Nobody was allowed in that room. Kottayam Pushpanath would close the door when he got in every morning and stay there for hours, churning out novel after novel. He’d get out for lunch but go back in again. The only person who could go in there without creating a ruckus was his grandson Rayan who grew up in that house in Kottayam, thinking as a child that his grandparents were his parents. But he too was not allowed to read the books his grandfather wrote – more than 350 of them, mostly horror and detective novels, written over several decades.
Rayan did once manage to sneak a book out with his cousins, as kids do. But he has had sleepless nights reading it, a horror novel called Dracula Kotta (Castle of Dracula), featuring the same vampire character created by Irish writer Bram Stoker in the 19th century. Pushpanath wrote about 20 Dracula novels, at first a translation, and then fascinated by the vampire that woke up in the night, he wrote his own stories featuring the Count of Romania, taking him to different continents.
Two decades later, and two years after the passing of his famous grandfather, Rayan is republishing five Dracula novels written by Kottayam Pushpanath - Draculayude Nizhal, Draculayude Anki, Dracula Unarunnu, Draculayude Makal, and Dracula Asiayil.
“He was fascinated by mystery and crime stories. Pappa (grandfather) first heard a Sherlock Holmes story (popular detective series by Arthur Conan Doyle) from his high school Math teacher Iype, who’d often tell stories to keep the children engaged. Inspired, Pappa wrote one called Thiramala for the school magazine. That was his first. He then wrote for a magazine called Detector in the '60s – these are available in the Appan Thampuran Smaraka Library in Thrissur,” Rayan says.
Pushpanath began writing in the late 1960s and went on prolifically for several decades, writing for Malayalam magazines that serialised the books and won him many readers. Along with the Dracula series (there were 20 of these), he wrote detective novels featuring two distinct characters Marxin and Pushparaj. Marxin solved cases outside India while Pushparaj dealt with those within the country.
He began a publishing house called Kottayam Pushpanath Publications in 1977 but that didn’t last long. Rayan is however reviving it and republishing novels through it.
Pushpanath was a history teacher at a school in Kottayam and research came naturally to him. It surprised his readers that he set his novels in many foreign places without ever having left the country once. “He would study the places, the eras in which he set them, poring over books and speaking to people. This was a time of no internet, so information didn’t come easily. He wrote fantasy too and I remember travelling with Pappa to temples when he wanted to chat with the priests to understand tantric rituals,” Rayan says.
Only Rayan enjoyed these privileges, everyone else in the family was intimidated by the writer. No one would dare go to his writing room where apart from his books was a quaint old transistor and a table fan. Pushpanath, wearing his trademark flat cap, would sit there and write till evening as a routine, and then step out of the house for some fresh air. “But it was like that only for the family. For anyone who visited him, he had long tales to tell. He spoke little with the relatives but turned into a chatterbox with his friends.”
Rayan with Kottayam Pushpanath
After reading that first novel of his grandfather with his cousins, under a tamarind tree by the paddy field next to their home, Rayan made it a habit to sneak out more books and loved them all. In 2019, when Manorama released their yearly special edition, he wrote a story with his grandfather’s detectives Marxin and Pushparaj, investigating a case in Alaska. That year he re-published 10 of Pushpanath’s books, in the order they were first released.
He has more plans to take forward the legacy of Kottayam Pushpanath; make a web series out of the novels, do English translations – the books have been translated to a number of Indian languages but not English so far.