Crossing Over

Devi Yesodharan's novel The Outsiders peels off layers of the complicated journey of migration and spotlights the shifting roles of women in contemporary migration stories

- SUDHA G TILAK

The proliferation of literary output from Kerala on the theme of migration for livelihoods to West Asia has a term: 'petrofication'.

Of the 2 million people who migrated from Kerala, nearly 90 per cent live and work in the Gulf countries. Novels such as the 2008 bestseller, Benyamin's Goat Days (that Mollywood turned into a monster hit called Aadu-jeevitham this year), Temporary People, Camels in the Sky, among others by Malayali writers draw attention to the dehumanising experience of migration to Gulf Countries.

Devi Yesodharan's second novel, The Outsiders (Vintage, Penguin) is a well-deserved entrant into this petro literary club. It is to the author's credit that she makes it an evocative human experience where the past and present collide. Imagination, mythology and reality transmute to throw questions and offer answers, and the present's poignancy finds solace in the wisdom of the past.

According to her, while the signs of Kerala's successful West Asia migration are glaringly visible in the homes, food and money, "in literature, the narratives are less straightforward. Migration is a complicated journey, one that requires reinvention, and adjustment, where you lose as well as gain."