As usual with Malayalam novels, I've been taking my sweet time to read
Randidangazhi (to my dad, in the case of this particular one). It's about enslaved low-caste people, so not surprisingly, the storyline is not a particularly happy one. Luckily, the last chapter wasn't so bad. I wonder how the next one will turn out.
Mayura Sandesham, on the other hand, has been going very well. I've memorized 18 quatrains now, and I think I understand them. Sometimes I think about what it would be like to translate these quatrains into English. It seems hard to convey how difficult they are for a native speaker of Malayalam to decipher in an English translation without using some combination of Shakespearean English and lots of loanwords from Latin and/or Romance languages.
I managed to translate a bit more of my grandfather's diary yesterday, too. Next comes his very brief description of (his experiences during) the final stages of the
Burma Campaign, particularly in 1944, and after that, his account of the war's aftermath, which probably held more personal significance to him.