The terrain that turned into her political destiny

When novelist Lizzy Joy wrote her 2010 short story Anandhakuttan Oru Gunda, she captured the despair of Lalur — once the stinking dump yard of Thrissur city, choked by mountains of rotting waste and residents battling illness and indignity. She never imagined then that the very ground she portrayed with such anguish would one day become her own political arena. Today, Ms. Joy returns to Lalur not as a storyteller, but as the CPI(M) candidate for the division. The garbage hill that once defined the locality has vanished, replaced by a state-of-the-art sports complex named after football legend I. M. Vijayan — a transformation as dramatic as any fiction she has penned.