SAY NO TO DRUGS

How a school dropout ditched addiction and became a much-followed prose-poet on FB

It is better not to open your eyes

It is better to close your ears, too

It is even better if you are not born

If you open your eyes, you will see the world of hypocrisy,

see the world of religious fanatics

You can see people running to fill the offertory box to satiate their hunger for god

You can see communal fanatics licking blood spilled on the streets

It is better if you don't open your eyes

It is even better if you are not born

This is a part of a Facebook post written by Vinu Velashwaram (42) under the photo he clicked of five just-born puppies snuggling together on the street.

Vinu is a school dropout and works as a loading worker in a laterite stone quarry in Kasaragod's Ajanur grama panchayat.

The post attracted around 100 likes and an equal number of comments and discussions. Many wonders if he is a poet or a writer.

Vinu, who was Vinod K during his unsuccessful stint in school, has a dual life. The headload workers and stone cutters in laterite quarries don't know about Vinu, the small-town celebrity on social media.

On Facebook, he has nearly 4,300 'friends', several of them are writers, poets, playwrights and artists from Kasaragod and Kannur districts. Schools invite him to speak during Reading Week. And police officers cite him as an example during their talks on addiction because of the way he beat alcoholism and turned teetotaller.

"Vinu is different because he sees his ordinary life differently," says playwright Padmanabhan Blathoor, whose plays often win prizes in school festivals. "But I hold him close to me because he is a rustic person with a heart of gold," he says.

Vinu's writings are punctuated with grammatical mistakes and his lack of reading is evident, Blathoor says. "But he makes up with his choice of words and his observations. He will have something different to say about a worker sitting alone on the roadside, a farmer walking his cow," he says.

Take the case of a garden lizard he spotted on a fallen tree near his workplace. He clicked the reptile and scribbled on his Facebook page:

I do change my colour

but I never change my heart

Stop throwing stones at me

I'm one among the last survivors of the tribe whom you lynched calling bloodsuckers.

In one of his widely shared posts, he put out a photograph of four young boys engrossed in their mobile phones lamenting how the 'talking box' (samsara petti) had enslaved today's childhood. "Though he did not complete his school, he has the word power to contribute to Malayalam vocabulary. 'Samsara petti' is an example. We all use 'phone' in our writing," said C P Subha, a teacher, and poet who recently appeared in the film 'Nna, Thaan Case Kodu' ('Sue Me').

Vinu was always not like this till a year ago, and Subha played a key role in pulling him back from the brink.

Vinu was born to daily wage labourer Janaki (65) and the late Krishnan K, a mason who was a popular communist in Velashwaram, a village in Ajanur panchayat of Kasaragod.

His parents had spent around a week in Kannur central prison during the Michabhoomi Samaram (a protest for the ownership of the government's surplus land in the early 1970s). After the successful struggle, Krishnan -- who had cleared Class 10 those days -- demarcated around one acre for his neighbours, and kept only 62 cents for himself. He used to offer his service as a mason free of cost to families who could not afford to build houses. "He was a helping hand in society but was abusive at home," says Janaki, known in the neighbourhood as Jaanu. He did not have patience for parenting, used to assault the children, and set their sleeping mats on fire. Once he hit Vinu on the head with a piece of wood which required 15 stitches. "I used to hide in the forest with my four children when he came home in the night," said Jaanu.

After her husband died, she worked in laterite stone quarries and raised her three sons and a daughter. She invested in her daughter's education and she is now an overseer with the Local Self-Government Department.

Her two other sons are commercial vehicle drivers. "Vinu was least interested in studies," says Jaanu.

When Vinu failed in Class 9 at Mahakavi P Smaraka Government Vocational Higher Secondary School at Bellikoth, she took him out and put him in Class 10 at the government school in Ravaneshwaram. He failed in Class 10, too.

After that, he joined his mother as a headload worker in laterite quarries. "I enjoyed the freedom I got and took to drinking beer," says Vinu. He moved to "hot drinks" when he turned 20 years.

After he left school, he remembers hiding a love letter for a schoolgirl between two laterite stones. "She read it and accused me of copying somebody else's words," he says.

That was an infatuation of a teenager, he says. But later he had a deep affair and when the girl's parents found out, they married her off to another person. A heartbroken Vinu decided to stay unmarried. He lost the purpose of his life. And took to drinking heavily.

"I would drink heavily every day and work for only three or four days a week and blow up the money I earned," says Vinu.

The heavy drinking failed his pancreas and damaged his kidneys, and he had to undergo surgery. Once when he went to the District Hospital because of continuous vomiting, the doctor "told me to touch a peg again only after preparing my grave".

But he never stopped. He continued to punish his body. "I was embracing death," Vinu says.

During this time, he used to write on Facebook, too. People who knew Vinu from childhood dismissed him as a 'good for nothing' and marijuana addict.

Only in 2021, he was discovered by Sreehari 'North Kottachery', an activist with 'Nanma Maram' (The Tree of Goodness), a collective of volunteers from Kanhangad.

"He used very few words on his Facebook posts. They were powerful but his writings were about suicide, silence, death and depression," says Sreehari, who works with a company supplying utensils and crockery to hotels and restaurants in Dubai.

Sreehari then contacted poet Subha, another volunteer with 'Nanma Maram'. Sometime in July, 2021, she called on him with a set of five books and started spending time with him. She took him along to literary and theatre groups she was part of. She weaned him off alcohol in four months. "She erased the dreams of death from my mind and got me addicted to reading," says Vinu.

One of the first books he read was the Malayalam translation of Victor Hugo's 'Les Miserables'. He completed it in two weeks. "It was 800 pages. I could not understand much but I kept reading. Only towards the end, did it make sense to me," he says.

But after 'Les Miserables', other books such as M T Vasudevan Nair's 'Manju', O V Vijayan's 'Khasakkinte Ithihasam' and Sarah Joseph's 'Budhini' became a breeze to read. "Now I can say I have a new addiction," Vinu says.

His writings started reflecting that. When Onmanorama called Subha for this report, her first words were: "Ente mon. (my son)." "He exposes the rawness of life. There is no pretense in his words. He has a style that is similar to M Mukundan's. I am saying this as a person who has read all of Mukundan's books," she says. "Vinu does not hide what he was, what he is, or what he does for a living," she says.

Earlier, he would not look into people's eyes. Now, he mingles with strangers with ease. "He goes to grieving houses and manages the backend. He stands in as a caregiver to lonely people in hospitals," says Shuba. "Among all of these, I am happy I could introduce reading to him and he has taken it seriously," she says.

Vinu, who till now does not even have a bank account, says he owed his life to Hari and Subha 'teacher'. "I have a new aim. I may go abroad, make some money and return to make movies of people around me," he says.

Jaanu rolls her eyes. "Onnu pennu kettiyal mathiyayirunnu! (If only he got married!)."