The prolific Malayalam writer Benyamin’s short story “EMS and the Girl” begins with a narration by Jose, an immigrant from Kerala living in the United States. In order to hide his own identity from a girl who sought refuge in his house, he introduces himself as Elamkulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad – in short, EMS. The girl has never heard of the real EMS – a towering Communist figure in Kerala, who became the Indian state’s first chief minister in 1957 – and therefore believes that it is her host’s name. She goes her way, and for the protagonist life resumes normalcy after some days of high drama. Years later, Jose comes to know from his wife – who had, all the while, been kept ignorant of the entire series of incidents – that once, when he was away, the girl had come looking for EMS. “Even a girl in America came in search of EMS from Kerala when she had a problem,” his wife exclaims. “Imagine – EMS in America!”
The short story is included in Benyamin’s collection Márquez, EMS, Gulam and Others, recently translated from Malayalam by Swarup B R. We learn that the big names in the collection’s title – the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the political and intellectual giant EMS – serve as refuges for small individuals in the stories engaged in petty masquerades.
Many of the stories in Márquez, EMS, Gulam and Others are about stitching together with linear narratives a varied cast of characters from very different backgrounds – for instance, a Hmong teenager, from an ethnic group who fought on the American side in the Vietnam War, and EMS, the ideologue-in-chief of Malayali communism. Here there are the stories of Javed, a displaced Kashmiri in Nainital, in the state of Uttarakhand, whose life is recounted by a migrant; or of a princess of the Hadiya people in Ethiopia, waiting in a bar where Malayali migrants hang out; or a Christian Arab tour guide and an undocumented Malayali in Jerusalem. Benyamin’s prose brings forth a view of globalisation from below, through the eyes of people on the margins of the West-dominated world order. The stories give evocative voice to the often ignored connections and solidarities between people from the Global South amid global patterns of migration and displacement. And they show these people’s lives playing out, whether as tragedy or comedy, amid the global saga of our present age.