A Kerala man who ‘documented’  taste of cyanide appears in a Booker Prize-nominated novel

MP Prasad was only 32 when he was duped and lost a small fortune. The goldsmith in Palakkad committed suicide in 2006, but that is not why he became famous after his death. Prasad is said to be the only person who documented the taste of Potassium Cyanide, a poison that was supposed to kill instantly, before dying. Fourteen years later, his story was included in a Chilean writer’s book, When We Cease to Understand The World, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

The effects of cyanide are so swift that there is but one historical account of its flavour, left behind in the early twenty-first century by MP Prasad, an Indian goldsmith, thirty-two years old, who managed to write three lines after swallowing it: “Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tested it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid,” said the note found next to his body in the hotel room he had rented for the purpose of taking his own life.

That’s from Benjamin Labatut’s novel, which is based on the lives of three real-life scientists. The book begins with the cyanide story, which describes how thousands of suicides occurred in Nazi Germany near the end of World War II, including that of Adolf Hitler, who shot himself in the head because he suspected the cyanide had been tampered with to make it painful for him.

“It’s all made up,” says Dr Mohammed Shafi, retired head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Calicut. “When the Koodathayi cyanide murders were revealed, some incorrectly assumed that the victims died as soon as their tongues touched cyanide. It doesn’t work like that. It is not an easy death, as it is portrayed, but it is a very painful one. The victim’s oxygen intake ceases, and he or she suffocates for lack of oxygen. For death to occur, at least 200 milligrams of cyanide must enter the body.

He is, however, unfamiliar with the storey of Prasad, who wrote about a taste that no one had ever experienced before. According to newspaper reports from the time (July 2006), Prasad ordered a bottle of liquor in his hotel room and mixed a pinch of cyanide into it with the tip of his pen. According to police, Prasad accidentally chewed the end of the pen with which he mixed the cyanide, and that’s how he tasted the poison before the negative effects kicked in.

According to Ramesh Babu’s July 2006 Hindustan Times report, police surgeon PB Gujral stated that the suicide note is a document, and there is no written proof about the taste of cyanide.

Prasad’s storey received little attention in the years that followed, until Benjamin Labatut in Chile wrote about it again.