PVK essay ‘Comrade Number One and His Crorepathy Driver: On Namboodiripad, E. M. S. and his Ezhava Driver’.
Few stories mix the bizarre, the outrageous and the near-epic scale of the tale of E M S, Kerala’s gift to the legacy of Karl Marx and his Ezhava driver, P Parameswaran.
There is no reference to him in ‘Keralathinte Rastriya Charitram’ by R K Binuraj. (DC, 2021.) His name is not among those who defaulted on water charges in Trivandrum Corporation. He appears to have been law-abiding. There is not a trace of this enigma on the internet that Trivandrum, or ‘Trondrum’ to natives, can smell or taste.
The use of ‘Trondrum’is deliberate for PP spoke with a pronounced native accent, the kind locals heard with great pleasure in the off-beat and excellent movie directed by Prasant Vijay, titled ‘Ithiri Neeram’. It is difficult to translate the magic of the title to English, but ‘a little while’ might be close. He could turn on a caricaturish and deadly version of the lingo when the mood caught him, particularly for sarcasm and mockery, at which he was a master. He may not have been aware of it but his speech and mannerisms were brilliant and repulsive at the same time. In some ways it captivated those who listened to it.
I first met PP when I was a book consultant to Eloor Libraries run by that peerless gentleman-businessman Luiz P John. Luiz belonged to Eloor near Kochi, took an MA in ‘Eng Lit’ from Maharajah’s before entering the central civil services and being allotted to one of the ‘allied services’. He was ‘Deputy Passport Officer’ at Kochi when he resigned on an impulse and decided to start a business – that of starting a lending library.
The notion of a lending library was so novel his wife, Minnie, decided he was crazy, putting the fortune of the entire family at risk. Lending libraries till then relied on local patronage and specialized in stocking popular fiction, comics for children and so on. Trivandrum had had several of them and they did fairly well with their collection of westerns, romances and other staples of the lending library business.
Luiz opened his first library at Kochi and later one at Bangalore. Trivandrum was third on his shelf.
In every city he followed a pattern. He would visit the city and would, while staying in an up-scale hotel, scout for a location in which to start his library. He was never in a hurry and never broke any rule, legal or ethical, while doing all of this. To him the ends – a reasonable profit – mattered as much as the means, the running of libraries.
He was charming and witty and he won friends and influenced all those who became members of his library. His wit was occasionally abrasive. He had signs on the walls of his library that sometimes pissed off people. Dr C. R. Soman, famed nutritionist and public intellectual, gave up his membership because of a sign that said that Luiz treated all the books in his library as virgins and if anyone was found violating them, punishment was sure and would sting. The good doctor may not have measured the nutritional benefits of humour.
A young IAS officer from Delhi, snooty because he was upper caste and upper crust, returned an expensive book of photographs with two nudes missing. This Gupta was told that if he did not pay three times the price of the book, the standard fine for damaging a “virgin”, his name would be mud among all the IAS officers in Trivandrum. He promptly paid, sending his official driver with the cash. The errands that drivers have to run!
I was both happy and chagrined because I had introduced Gupta to Eloor. I had known him as a young trainee at Palghat where we met at the State Guest House where I would have lunch while working at the Government Victoria College. Gupta had borrowed T S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Guide to The Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot’ by B. C. Southam from me. He returned them before returning to Delhi, his idea of a “civilized place”, without any pages missing.
Luiz loved books and reading and had cannily turned his passion into a profitable business. He told me once that I could select any book I liked no matter what the price of the book or its potential to bring in an income. I should feel proud standing in my own library, he said. This was another quality that endeared me to Luiz. Pride.
I never told Luiz this, but I was also driven by pride. It is a quality I had learned from my parents and my grandfather and, more broadly speaking, from the glorious revolution that Kumaran Asan, my grandfather, and his cohorts, Dr Palpu and Narayana Guru had collectively led. They instilled pride in Ezhavas while insisting that arrogance had no place in a civilized man’s armoury.
One should remember that for so many things the model community for Ezhavas was that of Kerala Christians. Luiz embodied, effortlessly, the best of those qualities – entrepreneurship and business acumen, generosity and compassion and a meticulous sticking to the ethical path. Above all, Christians valued modern education and updating of one’s minds. That is why they are the model community of a model state. True, not all Christians stuck to these principles, but most did.
Luiz himself would in an endearingly self-deprecating way tell me that he was an “achayan” or Kerala Syrian Christian and add that I had no need to fear him on that count. I never feared him. He was one of my best friends, as true and steadfast and generous as they come.
In conclusion I must mention the one stunning, unforgettable encounter I had with PP.
I once met PP along with Sharma, Luiz’s Trivandrum auditor and the good Narayanan, Eloor’s manager. It was to request PP to extend the lease on the basement of the three storey building where Eloor sat. It was ‘PP’s Restaurant’, famed for delicious food and quick service. PP, once a driver had become a cook and would often be busy in the kitchen, stirring a ‘thoran’ or an ‘aviyal’ to perfection. Business was good and Luiz hoped that the fact that he had signed a bank document promising a three-year extension of his lease in January that year would taste good in PP’s mouth.
Things turned foul the minute Narayanan mentioned that I was a “prof”. In his broadest ‘Trondrum accent’ he mocked me. “Professera?” In a tone rich with the taste of scorn that the unlettered had for the scholarly and for books, he sneered: “Professeraa? Professareee! Listen! If there is a March 31 this year, I will break open your lock on my building, go in and smear shit on all your books, starting with the most expensive ones.” He seemed to have come up with a recipe for how much shit was needed to cover all the shelves and how that meal had to be served.
Going through my old autograph books as part of rebuilding Kamalalayam, my family home, I came across an old autograph book that had E M S’s signature on it. It was a shame I had never collected PP’s signature on the same book. Shit! It is too late now.
I must thank the good and infinitely benign Narayanan for all that he has done to provide me with quality information on PP.
And I must once again salute that exemplar of decency, moderation and rationality, Luiz John, and pay a tribute to Minnie “chechi” for her stoicism and courage.
P. Vijaya Kumar / PVK
Note: A couple of minor corrections have been made to the original article.
Thank you. Nandri. Namaskaram.
PVK 31/May/2026
© PVK / P. Vijaya Kumar / profpvk@gmail.com
PVK's Book mark 