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Literary Review
Games with time
K. SRILATA
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Ghosts is a novel about writing a story, the challenges that it brings.
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Murukan’s work is bold and experimental …but there is a reluctance to flesh things out.
The Ghosts of Arasur, Era Murukan, translated from the Tamil by Janaki Venkataraman, Indian Writing, p.336
“Perhaps I felt like telling a story, a long story with a little reality and a lot of imagination…,” says Era Murukan in the prefatory note to his novel The Ghosts of Arasur (Arasur Vamsam), ably translated from the Tamil by Janaki Venkataraman. Using the fictional framework of family history, Murukan weaves what turns out to be a tall tale, a label he anticipates will be used to describe his work. In the end, it is the quality of his imagination and the world that this imagination brings into being that one is compelled to scrutinise. To what extent does Murukan succeed in luring us into his parallel world of ancestral spirits and the spirits of the future, represented perfectly by the Banian brothers who zip through the narrow lanes of Arasur in their Austin, inciting in those they meet a desire for modernity? That is the question confronting the reader.
Murukan plays a deft game with time and in his novel a fictional past mingles with a fictional future to create a fantastic, larger- than-life narrative. It is as though the ghosts of Arasur have entered the narrator, compelling him to tell us this particular story. “They surrounded my table,” he claims, “clinging to its corners like swirls of smoke as they tried to persuade me [to write about them]”. In the fictional universe of Arasur, we have a powerless, heirless and impoverished king and queen, the well-to-do tobacco merchant Subramanya Iyer and his two sons (Swaminathan, who is insane, and Sankaran, who looks after the family business) and the Banian brothers who appear from the future every now and then. There are other minor characters — Subbamma, through whom the ancestral spirits speak, Swaminathan’s ghostly lover, the Kottakudi dasi and so on. Murukan has kept the plot deliberately thin. His attempt has been to get us to inhabit Arasur for a while, an attempt to create setting through character. However, while he unfurls what promises to be an exciting fictional universe, he doesn’t quite do justice to it. One wants more anchoring in Arasur and its people. One wants to know more about its minor characters — the Kottakudi dasi, for instance. And one wants to know more about its central characters. Instead, Murukan insists on offering elaborate and, often, tiresome descriptions of their sexual fantasies. In his last chapter, Murukan anticipates this criticism. The ancestors observe that the narrator has “just started” writing about Arasur. That may be Murukan’s escape clause but it does not convince.
The novel’s self-reflexivity though is also one of its most interesting aspects. The Ghosts of Arasur is about writing a story, the many challenges it throws up and the fact that there is no such thing as a story that has been completely told. “Only when I had shut down the computer … did I remember that I had not found out what happened to Suleiman,” says the narrator.
Does Arasur stay with us? Not as much as I would have liked. Murukan’s work is bold and experimental and he begins well. But there is a reluctance to flesh things out, a reluctance that a writer can ill afford.
Email: sree@iitm.ac.in
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