We who have grown old reading news articles about boys like Shankar and Ilavarasan murdered for marrying upper-caste girls are numb to deaths now they wash over us like faraway fairytales about evil ogres. There is an ominous passage when the villagers come to serve an ultimatum and ask Kumaresan, ‘Do you think you can antagonize the village and remain alive?’ It is echoed a little later by his mother Marayi who says, ‘You will have respect as long as you stay with the crowd’. Pilla, the tenderness pours off the pages like golden honey.Īnd yet, this is also a story of blinding hate, a hate that is all the more dehumanising because it is engendered not by personal enmity but by the impersonal, communal, and all-encompassing demands of caste. When Kumaresan cups Saroja’s face in his hands, when he kisses her temple, when he smiles at her and calls her Describing the look in Kumaresan’s eyes when he gazes at Saroja, he says they came alive like the brilliant “glow of ashen embers” when you blow once upon them. Maadhorubaagan, here too, the love between man and wife glows with a sweet, strong passion that draws you into its folds like the drowsy buzzing of bees on a heady summer afternoon. I have yet to read an Indian author who writes of love as beautifully as Murugan does. It’s a wrath they soon realise they have nothing to fight with except the strength of their love. They run away and get married, and then they go to Kumaresan’s remote village to face a mother and a family and an entire community rearing in fury at this breach of faith.
Pyre is the love story of Saroja and Kumaresan, who belong to different castes. Seeing the fair and fragile Saroja, the villagers predict that she will splutter and die in the unforgiving heat like “a little sesame seed”.
Yen thanga katti, yen kannu kutty in the brother’s endearments to his sister: ‘My piece of gold, my little calf…’ When Saroja sits in her best sari on the blazing rock to wait for her husband Kumaresan and her mother-in-law curses her for “looking like a lush erukku shrub”, the picture comes alive. In reading someone like Murugan, there is always a sense of wonderment and mourning at the resonances lost in not reading in Tamil, but Aniruddhan translates with a fine ear that preserves beautifully the music of the original. And now I find myself instead being grateful in a grotesquely inappropriate way to the poisonous controversy that brought Perumal Murugan within my ken. Our literary ecosystem should have quivered with recognition when his first books emerged but conditioned as we are to reading second-hand accounts of ourselves we are mostly blind to the flames beyond our neon-lit windows. Maadhorubaagan for us to notice this extraordinary writer. It should not have taken the senseless raging against Like the creepers and tendrils of the Kongu land he describes so lovingly, it twines around and holds you fast.
What a world of hidden treasure is being unveiled by this writer and his sensitive translator. Pyre, a book marked with the same quality of luminous integrity and beauty seen in Words that describe perfectly the sensations with which you put down Perumal Murugan’s “Meditative, joyous, humbling” - three words Aniruddhan Vasudevan uses in his translator’s note.
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