instead of drained from the effort.“I felt full. I sensed many more stories arising, as though new creative channels were opening up. I continued to write and publish stories, and imagined that if I were to write a second book, it would be another collection of short stories.
“Instead, what first appeared was the image of a large, ancient-looking woman in a white sari, squatting in a lush verdant garden, doing a bit of gardening. There was something so compelling, mysterious and magnetic about her that I began to look more closely at this image,” she says.
That woman eventually became the character Pushpanayagi and her house – Yalpanam, or Eden’s Eden if it were to go by its first name – became the setting of Shivani’s second book, published by Penguin Random House SEA.
Also bearing the title name of the novel, it is expected that the manor play a significant role in the narrative.
From the ivy-covered pillars to the rotting floor planks and rooms with no doors to its lush, fruitful vegetable garden filled with pumpkins, tomatoes, cabbages and limes, Yalpanam holds secrets and shadows that wait to be uncovered.
“My writing tends to gravitate towards solid settings and, in many ways, is place-oriented. Where my characters live and how they experience their concrete settings are so vital in my writing in general, and in Yalpanam in particular.
“The bulk of the novel takes place in the house, and the house is a character in itself – so, setting becomes of particular importance. I wanted the reader to be immersed in this world and experience it with the characters, side-by-side, and not as an external observer,” she says.
The challenge, therefore, was transferring the world in her head onto paper, which Shivani described as a journey that has sharpened her discernment as an author.
“These places and scenes had been with me for many years and so they had time to deepen and grow, and become even more crystal-clear.
My task was to ensure the smallest possible gap between what I saw and the words on the page,” says Shivani, who currently teaches creative writing and English Literature at an international university in Selangor.
Building new bonds
The character of Pushpanayagi, an elderly migrant from Ceylon, is juxtaposed with the figure of Maxim Cheah, a sheltered teenager on the cusp of adulthood.
With her father, a weathered politician, and mother, an overbearing, churlish matriarch, Maxim lives just down the road from Yalpanam though no one in her family has set foot near their neighbour’s abode.
“As a university lecturer, I spend a fair bit of time with people in their late teens and early 20s, and a lot of the inspiration for Maxim has come out of this contact and connection with my students over 12 years of teaching.
“She’s an 18-year-old Chinese girl, living on a small Malaysian island, trapped in an unhappy family, dreaming of finding wings to flap her way towards the kind of independence that would grant her self-worth. She’s representative of youth itching for freedom, for truth, for understanding, and of the rebellion that comes from not being honoured and seen by the adults who are meant to be guiding this process of maturation,” says Shivani.
In many ways, the author continues, Maxim could be a young person anywhere but she seems to encompass an upbringing of many well-to-do Asian families in current times.
“Maxim is given everything materialistic and very little of the depth and realness she craves from her parents. She’s travelled all over the world and is taught to value other cultures, other histories, other worlds, but not her own. She’s disconnected from her own family, from her country, from her history, from herself,” she elaborates.
But instead of lashing out, Maxim’s rebellion is to opt for the opposite – to scale down and disappear – which sets in motion a set of events that few could expect.
While Maxim’s challenges are in the present, Pushpanayagi’s demons lie in the past and are revisited through flashbacks to significant events in her long life.
From her journey from Ceylon upon a sea vessel to life in colonial times and through the Japanese occupation, she must make peace with the regrets that continue to haunt her.
“In playing the game of adopting and adapting, she’s lost herself. She’s a paradoxical character; on the one hand, she’s grandiose and commanding. On the other hand, as clever and special as she may seem, she is also a character riddled with shame.
“(In writing her,) I found myself having to be patient and attentive in order to discover more of her secrets. You could say she trained me to be more open, more welcoming of the unknown, more present, more spontaneous.
“This is partly because she’s so inscrutable and perplexing, and she remained this way right up until the final stages of completing the book,” concludes Shivani.
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