Love won’t find its way

Shiva

Perumal Murugan has done it again: Pyre is as intense and unnerving as its title. Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Pookkhuzi (Tamil title) was dedicated to a Dalit boy who had married an upper-caste woman, only to endanger his life to honour killing. In this poignant tale of love and loss, Murugan paints a picturesque image of a small town with palm trees, bushes, rocks, birds and goats. However, the moment caste comes into the picture, the charm gives way to unrelenting acerbity, and rustic rock becomes the battleground for collision of intransigent forces — love and caste.

Kumaresan and Saroja, who are in love, after marriage set foot in Kumaresan’s village, little suspecting the grave ‘impediments’ to the ‘marriage of true minds’, especially if it is inter-caste. Though Kumaresan strives to keep Saroja’s caste under wraps, he is too small a peg weighed against the guardians of caste. The villagers suspect that the fair-skinned girl who ‘pleats her saree at the front’ must belong to a different caste. 

Marayi, Kumaresan’s widowed mother, is mortified due to the disgrace her son has brought to the family by marrying outside the caste and is a constant source of Saroja’s disquietude. Without a soul on their side, the newly-weds find solace in each other and in their plan to set up a soda shop.

In terms of novelistic construction, Murugan is no minor master. He dips in and out of the past to bring depth to the characters; each time he dives, the reader finds herself a step closer to Kumaresan’s perseverance, Saroja’s anxiety and Marayi’s frustrations. Inch by inch, mundane aspects of daily life are revealed, and in these prosaic moments are spiralled not only the signs of resilient love, but also the ‘acts of discrimination’. When Marayi directs vicious dirges towards Saroja, the slightest sound of Kumaresan’s cycle on the road is enough to mollify the caustic effect of insinuations. By staying away from grandeur and pomp, Murugan, quite simply, reaffirms the belief underlying Victor Hugo’s words, ‘The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness.’

Through climactic moments of vehement violence, Murugan exposes the xenophobia which is at the heart of parochialism. He writes, ‘In truth, not even the wind from elsewhere could enter this space. The air in these parts had circulated within the confines of this place and had turned poisonous.

Instigated by this insularity, the villagers take their chauvinism to such a degree that it culminates into nothing short of barbarianism.

Since the book on the table is a translation, the reader owes her indebtedness, in part, to Aniruddhan Vasudevan. Italo Calvino once said, ‘Without translation I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.’ This ally introduces us to a shining diamond of Indian writing, without compromising on clarity. Tamil idioms and proverbs, when translated into lines like, ‘His talk was smooth, like banana slipping in castor oil’, suffuse the text with local flavour, sound, and colour.

Embroidered with detail, Pyre kindles a sense of dismay, which stays with us even as we keep the book aside. Though the plot is set in a small town of Tamil Nadu, it resonates with the caste problem rampant throughout the nation and racial prejudices across the globe. That is the beauty of Murugan’s art that it ‘amplifies itself to something universal’ while retaining the local texture.