Time, the leveller

KAALA VELLAM (Tamil): Rs. 75.

THIRAIGALUKKU APPAAL (Tamil): Rs. 60. Both from Arundhati Nilayam, 19, Kannadasan Salai, Chennai-600017.

INDIRA PARTHASARATHY KADHAIGAL - Collected stories of Indira Parthasarathy - Volumes 1 and 2: Rajarajan Pathippagam, 19, Kannadasan Salai, T.Nagar, Chennai-600017. Rs. 100 each.

THE MAJOR requirements of writers seeking to project human behaviour - and more often the repelling part of it - is a keenness of perception not just at a point of time but also over the years during which it weakens due to creeping age or mellows because of wisdom. Dr. Indira Parthasarathy, who had been Professor of Tamil in the Delhi University for many years and now resides in Chennai and has been writing for nearly 40 years, infuses, with a rare deftness, life into his novels and short stories under review.

How Time tames the dreaded Padmanabhachar, village aristocrat and terror, known better as ``Pachaikal'' because of the expensive ring he wears is handled with skill by him in Kaala Vellam. He takes the scene back to the 1920s and 1930s when the likes of Pachaikal were bullying everybody but lived long enough to know that they no longer mattered. Pachaikal, however, should have been a rare species in his time to have longed for a daughter when his first wife, Alamelu delivered only a succession of sons and he married Chellam who also did not live up to his hopes that she would give him a daughter. The recurring pregnancies take an unexpected turn when his first wife delivered the much longed for daughter, Vedavalli. The novel spans two generations with the scenes shifting from the village to the sprawling metropolis of Chennai. The novel presents Time as a leveller in this fast-paced novel.

Thiraigalukku Appaal (Beyond the screen), the second novel under notice, is a denunciation of the colour consciousness prevailing among the middle and upper middle class Indians. Lest there should be any doubt about it, one has only to go through the matrimonial advertisements specifically mentioning a preference for fair-complexioned brides. Bhuma, in the novel, is a dark- skinned girl who is in fact very good looking and also high- spirited. Her marriage breaks up because of the brutal inconsiderateness of her husband who is always teasing her for her being dark. The other men in the novel find her intelligent and attractive. It ends leaving a very angry and disillusioned Bhuma after she discovers that the man she is about to marry had seduced and deserted a nurse after promising to marry her.

The novels and the stories also have a small sprinkling of the Hindi-speaking friends of the characters. They are mostly a virtual exploration of the human psyche giving a distinctive flavour from Dr. Parthasarathy's focus on the educated Tamils in Delhi. Yet another feature of his fiction, shared by the other educated writers, is the intrusion of English in the conversation of the characters and it invites attention to how this language still remains as an active presence in our minds. ``Elementary, my dear Watson'', says the girl in one of the books under review assuming the airs of Sherlock Holmes.

The novels and stories revolve round Karolbagh, the Connaught Place, the Rivoli Theatre and the other haunts of the Tamil emigrants to Delhi, along with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). Dr. Parthasarathy knows very well that even while conveying a message he should keep in mind expectations for good incident-filled short-stories. He recalls in his foreword to his collection of short-stories, Chekhov's advice that a story beginning with a revolver in a room should end with its being fired.

The very first story, ``Manitha Deivangal'', in the first collection of short-shorties, is about a Muslim pilot in the Indian Air Force, engaged in repelling Pakistan's incursions killing himself by crashing his own plane against it when he found that he could not smash it with aerial bombardment. The other character in the story is a Pakistani Muslim girl seeking refuge in India and the predicament into which she puts the Indian army by giving rise to suspicions about her being a Pakistani spy. The story is an illustration of how the division of the country brought about by Jinnah's hunger for power had only wrought havoc on human sentiments. More than one story in the collection are about elderly men regretting very late their marrying for a second time after the death of the first wife, younger women who despise them. The realisation by a man who had to struggle as a young man to raise himself from poverty that life has become a void when he is rich, the agony of an artiste when the little girl he has befriended is no longer interested in the portrait of her dead mother since a ``new mother'' has come into her life, the imperious demand from a girl in a bus to the youth occupying the ``ladies' seat'' and her feeling ashamed when she discovers that he is handicapped, the American who is astonished when a young woman in the village to which he had come to study Indian culture is infuriated when he suggests that she should every day light the ``kuthuvilakku'' offered to him for sale and the heartlessness of those who do not involve themselves by rushing to the aid of a boy whose legs are crushed under the wheels of a bus are projected with great sensitivity in the first collection of stories.

The second bunch starts with a story about a passenger in a train suffering under an onslaught of asthma and goes on to take a look at an inveterate writer of ``Letters to the Editor'' and his child who dies in a hospital because of lack of attention from the doctors rushing to the Parliament House to attend on a minister suffering from chest pain. The other stories include one about the compassion of a Muslim purchaser of a house in a village in letting the old couple who had been living in it for years to remain there. There are also the Hollywood nymphs getting lost in the bliss of an Indian ashram. Among the other stories is one about the touching camaraderie between a barber and a Brahmin priest in Kumbakonam when they discover that their sons who are well off in Delhi have become strangers to them because of their parents clinging to their old occupations.

The novels and the stories are an illustration of how a serious writer can be very readable while still being an ``intellectual''.

CVG

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