Annakutty relinquishes her four-year-old son, Madhu to German tourists passing through her town. Thirty six years pass, and she lies on her death bed not knowing how to die; a world away, he struggles with not knowing how to inhabit his life. The mother and son’s search for each other is the shape of their quest for a narrative powerful enough to allow him to live and her to die without the redemption of a reunion.
Such a narrative must map the contours of the future she had hoped to inhabit with him and of the past that will forever remain unknown to him. Theirs is the story of not only the things that have happened in their lives but also of what may and might have happened. Not Only The Things That Have Happened is also the larger story of how people in two different societies — Kerala and the Midwestern United States — go about the business of loving and leaving, in short the business of living.
The author: Mridula Koshy