Almost each Communist village of Kerala’s northern Malabar has a Martyr’s Column and a library. My village, Madikkai in Kasaragod, has a memorial for slain DYFI chief, comrade Bhaskara Kumbala, and a library in-built memory of Communist revolutionary A.Ok. Gopalan. They say libraries performed a important position in shaping Kerala’s status as an erudite State. And like many others, it’s from one of these tiny, tiled-roof libraries that my world opened up.
I first heard of Victor Hugo from an uncle one summer season afternoon, whereas we had been constructing castles with moist mud in a palm orchard. He stated to us youngsters: “All of you should definitely read Victor Hugo’s Pavangal [Les Miserables].” That should have stayed on, for one night I discovered myself on the library ready for comrade Kottan, the librarian, to get there. He additionally had a job in a beedi firm. As Kottettan (brother Kottan, as I used to name him) got here in, I eagerly requested about Pavangal. With a torch torch in hand, he led me by way of the book-lined cabinets of the dimly-lit, sparsely furnished library. However, we couldn’t discover the e-book that day.
Visitors on the Notre Dame
| Photo Credit:
Thulasi Kakkat
Instead, he handed me one other one, Maxim Gorky’s Amma (Mother). Just a few days later, Kottettan instructed me he discovered the e-book I had been in search of. But it turned out to be one other one by Hugo, Notre Damile Koonan (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). And that was the start of an expertise I cherish to this present day. In that dingy library, I learn concerning the famed winters of St. Petersburg, the medieval cathedrals of Paris, and the cobbled streets of historical cities. I felt a deep sense of anemoia — a phrase the dictionary describes as nostalgia for a place one has by no means been to. In a village with solely harsh summers, brooding rains and a mere whiff of spring, I yearned for the alleyways of unusual cities, their biting winters, and golden wheat fields.
Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Leaning into the acquainted
This January, on a significantly chilly night, whereas strolling throughout a bridge over the Seine to the Notre-Dame de Paris, I felt a sense of familiarity — the reminiscences of what I had learn intertwining with actual life.
It had solely been weeks because the cathedral, which was shut for restoration following a hearth in 2019, was reopened to the general public. Overwhelmed, I felt an urge to shout out to the vacationers queuing to enter the cathedral that beneath the bottom upon which they had been standing, as soon as upon a time, there had been 11 steps. I had learn in The Hunchback… that the steps main as much as the cathedral had been destroyed by the repeated flooding of the Seine. As I stepped inside Notre Dame by way of the triple-arched entryway, I used to be struck by how a lot I remembered from the e-book. Did I hear somebody name out “refuge” from behind the altar? Did I hear a faint Spanish lullaby from some secret chamber above? Or did I spot a lamb operating by way of the maze of the guests’ toes?
Glimpses from inside Notre Dame
| Photo Credit:
Thulasi Kakkat
Though I knew I wouldn’t discover it, I saved in search of a phrase. On the flooring speckled with daylight filtering in by way of the colored glass home windows, within the gloomy corners with large sculptures, on the partitions adorned with photos — ANArKH. Hugo, in his preface to the novel, says he chanced upon this mysterious phrase, that means destiny in Greek, casually scribbled on one of Notre Dame’s towers.
“… The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth,” he writes, additionally alluding to the state of disrepair the cathedral had fallen into within the early nineteenth century. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame helped renew curiosity within the constructing and led to the efforts in its restoration.
Notre Dame at night time
| Photo Credit:
Thulasi Kakkat
Over 860 years previous, the cathedral, a masterpiece of Gothic structure, took 200 years and hundreds of employees to construct. Scores of artists and sculptors whose works it holds, the unusual and the extraordinary folks whose prayers and silences it has witnessed. Does this colossal monument know simply what number of lives have been linked to it in innumerable methods? Lives like mine?
