Moustache, or The Man Who Never Ends
Photo: Karan Madhok
In Moustache, S. Hareesh creates a modern Indian fable, a magical, evolving story that spreads its bushy tentacles far beyond the pages of the novel.
First, there is a Vavachan, a Pulayan-caste man in the Kuttanad farming region of Kerala. Then, comes Vavachan’s moustache, facial hair that he is asked to grow to play the role of a ‘higher’ caste policeman in a local play. For much of the upper-caste members in the audience, the man and the moustache are a match made in hell. Vavachan is portrayed as dark-skinned and demonic, the second-coming of the rakshas, a mid-20th century Ravana. The moustache grants Vavachan an unexpected position of power. Audience members escape before the performance ends. Old men piss themselves.
The moustache takes a life of its own. Vavachan isn’t Vavachan anymore; he is barely even a man. “The hair on his chin had stopped growing, and sucking up the surplus energy, the moustache grew, taking on life like a human being – sentient, irate, decorous.” He is now capital-M Moustache, a living myth, a menace for some, a saviour for others, a modern Indian legend.
Then, we jump far into the future to contemporary Kerala, where the story’s real narrator tells his son of the wonders of Moustache. Ponnu, the narrator’s son, asks in disbelief, ‘Did Moustache really have magic powers?’
The narrator answers:
‘Of course! He could disappear in an instant, like smoke,’ I said. ‘Sometimes he could become a falcon or a kingfisher and fly away. Or he would shapeshift into a frog or a tadpole or a minnow or a tortoise…’
.
‘Lies! You need a wand to do magic.’
‘If that’s so, how come Spiderman doesn’t have a magic wand?’
‘Because he has a magic dress.’
‘And Moustache has a magic moustache. No one else has such a big moustache, bigger than the man himself. Sometimes, it would be as small as my hand, but at other times it would be as tall as that coconut tree, or as big as a whole forest.’
Hareesh has created something in the Moustache legend that outlasts the pages of his novel, becomes a part of the coastal waters, grows among the tree-vines, and spices up the humid air. Moustache becomes a mortal immortalised by the songs and fables about him.
This is the myth in S. Hareesh’s landmark novel Moustache, published first in Malayalam as Meesha in 2018 to great critical acclaim, and translated to English in by Jayasree Kalathil for publication last year. Kalathil’s translation brought this classic story national and international acclaim, including the prestigious 2020 JCB Prize for Literature.
While the new translation may have expanded the novel’s borders and accessibility, Moustache remains a story planted firmly and deep in its hyperlocal environment. The ecosystem of Kuttanad—a unique, below-sea-level farming region in Kerala’s south-west coast—plays as important a part as any character in the narrative. It is an intricate, closely-connected setting that confronts, shapes, and evolves the protagonist’s story—the moustache, or “Moustache” is an extension of the environment itself.
And just like the environment, Hareesh has created something in the Moustache legend that outlasts the pages of his novel, becomes a part of the coastal waters, grows among the tree-vines, and spices up the humid air. Moustache becomes a mortal immortalised by the songs and fables about him. Late in the novel, the world of the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’ meet when Moustache hears songs about himself: “Moustache did not trouble himself with wondering who this man in the songs was. He has decided that these songs had nothing to do with him.”
Moustache, the novel, serves as a commentary on numerous contemporary as well as timeless themes, including caste inequalities and ‘purity’, the human degradation of the ecosystem, social change with the progress of technology, Kerala’s history, and the intersection of caste and gender dynamics. Even the gods get involved when Kaalam—god of death—arrives on scene with his henchman to deal with the notorious moustachioed hero. Beyond the Hindu rakshas/Raavan symbolism attributed to the character, Hareesh also portrays Moustache as the “complete opposite of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and he drank the arrack [a distilled alcoholic drink] in a matter of seconds, turning it back into water”.
Much of Hareesh’s deeper preoccupations, however, remains with the idea of immortality, of stories that outlast the finite lives of men. The novel jets between the past and the present, between the real Moustache (Vavachan’s) life and that of the narrator and his son, keeping the stories alive decades later. On stage, a local goldsmith plays the part of a thieving goldsmith. Off-stage, the goldsmith’s real perception becomes that of his character. The same happens to Vavachan, as the moustachioed-policeman; and later to Moustache, as not the character on stage in the novel, but the character of the novel itself.
Moustache himself has far simpler motivations than his larger-than-life persona. He wishes to find Seetha, the upper-caste woman whom he is infatuated with. He wishes to swim away from the region to Malaya. “I’m searching for a woman, and when I find her, I’d like to go somewhere we can live without hunger.” And even when it seems that his story has come to an abrupt conclusion, much of the novel still remains: Moustache continues on his journey—a real man or an imaginary hero of songs. Is he even alive? In Hareesh’s magical prose—deeply influenced by oral, folk storytelling mythologies—it doesn’t really matter.
The woman in question is Seetha. Like Odysseus lost at sea—distracted by monsters and seductions while seeking a return to Penelope—Moustache, too, cannot rest easy until he is reunited by the lady of his dreams. It is in the opposite sex that the legend of Moustache finds an abrupt speedbump. Seetha spits at Moustache and sees through his façade; the facial hair, so fearsome and awesome to some, has no effect upon her. The character Narayanan later tells Moustache: “You don’t know how to behave with women… This big moustache and strong muscles aren’t enough… They have to make up their own minds. They’re not scared of blood. They see too much of it anyway. And they’re not scared of the moustache either. They have to like it for themselves.”
