DIFFERENT REGISTERS
Getting on with life
By C.S. Lakshmi
Each story is an exploration into an area of experience that is told with the utmost brevity.
THERE are some books which open up a whole new world of people, images, objects and language that become a part of your life. The smell, rhythm, tears and laughter of a group of people slowly seep into your everyday life and you are able to traverse space and time and mingle with families that feel like extended families of your own. Some writers who write about Dalits and other downtrodden are able to do this magic in some of their works. Recently I read Kanmani Gunasekaran's Vellerukku, a book of short stories in which each story is an exploration into an area of experience that is told with the utmost brevity of words. There is no space left to say anymore nor is there a spill over.
Moving camera
The women, men, young girls and boys in these stories are in the process of working out a way of surviving and, like a moving camera, the stories capture them at a particular moment of their lives. The characters turn their heads and look at the camera casually and then move on and go about their lives. There is the crowded rural bus in a story where suddenly a fully pregnant woman is in delivery pains. The entire bus gets into the act of rushing the bus to the nearest rural hospital. It is the young woman's first child. Her young husband is equally flustered. Both of them have married defying the family. And since the young woman does not know anything about pregnancy, she has as usual gone to the stone quarry to work with her husband even though she has felt the pain. She thinks it is hunger pain. It is while working that she begins to feel the real pain and the other workers put her and her husband in a bus that is not a frequent one. And now she is in a bus that is speeding her to a nearby village. And even while the bus is speeding she screams and before anybody can do anything a baby boy is born. Someone shouts for a blade. The conductor produces a new blade from his bag. Someone remarks about how prepared he is for this kind of eventuality. "This is the fourth delivery is this bus," he replies. "Travelling in buses on roads like this will always mean a safe delivery," someone comments.
Meanwhile the passengers decide there is no need now to go to the hospital and waste money. They help the young mother and her still unwashed newborn child and her husband to get down at a point where there is a tree, and suggest they should catch the bus on its return trip. They drive away the dogs hovering around at the smell of blood. The spot where she has delivered is full of blood and a woman gets a pot of water and pours it on the spot to clean the bus. The water mixed with blood starts flowing and there is still that smell of blood in the bus.
The bus has moved on but we wait with the young parents and the newborn child under the shade of a tree driving away the dogs and waiting for the return of the bus.
Strange customs
In another story that is woven around the marriage customs of a community where maternal uncles have total control over a girl's life, Chittu, a young girl, is eagerly waiting for the night with her groom. Just when she is about to go into the hut her maternal uncle comes with his cronies complaining that he was not treated properly in the wedding. He was served chicken instead of pig's meat. And one of the hundred rupee notes they gave was a soiled one with holes in it. The entire community in the village begins to cook again. A pig is slaughtered, liquor is brought and food is served and a new hundred-rupee note is given to him. He then tells Chittu that she can now go and meet her husband. It is already early morning. The night Chittu was looking forward to is over. Chittu gets up and goes and gets some cow dung and mixes it with water and begins her early morning job of splashing the threshold with cow dung water, shocking all the drunken men around. Some of that cow dung water also gets splattered on them.
A rich field
A young widowed mother brings up a son plucking cashews and selling them for a living. For her, a cashew can never be food to eat. It will always be a symbol of work and survival. Women like her cannot be tempted by food, she tells her son who insists on cooking the cashews as vegetable just for a day. A farmer's field is trampled completely by cows. But he can't bear to send the cows — one of them ready to calve any time — to the slaughterhouse in revenge. And there are spirits that possess girls and finally end up as strings of hair held by nails hammered on to a tree trunk. A bunch of schoolboys are walking through fields looking for stems of white yercum plant during school hours. Their teacher has sent them on this hunt. His second wife has given birth to a boy. The stems are normally used for making waistbands for newborns. A young boy recognises his need to be an artist when he paints a scarecrow pot with a terrifying face to ward off the evil eye — so many such characters occupy the story field of Kanmani Gunasekaran.
Along with the humour, pathos, cruelty and violence, which are part of the everyday life of the people who make these stories, the blood, the nails plunged into tree trunks and the plucked fresh cashews also remain with you long after the stories are read. It is as if Chittu has splattered some of that cow dung water on you also and the milk of the fresh cashews that stick and cause a burning sensation has got stuck in your mind.
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