Majeed Annan, who brought Khasakkinte Ithihasam alive for Thasrak visitors, dies at 70

Majeed, 70, who spent years as caretaker at the O.V. Vijayan Memorial Cultural Centre at Thasrak, died on Thursday night.

For visitors who travelled to Thasrak to see the landscape where O.V. Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam took shape, meeting Majeed Annan had become part of the journey.

He helped them enter the world of the novel by explaining its characters, recalling the writer he had known since childhood and pointing to the places connected with the story.

A childhood connection with O.V. Vijayan

Majeed was four when Vijayan lived at Thasrak and wrote the novel.

As a child, he would visit the writer with his mother.

He was too young then to understand the significance of the work taking shape around him, but he remembered Vijayan as a quiet man who spent much of his time thinking and writing.

Those early encounters later became a source of stories for generations of readers who came to Thasrak seeking the world of Khasakkinte Ithihasam.

With Majeed’s passing, the village has lost a link between the writer and the people who continue to visit the place in search of the novel’s world.

Showing readers the places behind the novel

Majeed could neither read nor write, but he knew the novel and its characters through his familiarity with the place and its people.

Visitors would gather around him as he explained the characters, their lives and the real-world surroundings that had inspired the story.

He would also take them to places associated with the novel, including Arabikkulam, Njattupura and Kooman Kavu.

For readers who knew these places from the pages of the book, his accounts created a connection between the fiction and the landscape before them.

His knowledge did not come from books or formal study.

It came from living close to the place and its memories, and from knowing the people and surroundings associated with Vijayan’s work.

He spoke about Vijayan, the circumstances in which the novel was written, and the people and places linked to it.

He also shared recollections of the writer’s final visit to Thasrak.

More than a caretaker

For visitors, Majeed was more than the person who looked after the memorial.

He was often the first person they turned to when they wanted to understand the world Vijayan had created.

His stories gave the place a human connection that a visit to the memorial alone could not provide.

That role made his personal memories part of the way many visitors encountered Thasrak and the novel.

Readers will continue to travel to Thasrak with Khasakkinte Ithihasam in their minds, and the places that shaped the novel will remain there.

But the man who helped them see those places through the eyes of its characters will no longer be there to tell them the stories.

Majeed is survived by his wife and three children.

He was buried at the Thasrak Juma Masjid cemetery on Friday.

Source: The Hindu