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Literary Review
Silent stream of tears
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These portraits of urban middle class life are really one long continuous piece of fiction, says PREMA NANDAKUMAR.
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LAKSHMI HOLMSTRÖM is fast becoming our Constance Garnett. Just as Constance helped us enter the Russian ethos, Lakshmi has been a great guide to the wide spaces of Tamil fiction. If practice does lead us to perfection, Lakshmi is quite close to a flawless finish in My Father's Friend.
"It's Shankaran's son, isn't it? So when did you come to Madras, da?''
Syed Maama!
Narayanan stopped short, startled. The final words he had spoken to Syed Maama were four months ago: "You've betrayed us, Maama. When we had to vacate our house, we never looked for a place elsewhere because we trusted your word. Now we realise you had been bluffing us all the time. You won't have a good life, Maama. You've totally betrayed us."
Thus begins the title story. This passage contains the rest of the story as in a magic cube. Even after reading the whole story nothing has happened to revise the tirade of the young narrator. Except when the innate culture of the Brahmin widow makes us breathe again, as she comes face to face with the friend who was indeed no friend in need:
"She stood silent for a moment, shocked to the core. Narayanan waited for her to raise her voice in abuse. But she began to weep and lament, saying. "How did your friend have the heart to leave all of you and go away in such haste?"
Well, this is definitely not a piece of fiction! Ashokamitran agrees that his stories do grow out of personal encounters with people (including Syed Maama) but "these stories are not their autobiographies." Quite true, Sripati and Sakuntala, Biplab Chaudhury and Ponnammal, Munir and Shaku had all escaped the hold of their creator once they entered Ashokamitran's writing, just as D'Artagnan and Dona Maria, Don Pedro and Maria Padilla, De Chauvelin and Madame Du Barry wink mischievously at their creator, Alexander Dumas. Ashokamitran is a Dumas fan and we realise that the passions and peccadilloes of those days of court intriguery are no different from the manner in which the characters and situations spring to life as Ashokamitran weaves his tales. We get absorbed in the tale as we do in the tales of Dumas and do not mind when these authors take their own time to come to the point since every sentence forms an interesting move. Before we get to Inspector Shenbagaraman in the title of the story, we happily relax with the dramatics of the narrator and Kantimatinathan in a school play. Time and clime may be different but feudalism reigns even in 20th Century India each time we watch Swarnam remove the shoes and socks of the Inspector. And the deadly Ashokamitran touch:
"My father knows Karam Singh well. We never buy tickets either, when we come to this cinema."
"In that case, you are a policeman already."
Despite this critical observance of men and matters, Ashokamitran's world is really made up of a silent stream of tears that characterises mortal life on earth. Sunt lacrimae rerum et mortalia tangunt! His attention to detail is amazing. Like a jeweller hunched over his work, he takes in every detail of the place. We who attend weddings where conspicuous consumption is the order of the day, get to the roots of the tragedy in "Festival Evening" through Lakshmi's enviable translation when the narrator's sister refuses to be "viewed" by prospective grooms:
"I cannot blame her. All the same, I was aware that in spite of ourselves, there was a single reason for the way I moved in and out of jobs, for my comparative wealth at times, and my poverty at others, the way we were all drifting along some indeterminable course. It was because I was unsuccessful in arranging a marriage for her. My features, my outlook, my conversation and even my thoughts were transformed because of this alone. She never did get married. She only died and left us."
So simply recorded but carrying megatons of bitterness. The storyteller insinuates the world of Ashok Kumar and Devika Rani in "Achut Kanya", of villains and comedians, lulling us into an avid reading but at the most unexpected moment we get back to the roots:
"Why couldn't a Harijan have turned up to marry my sister? An Ashok Kumar might have materialised for her. And why couldn't she have tried to commit suicide by drinking poison, as they invariably do in films? Doctors can save at least half the people who take poison by forcing them to vomit it up. But it was by falling from the second story and shattering her arms and legs that Sita chose to die."
Such sociological comments, though not wholly unexpected, elevate My Father's Friend to a plane of purposive instruction. But being a natural in creative artistry, Ashokamitran will not sermonise. "Let Me Sleep in Peace Tonight" gently peters away from wakefulness after loading every rift in the story with ore. The problems of ageing virgins and inter-caste marriages cannot just be wished away. But life goes on as in every one of the stories here. Some characters even reappear. As the author says after re-reading them at a single sitting, "each separate story seemed part of one long or continuous piece of fiction." But then life itself is one undulating whole and we live in the solid mandala of the urban middle class all the time in My Father's Friend, as we did in Ashokamitran's classic, Water, another precious gift of Lakshmi Holmström for Indian Literature in English Translation.
My Father's Friend and Other Stories, Ashokamitran, translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström, Sahitya Akademi, 2002, p. xi + 207.
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