She also runs a centre that provides children swimming classes for free. Under the banner of BP Moideen Seva Mandir, the charitable organisation named after him, Kanchana also runs a homeless shelter, a family counselling centre and a blood donors’ network. Kanchana now runs the institution and its library, which contains many of Moideen’s books. Just before his death, Moideen had set up a village centre to empower destitute women. Kanchana moved into Moideen’s house with his mother.īefore her death a few years later, his mother willed all of Moideen’s properties to Kanchana so she could continue some of the social service work Moideen had begun. She told Kanchana that if she didn’t wish to marry anyone else then Kanchana should live as her son’s widow. A fortnight after Moideen’s death, Kanchana had an unexpected visitor: Moideen’s mother. After the last attempt, she was admitted to a local hospital, where she again tried to end her life. Following his death, she tried to commit suicide six times.
Kanchana didn’t get to see his body, there was no one to accompany her to his house, and the decomposed body was buried in a hurry. It took three days to fish out the body and identify it as the remains of Moideen. One rain-drenched evening, Kanchana, like everyone else in Mukkom, heard about the tragic canoe accident in which the craft overturned in the river, and a person who had saved several passengers drowned in the whirls of the river. In his case, his father died and it became his responsibility to look after the rest of the family,’’ she says.Įventually, her confinement lasted exactly 25 years, till a time when it became entirely unnecessary to keep one apart from the other-when Moideen died in the Iruvanji.ĭuring the monsoon season of 1982, she was 41 and he 44. Elders told me to avoid that path as the infamy would affect the marriage prospects of my unmarried sister. “Mine was a joint family with too many members. But concern for their families stopped them. (The first time in 10 years),’’ Kanchana says.Īt one point, they decided to elope. “I saw him once while travelling in the village canoe. For 10 years, they hardly managed to even get a glimpse of each other. “It was a Herculean task to ensure that a letter would safely reach the other’s hands.
#Ennu ninte moideen story code#
With the help of supportive servants at home and on the estate, I sent him basic concepts of the code language,” she says. The vocabulary was created by misspelling common words.
#Ennu ninte moideen story free#
“It was I who developed the language in my free time at home using the Malayalam alphabet. They wrote each other letters in an encoded language, and sent them through trusted servants and farm hands. Soon after their confinement, they worked out a system of communication. Separated and chaperoned all the time, it was impossible for the two to talk, let alone meet without being found out. But she never saw him do any of those things.
Apart from being a known short story writer, he was a footballer, swimmer, political activist and painter,” says Kanchana. “Moideen was a multi-faceted personality. Remorseful after the second attack, his father relented to giving him a share of the family property, but never allowed him to enter the parental home or meet his mother. On another occasion, his father stabbed him 22 times for giving a critical speech in public but Moideen survived again,’’ says Kanchana. But Moideen had a miraculous escape even though he sustained multiple serious injuries. “His father shot Moideen using a country gun when he tried to forcibly barge into the house. Under pressure from community leaders, his father cut him out of his will and denied him a share in the family property, even tried to kill him. Moideen was thrown out of his home for refusing to marry a girl his family chose. Kanchana was forced to discontinue her studies and, she says, put under “house arrest”. The life sentences of the two lovers began soon after. The families broke all links with each other. Despite the long-standing friendship between the two families, in the ultra-conservative Kerala of the 1950s, there was no question of the possibility of an inter-faith marriage. All hell broke loose once both families came to know about the affair,” she says. “It was about a year later that my mother noticed a letter from Moideen while cleaning my bookshelf. But very soon I started getting poetic love letters along with the books.” Kanchana had no cause to question Moideen’s sincerity or how much he cared about her, so it never crossed her mind to turn him down either. Once he gave me a collection of poems by a Malayalam romantic poet, and I found sentences expressing love and romance were underlined,” says Kanchana. He used to lend me books, mainly novels and poems. “In the beginning it was just friendship.
0 kommentar(er)
