A Bookstagrammer accused me of reading Murakami and not S. Hareesh. I was indeed reading Haruki Murakami’s latest book, The City and its Uncertain Walls at the time and felt guilty.
It took me a couple of replays to get the name right. A search revealed that S Hareesh was a Malayalam author. He had written Meesa in 2018. It seems to have been controversial at first but which then won much acclaim.
The book was translated as Moustache into English by Jayasree Kalathil and the Audible version was available when I searched for it in January 2025. To be fair, I wanted to consume S Hareesh just the way I had consumed Murakami. I enjoyed the narration by Mary Joseph.
The story, at its heart, is the story of one man who grows up in Kuttanad in Kerala. He grows a moustache to play a role in a drama staged there. His acting strikes fear in the hearts of the people who watch the play.
The moustache then gets endowed with fantastical powers. People make sightings, associate the moustache with various mysterious events, and create a myth that grows through the story.
Add the magical pre-electricity Kerala as a backdrop, you get a mixture of the magical and the fantastical. Add people’s ego, imagination, and fears, and I think you get a good idea of what Moustache would read like.
Listening to this book made me realize that I had such an imagination when I was a child. I was mesmerized by the customs, temples, and traditions followed in Kerala that I witnessed on my summer vacation trips there.
But, I too imagined magical and fantastical stories behind temple paintings and wooden carvings. That same imagination kept me company when I walked with my father and mother at night along the paddy fields which stopped the road from reaching my father’s ancestral home. The swinging arcs of the torchlight in my father’s hand was the only tenuous link to reality.
Education seems to have filled me with rationality that made me lose touch with that wild imagination. Reading this book seems to have rekindled it.
Parallel Spirals 