Embracing The Winds
Sunith Puthur’s Embracing the Winds is less a novel and more an act of remembrance — a lyrical excavation of memory, ancestry, and identity that reads like a long monsoon song drifting through the hills of Palakkad. Rooted in the soil of southern India and yet carried by the winds of history and imagination, the book moves seamlessly between the personal and the civilizational, between whispered folklore and lived experience.
At its heart is Kesu — a boy whose coming-of-age mirrors the slow unfolding of a land caught between the ancient and the modern. His world — the rustle of neem leaves, the rhythm of bullock carts, the creak of wooden gates — is painted in gentle, unhurried prose. Through Kesu’s eyes, Puthur captures not only the vanishing rural ethos but also the spiritual quietness of a generation that lived in harmony with its myths.
The early chapters, such as The Departure and Summit on the Crag, reveal a mastery of observation. The author writes about everyday acts — watching a train, sharing tamarind juice, saying goodbye — with an intimacy that transforms the mundane into the meditative. Each description, whether of a mountain, a stream, or a human face, feels both tender and precise. Puthur’s language is richly textured but never ornamental; his sentences breathe with a rhythm reminiscent of oral storytelling.
As the narrative deepens, the book becomes an elegy — not only for lost people but for lost times. The intergenerational stories, the rituals of Puturmadam, and the recurring imagery of wind, smoke, and song, all gesture toward continuity. The novel’s emotional power lies in its restraint. When Kesu’s mother falls ill or when childhood friendships dissolve, Puthur writes with such delicacy that grief feels like a shadow moving gently through light.
Embracing the Winds is also a historical meditation. Set against the backdrop of colonial transformation, it explores how families and faith systems evolve under unseen pressures. Yet, it never turns into a political chronicle. Instead, it remains deeply human — a quiet study of endurance, of how people survive by remembering who they are.
Puthur’s achievement lies in transforming a regional narrative into a universal one. His Palakkad becomes everyone’s hometown — the place we all leave and return to, if only in memory. The wind in the title, after all, is not merely a metaphor for change but for connection — carrying songs, scents, and stories from one generation to the next.
In its simplicity lies its grandeur. Embracing the Winds stands as a remarkable work of literary grace — a novel that reminds us that the smallest details of village life can contain the largest truths of being.
Title: Embracing The Winds
Author: Sunith Puthur
Publisher: Evincepub Publishing
