In Maria, Just Maria, a woman born in the dense humidity of Kerala, with talking pets and petty saints as her friends, finds herself in a psychiatric hospital. The novel steps backwards, beginning with Maria as a recently divorced woman searching her memories for clues that might explain why she ended up in a hospital. The cause of her madness becomes the driving mystery of the novel, and in trying to untangle the answer, the story expands centuries back, diving into moments equally mundane and divine.
Narrated by a large cast of characters, Sandhya Mary’s Maria, Just Maria is a coming-of-age story where memories bleed into reality, blurring the lines between real and fantasy to tell the story of an ordinarily extraordinary childhood. Originally written in Malayalam, the novel has now been translated into English by Jayasree Kalathil to reach a wider audience.
From the very first chapter, the novel is self-aware. Maria asserts in her inner monologue, “Madness is often an easy solution for writers to conclude a story, especially stories with a hero or heroine in the grip of an existential crisis.” Maria floats through life, looking for meaning. But as she sees the other patients in the hospital, and as she reflects on her own Syrian-Christian family’s eccentricities, she considers the cause of her madness. She realizes that “I became mad without a clear and concise reason.”
In the non-linearity of wandering thoughts and intrusive memories, the novel tells the story of Maria’s early life, spent in her ancestral home, Kottarathil Veedu, providing glimpses into the lives of its various inhabitants, from her God-fearing great-grandfather to her prophetic grandaunt. Shifting from Maria’s perspective in the present to her memories from her childhood, with occasional chapters featuring first-person guest appearances from those who have loved her, Maria, Just Maria is an impressively complex narrative that stretches time, reality, and the comprehension of the reader, to tell a compelling story.
In the nested narratives, each chapter feels like a self-contained story, a puzzle piece with its own beauty; the funniest one is when Geevarghese Sahada, the long-dead patron saint of the land, suddenly grows very bored of his sainthood. Out of frustration over the banality of the people’s perils, he decides to enter people’s dreams, literally, and have honest conversations about their lifestyles and habits. But this honesty is not appreciated, and the people, sick of seeing Geevarghese Sahada in their dreams, try to avoid images of him in their daily life. What is intended to be a burst of enlightenment and a strengthening of power for Geevarghese results in a tragic-comedy of irritation and fear, ultimately repelling people from visiting the church at all.
Yet Maria, Just Maria, despite its genuine comedy, isn’t a light read. The characters are plentiful—all of whom have at least two other names they go by—and almost every page has an important self-contained story that, like a trailing thought, will reach fruition several chapters later. One such moment comes when Maria’s grandfather describes his days at the toddy shop with his buddies. Kali, his good friend and the woman he falls for, has a bunch of cashews with her. As they talk, she plants a cashew seed, and the conversation continues. Years later, Maria frequently sits atop the same cashew tree, unaware of its origins yet still embroiled in the unending web of actions and consequences, of overlapping personal histories, one that eventually culminates in the moment when Maria “begins her journey into the time and place where she loses her mind.”
The memories Maria reflects on don’t feature her parents or siblings because they “barely knew each other.” Towards the end of the novel, when her parents come to collect her from her grandparent’s home, she faces the turbulence of strange siblings and cold parents, and finds herself as an outsider to a family unit she has no place in. Her siblings bully her, her parents can’t understand her, and she bubbles with resentment and rage that pours out when she is alone at night. The transformation from the whimsical stories of Kottarathil Veedu to life at her parent’s home is bleak and tragic, with a school, siblings, and parents who are unrelentingly confusing. Maria retreats into herself, into a swirl of simpler memories in which she spends the rest of her life.
At one point, Maria revisits her grandparents as an adult and recalls a childhood memory of pure and hysterical joy. Yet when she narrates it to her grandparents—key characters in that memory—they’re both confused. It turns out that no such thing occurred, and Maria, with no other course of action, begins to cry. The novel probes the impact of childhood on our adult selves and interrogates how much of our personalities are built on these non-experiences. And if childhood is misremembered—as it always is—then how much of the adult self is built on false memories? Is that madness too?
While Maria, Just Maria is a rich story of lost childhood whimsy, it’s also a stunning exploration of how the stories we tell ourselves become the basis of our personalities. Equally filled with heartbreak and joy, the novel probes the inner workings of a single character, tracing events from centuries ago, to understand where—and with whom—Maria belongs.
It is equally a story of intense love; love so unconditional that it rejects labels and allows a changing and volatile Maria to become “just Maria”.