OhRow House is also an unwritten novel. Each man in those houses is a character with thousands of subplots. The scope of the story continues to heat up and shrink due to internal emotions and external interventions. Though they are not marked by words, every moment is passed silently, collectively, secretly or openly, as pains, smiles, anxieties, joys, sorrows, reunions, and goodbyes.
Jisa Jose’s latest novel Anandabharam also tells the story of a house. Home is one of the few adjoining railway quarters. In it are the conflicts of the inmates with different mentalities. Vipinan’s mother Vinodini, a railway employee, and Vipinan’s mother, who goes to bed unexpectedly the very next day of the wedding, the gemstone where he studied nursing, which he married. Vinodini, who has been bedridden for ten years, has been caring for them, the gem industry, those who continue to live in the gem’s life, the neighbors Parimalam, her husband Jnanasekhar, Mami Marathakam, Vipin’s cousin Ajayan, the everlasting help that comes in as part of the treatment of the bedridden entertainer, Mary Preeta, and these human beings who come through and experience. The novel is an emotionally charged script of the good things that life does for them and the gem industry.
Human life is full of surprises and contingencies. It is a fact experienced only by those who walk through it, knowing that every human being hides inwardly every moment stories and emotions that are twice as blunt as what is read. When the woman, Ratna Mehta, was forced to adapt to changed circumstances and changed thoughts when she was transformed into a new world of unexpectedness with all her own dreams and desires, the playground set up for her by that fugitive who simply says fate again was another was another.
Jisa Jose’s first novel, ‘Printed’, was very impressive on first reading. In this novel, the strong personalities of the characters, which are subtly marked in the first work, are replicated more intensely in the same way that they copy their mental movements and emotions to the readers as well. Along with the mental movement of the characters, many opportunities in the story provide an opportunity to see this unstable life on another level where human desires and dreams never end.
“If the cherry tree is cut down
Where are the flowers?
But when spring comes,
Flowers everywhere! ”
The energy, light and message of this novel is the very meaning of the poem that Mary Preeta recited on one occasion to the gem region.