Aneesha

Two years ago, my best friend posted a story about the novel Francis Ittykora . Intrigued, I asked to borrow it, and he brought it to me. It took me eleven days to finish, mostly because I was simultaneously reading Haunting Adeline . ​As a B.A. English Language and Literature student, I later brought up Francis Ittykora during a classroom discussion as an example of historical fiction . My teacher was completely taken aback. She refused to classify it strictly as historical fiction, solely because of how horrifying the narrative is. "You’ve actually read it?" she asked, surprised. When I told her how much I loved it, it became my go-to recommendation for anyone asking for book suggestions. ​Francis Ittykora contains genuinely blood-chilling chapters. The writing is so convincing that it makes you believe Francis Ittykora actually existed. After finishing it, I was left in a delusional haze, wondering if such people still walk among us—what if the wealthy elites surrounding ...

It took me all this time to realize that every poet praises incomplete love. I am pretty sure that people always find beauty in incompleteness. Take the movie Titanic —its massive popularity exists only because of the incomplete love of Jack and Rose . If they had united in the end, it would have been just another romance movie; it would never hold the depth of the bitterest tragedy, the impact of which covered the rest of Rose's life. ​Consider Husnul Jamal and Badarul Muneer , the celebrated masterpiece of the poet Moyinkutty Vaidyar . Even though they unite later, people find the true beauty of the song in the painful poetry of their separation. ​What about Majnun ? We know it literally means 'madman.' Even though he had a name, people refused to call him Qais . That is what the world loves to see: the beauty of a love so consuming that it pushes a man to the brink of death. The world never remembered the poet ' Qais ibn al-Mulawwah ' as an ordinary man; instead ...