Childhood Comrades: Russo & Finnu at Kozhikode Youth Festival by Zara BalrogBalls  

Fanwork Notes

I’m on the move but the 1940s challenge features one of my favourite books, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s Balyakalasakhi (Trans: Childhood Comrade) as a prompt, and considering the book’s title, the fact that it’s set in Kozhikode, Basheer himself being mentioned a few times in my Silm AU Prayers to Broken Stone set in 1930s—1970s India, and Basheer being a big influence on the fic’s “slapstick tragedy” style, I couldn’t resist a quick watercolour in the car. Here’s Russo and Finnu, aka pre-Comrade Maedhros, and the snippet below is from Chapter 9 of the story, meant to contextualise the art a little. 

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It may be necessary to provide a contextual explanation here, for the readers lucky enough to not be exposed to Maedhros and Fingon’s favourite joke, the one they re-told and re-enacted practically on a monthly basis for the last few decades until every member of the extended family knew it by-heart. 

The two had come up with the routine in their late teens as a comedy skit for the district Youth Festival, an event attended that year by a conglomerate of high-up Congress politicians, inclusive of Jawaharlal Nehru, who would later become Prime Minister: a man famed for a pathologically neoliberal approach to socialism and an impressively Oedipal devotion to Mahatma Gandhi. 

The routine was as simple as it was disrespectful, and sat neatly in the annals of Kerala Communists’ illustrious record of Below-the-Belt Gandhi Jokes. It went as such: a third party, usually Maglor, would lie back on a couch, pretending to be Gandhi on one of his “I will be fasting until my people showcase their undying love for me and stop hurting each other on the basis of religion” spells. 

Maedhros and Fingon would walk onto the stage dressed as a Mecca-bound pilgrim and a Catholic cardinal, introducing themselves as a Muslim and a Christian, which was technically true. They would then sit facing each other, keeping up a steady patter of polite conversation, at one point even trying to get their fictional son and daughter married to each other. The fake-Gandhi would then sit up, looking pleased at their getting along and calling for an end to his fast, only for Maedhros to produce a brightly coloured plastic cricket bat, call Fingon a godless infidel, and smack him on the head with said bat. 

Maglor-Gandhi would then lie back down and the entire charade would repeat, this time with Fingon being the batsman, calling Maedhros a jihadi devil-worshipper, and so on and so forth, with the two boys taking turns to hit each other with the bat anytime Gandhi showed any signs of ending his fast. The slapstick routine would continue until three weeks were said to have passed onstage, whereupon it ended with Gandhi giving up on any ideas of a religious harmony centred around a love for him, jumping off the couch and running into the audience, calling for a heaped plate of mutton biryani as he fled. 

To this day, it is said in Kozhikode that Nehru’s abysmal handling of the South Indian states after Independence and his insistence on imposing Hindi over their regional languages, had less to do with his ignorance about the states in question, and more to do with the fifteen unforgettable minutes he spent watching Maedhros and Fingon’s Youth Festival skit.