The wealth of contemporary Tamil literature has always been just out of reach for readers like me who speak the mother tongue well enough but tend to stumble over the printed word.\u00a0 But you don’t need Tamil roots to appreciate this new collection of translated stories. In fact, Dilip Kumar, the acclaimed author of the Tamil original is not a native speaker of the language.<\/p>\n

\u00a0In the title story \u201cCat in the Agraharam<\/em>,\u201d we meet Babli Patti. The devout old lady wants to get rid of a stray cat that has taken to raiding her flat to lap up milk, which she offers to Lord Krishna in prayer. Her son makes an appeal to their godless relative, Suri, \u201cthe one-man kangaroo court for all of the wrongdoing in the Agraharam.\u201d This hooligan, who can swear fluently in both Gujarati and Tamil, breezily says, \u201cConsider the job done!\u201d Eventually, this humane layabout ends up saving the cat from the deadly clutches of his pious aunt.<\/p>\n

Unlike R.K. Narayan\u2019s creation Malgudi, Ekambareshvarar Agraharam is a real place on the map.\u00a0 This Agraharam is a set of three-story buildings around the 350-year-old temple of the same name, in Sowcarpet, an old neighborhood of North Chennai. The translator or \u201csecond writer\u201d is Martha Ann Selby, an American scholar of Tamil and Sanskrit, at the University of Texas in Austin. In her introduction, she provides context, so we can better appreciate the stories. The Gujaratis of Sowcarpet come alive for us, in English, via Tamil.<\/p>\n

Sowcarpet has been a stronghold of North Indian immigrants in Chennai. When the capital began burgeoning into a center of commerce in the 17^{th<\/sup> century, some of the Gujarati weavers, who had settled in and around Madurai, took up residence near the Ekambareshvarar temple. Then came the Gujarati merchants or \u201csowcars,\u201d from Gujarat, who gave the neighborhood its name, followed by traders from Rajasthan. In local parlance, these relatively affluent immigrants are known as saits<\/em>. In Tamil films, the stereotypical sait<\/em>, is often a money lender, and speaks broken Tamil interspersed with nonsense words like \u201cnambal, nimbal<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n}

Dilip Kumar is the very opposite of those movie saits. His ancestors moved from Kutch to Coimbatore and they belonged to a prosperous community. But following the early death of his father, a rich businessman, he had to drop out of school and take up a series of dead end jobs to support his family. Such circumstances gave him plenty of experiences to draw on later, as a writer. He spoke the local language well. His humanistic, hyper-realistic fiction, which touches upon a range of themes, tends to be laced with humor.<\/p>\n

Ekambareshvarar Agraharam teems with relatable characters. My favorite is Gangu Patti who makes \u201cbeautiful use of vast numbers of Gujarati swearwords, turning them into cubes of jaggery.\u201d Young women seek her advice on everything, \u201cincluding sex, religion, pickle-making, and the nature of time and god.\u201d As Patti holds court in her flat, we get her tragic backstory through a series of conversational vignettes. The hardest part of translation, Prof. Selby says, is rendering dialogue correctly. These conversations sound pitch perfect. To my mind, the best of the 14 stories are set in Sowcarpet. <\/b><\/p>\n

Other stories have their own appeal. Some of them have autobiographical elements from the author\u2019s life, Prof Selby points out. The young worker in \u201cThe Bamboo Shoots,\u201d and the suicidal poet in \u201cThe Scent of a Woman,\u201d the letter writer in \u201cThe Letter,\u201d are versions of the author. (A recent Tamil drama-film, Nasir<\/em>, which premiered, and won an award, at this year\u2019s Rotterdam film festival was based the author\u2019s \u201cA Clerk\u2019s Story,\u201d not part of this collection.) \u201cThe Miracle That Refused to Happen,\u201d is the Indianized version of Henrik Ibsen\u2019s classic play \u201cA Doll\u2019s House.\u201d<\/p>\n

This book, in all likelihood, will whet your appetite for stories by other Tamil masters. In that case, pick up a copy of Dilip Kumar\u2019s comprehensive anthology, The Tamil Short Story: Through the Times, through the Tides<\/em>. The tome traces the evolution of short fiction in Tamil through 88 stories published in the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

Or you may simply want to read more of Dilip Kumar\u2019s well-crafted short stories. Prof Selby points out that the author, who taught himself Tamil by reading newspapers, writes in short, \u201calmost telegraphic\u201d phrases. This insight suggests that even an intermediate reader of Tamil, like me, can hope to read the contemporary master\u2019s work in the original. It is an unexpected takeaway from this book of superbly translated stories.<\/p>\n

sowcarpetchronicles<\/a>Download<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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