MRIDULA KOSHY’S NOVEL NOT ONLY THE THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED: A DIPTYCH

Abstract

A Diptych in art is a two panel painting connected using a hinge. Even though there were many deliberate efforts to bring forth this style of writing as a canon, especially in medieval literature, it got unwind somewhere in the history. Recently it was Mridula Koshy, an Indian writer settled in America, came forth with this technique through her debut novel Not Only the Things That Have Happened.  It is the story of a mother who lost her future and a son who lost his past, and both were never regained. Each of these protagonists forms each panel of the diptych and bakes their story independently so that one could treat each panel as two separate stories. When the feature time is considered, we can trace two cycle of period - a story of thirty-six hours and a story of thirty-six hours. Again the text can be bisected in terms of the setting also. The background of the first panel is a small remote area in Kerala. The local language used and the culture described here portrays the land as its mirror image. In the second panel the land portrayed is the United States. Unlike the usual stories set in America, Koshy presents “A small city in the Midwest, United States” which is not much close to the metropolitan region.