Hareesh excels in the balance between centring and decentring the character of Moustache through the course of the story. While Vavachan/Moustache remains involved in much of the narrative, he is only rarely the funnel—or the perspective—through which the story is told. In Moustache’s Kuttanad, every being and every inanimate object is alive and conscious, everything has its own motivations, sharing the environment and the page with the human characters. In chapter 8, Hareesh writes, “Pigeons and parakeets did not bother with rice, baffled by the way humans treated paddy, boiling it twice in water, drying it in the sun, and then boiling it again.” There are sentences and subtle shifts of perspectives like this throughout the book, keeping the reader on their toes, making them question the true focus of the narrative.
Later in the same chapter, Hareesh takes us deep into the perspective of a sardine:
A sardine in the basket, overcome with a sense of guilt and memories of the sea, moved slightly. He had come with a vast school of sardines, and as the chaakara came to an end, he was on his way back to the deep sea with his mates when the sunlight streaming through the clear water had enticed him gleefully to the surface. The school, with many pregnant females with bellies swollen with eggs, had followed him, and the fishermen, watching the sea turn silver, had rushed over and cast their nets in a circle.
In another section, two turtles discuss their befuddlement with human beings and their beliefs (“‘They think the earth is round!’ The black turtle struggled to control its laughter.”) while also commenting on Moustache’s ongoing adventure. In the opening chapter, a boat is described as being ‘loyal’. Close to the novel’s end, a flame and the wind confront in a brief duel.
And then there are the crocodiles, the co-emperors of the region, fighting to survive against the onslaught of humanity. The ‘last crocodile’, Kariyaat, is also a hero of sorts, facing off against the Englishman Preacher Saheb who is inflicted with a Captain Ahab-like zeal to defeat the creature. Hareesh writes, “The arrival of the white man had changed many of the thousands-of-years-old traditions of the land”. The author refers to not only the disturbance of the natural environment, but the irreversible cultural shift imposed upon coastal Kerala by colonialism.
Moustache becomes a voice of the entire ecosystem, a world where each creature has their own lens and their own pedestal, and where magic exists as casually as reality. Hareesh’s text finds no contradiction in the story’s magic realism, since—he makes it clear—that Moustache’s tale is a modern folk story, and if anything is believed with conviction, then it is about as true as one wishes it to be.
Moustache thus becomes a voice of the entire ecosystem, a world where each creature has their own lens and their own pedestal, and where magic exists as casually as reality. Hareesh’s text finds no contradiction in the story’s magic realism, since—he makes it clear—that Moustache’s tale is a modern folk story, and if anything is believed with conviction, then it is about as true as one wishes it to be. The chapter entitled “The Ghost Who Begs For Food” is a particularly delightful meditation of rationalism and magic, where the narrator argues that “Rationalism is the most problematic philosophy in the world, one that completely kills a person’s imagination and instincts.” Instead, he wishes for his son—and thus, us, the reader—to keep our minds free and accept the imaginative instincts of the story.
The hints of magic realism, the vast swathe of characters, and the marriage of nature with human actions all seem to be heavily inspired by Gabriel García Márquez. Closer to home, Hareesh’s work was also compared and contrasted with O.V. Vijayan and his influential 1969 Malayalam novel, The Legends of Khasak. In Vijayan’s work, the chief character sets off on a modernist existential voyage, journeying deeper within himself for answers. In Moustache, the voyage is not as much of the self as is of the bubble within which this world exists. Vavachan becomes ‘Moustache’ not only because of his own actions, but because of how the world chooses to experience and comprehend him. The moustache becomes the characters superpower as well as his Achilles’ heel, both boon and bane.
We realise that the legend of moustache isn’t Moustache’s alone. The Preacher Saheb’s son Ouseph grows a moustache, too, hinting at his aspirations to grasp the same power and infamy. Another rival ‘Moustache’ arrives in the form of the character Narayanan. There are now more copycat ‘Moustaches’. Ponnu, the narrator’s son’s early comparisons to American superheroes were prescient: Moustache isn’t a person anymore—it’s a symbol.
Hareesh writes:
Moustache himself was the copy of a copy…. There were great chasms of difference between the events describes, and between the iterations of the man himself… Even if he had come across stories of Moustache, he might not remember the character he had created, or recognise him in the stories. A father and his son were fundamentally strangers, and so were faithful copies of the same thing.
Ponnu hopes to make his own conclusion for Moustache. The narrator does, too. By the end of the novel, we realise that the ‘end’ belongs to no one. It is the reader’s—or the listener’s—prerogative to decide for himself.
“And did he finally get to Malaya?” Ponnu asks his father. The narrator himself isn’t sure. “Something else happened first,” he responds. Something else can always happen. Moustache’s tale, much like that of the Indian epics, is a story ad infimum. Its end is whatever we wish it to be.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose creative work has appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. His debut novel is forthcoming on the Aleph Book Company. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
