We were obsessed with discovering the meaning of everything. And to this end, every weekend we would all get together to discuss and debate: the meaning of words, the meaning of omens, the meaning of historical events and even the meaning hidden inside everyday road accidents. To say nothing of the mania to discover the meaning of life itself that came over us which ultimately, and stubbornly, took the form of a collective, a building and eventually as an institution itself.
One day, we invited a guest-speaker to come and present his lecture on meaning. On his way to the lecture hall, before his speech, he was however wracked with doubt: to urinate or not to urinate? He asked us, ‘Where are the pissing pots?’ There was a toilet ensconced near the lecture hall.
‘There!’, we said pointing to its chambers.
He entered the toilet and locked the doors. We patiently awaited his return.
But, he didn’t emerge. We waited and then we waited some more. But he didn’t return.
Now, centuries have gone by. He is yet to emerge from behind those toilet doors.
Chapter One.
What is progress, I asked?
Chapter Two.
It is a journey towards the Left and then to the Right, came the answer.
Chapter Three.
The answer was delivered by a Crab.
[Original in Malayalam by O. V. Vijayan titled: ‘Anartham Artham’. Depending on how we choose to read this fable, ‘Artha’ can mean material or wealth; ‘Artha’ can mean meaning itself. The corresponding antonymic valence of ‘anArtham’ duly changes as well. One suspects O. V. Vijayan was ribbing the various organized efforts to discover the long hand of dialectical materialism in every aspect of Kerala’s life, especially during the heydays of Marxist-Communist rule.
Translated by Keerthik Sasidharan]