Cat in the Agraharam
The wealth of contemporary Tamil literature has always been just out of reach for readers like me who speak the mother tongue well enough but tend to stumble over the printed word. But you don’t need Tamil roots to appreciate this new collection of translated stories. In fact, Dilip Kumar, the acclaimed author of the Tamil original is not a native speaker of the language.
In the title story “Cat in the Agraharam,” we meet Babli Patti. The devout old lady wants to get rid of a stray cat that has taken to raiding her flat to lap up milk, which she offers to Lord Krishna in prayer. Her son makes an appeal to their godless relative, Suri, “the one-man kangaroo court for all of the wrongdoing in the Agraharam.” This hooligan, who can swear fluently in both Gujarati and Tamil, breezily says, “Consider the job done!” Eventually, this humane layabout ends up saving the cat from the deadly clutches of his pious aunt.
Unlike R.K. Narayan’s creation Malgudi, Ekambareshvarar Agraharam is a real place on the map. This Agraharam is a set of three-story buildings around the 350-year-old temple of the same name, in Sowcarpet, an old neighborhood of North Chennai. The translator or “second writer” is Martha Ann Selby, an American scholar of Tamil and Sanskrit, at the University of Texas in Austin. In her introduction, she provides context, so we can better appreciate the stories. The Gujaratis of Sowcarpet come alive for us, in English, via Tamil.
Sowcarpet has been a stronghold of North Indian immigrants in Chennai. When the capital began burgeoning into a center of commerce in the 17th century, some of the Gujarati weavers, who had settled in and around Madurai, took up residence near the Ekambareshvarar temple. Then came the Gujarati merchants or “sowcars,” from Gujarat, who gave the neighborhood its name, followed by traders from Rajasthan. In local parlance, these relatively affluent immigrants are known as saits. In Tamil films, the stereotypical sait, is often a money lender, and speaks broken Tamil interspersed with nonsense words like “nambal, nimbal.”
Dilip Kumar is the very opposite of those movie saits. His ancestors moved from Kutch to Coimbatore and they belonged to a prosperous community. But following the early death of his father, a rich businessman, he had to drop out of school and take up a series of dead end jobs to support his family. Such circumstances gave him plenty of experiences to draw on later, as a writer. He spoke the local language well. His humanistic, hyper-realistic fiction, which touches upon a range of themes, tends to be laced with humor.
Ekambareshvarar Agraharam teems with relatable characters. My favorite is Gangu Patti who makes “beautiful use of vast numbers of Gujarati swearwords, turning them into cubes of jaggery.” Young women seek her advice on everything, “including sex, religion, pickle-making, and the nature of time and god.” As Patti holds court in her flat, we get her tragic backstory through a series of conversational vignettes. The hardest part of translation, Prof. Selby says, is rendering dialogue correctly. These conversations sound pitch perfect. To my mind, the best of the 14 stories are set in Sowcarpet.
Other stories have their own appeal. Some of them have autobiographical elements from the author’s life, Prof Selby points out. The young worker in “The Bamboo Shoots,” and the suicidal poet in “The Scent of a Woman,” the letter writer in “The Letter,” are versions of the author. (A recent Tamil drama-film, Nasir, which premiered, and won an award, at this year’s Rotterdam film festival was based the author’s “A Clerk’s Story,” not part of this collection.) “The Miracle That Refused to Happen,” is the Indianized version of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play “A Doll’s House.”
This book, in all likelihood, will whet your appetite for stories by other Tamil masters. In that case, pick up a copy of Dilip Kumar’s comprehensive anthology, The Tamil Short Story: Through the Times, through the Tides. The tome traces the evolution of short fiction in Tamil through 88 stories published in the twentieth century.
Or you may simply want to read more of Dilip Kumar’s well-crafted short stories. Prof Selby points out that the author, who taught himself Tamil by reading newspapers, writes in short, “almost telegraphic” phrases. This insight suggests that even an intermediate reader of Tamil, like me, can hope to read the contemporary master’s work in the original. It is an unexpected takeaway from this book of superbly translated stories.
Read the “edited” version here. html.