Tamil Paperbacks in New Orleans
If you want to be fluent in a language, experts say, you should briefly relocate to a place where the language is spoken. It will force you to find the words to interact with locals – this is the immersion method. Perhaps the reverse is true for reading in one’s mother tongue: I read my first Tamil novel not in my hometown Madras, but in a chemistry lab in New Orleans.
As a graduate student at the university, during the day I attended classes and taught a lab course. After an early dinner, I’d return to the lab to set up reactions that often took hours to run. With those underway, I’d start grading lab reports, or step into the deserted hallway to chat with students from other labs. There were some Chinese students, even a few Eastern Europeans from Bulgaria. In the late evenings, the place was mostly quiet except for the thrum of analytical instruments in the background. Most students – American and international – had a life outside the lab, but getting a life in a new country takes time.
Before social media shrank the world, finding kindred spirits was largely a matter of chance. One day, I stumbled upon a college friend’s mother online. Her daughter and I had both read plenty of Agatha Christie mysteries in college. We had followed the adventures of girl-detective Nancy Drew as schoolgirls. I later graduated to abstruse coming-of-age novels like The Catcher in the Rye. My friend’s mother, however, was a fan of popular literature in Tamil and remained one in Washington D.C, where she lived now.
While I read indiscriminately in English, I was oblivious to both contemporary Tamil literature and classical poetry from over 2000 years ago – and everything in between. My proficiency in English had come at a price, as it must have for many other international students, particularly from Asian countries. From early on, we trimmed parts of ourselves to belong elsewhere, someday. But luckily an ancient language — like a loving mother — bears no grudges.
Just before the campus turned into a ghost town during Christmas break, my friend’s mother mailed me a Tamil paperback. The women characters in that multi-generational novel Paalangal sounded like my relatives back home. Their cadences and idioms were so familiar, when one of them started saying something, I could finish the sentence in my head. This unexpected “autocomplete” feature helped me read faster. I mailed the book back with gratitude. Like the human equivalent of a clever recommendation algorithm, my friend’s mother gave me suggestions, and some books I found on my own. Among my finds, one writer stood out—Sujatha Rangarajan.
An engineer by profession, the man had led the team that designed the electronic voting machine deployed for use in the world’s largest democracy. The anthology of essays, in which he chronicled his early days growing up in Srirangam, a small temple town in southern India, remains one of my all-time favorite books. His idols — the people who left an impression on him — come to life in this collection. In particular, I loved reading about that cricket match between two temple towns, thanks to which the nerdy author’s name appeared in the sports page of The Hindu — for the first and last time. He says in the preface, a straightforward description of real-life incidents will be boring, some things have to be added or deleted to make it a good read. But how much of the narrative is fact and how much is fiction — the ratio is a trade secret which no writer worth his/her salt will ever give away.
Despite growing up in a temple town, Sujatha comes across as urbane and decidedly modern, the rationalist who could appreciate the poetry of devotional pasurams. Beyond novels, screenplays, and science fiction, he turned to science writing in Tamil, perhaps with the intention of reaching readers in small towns like Srirangam, who, in the pre-Internet era, would have remained unaware of advances in medicine and technology. Rangarajan, who was brought up by his paternal grandmother, knew his Tamil and Sanskrit classics, and could easily reach into Hindu mythology to draw metaphors to illuminate scientific ideas. At other times, he picked examples from everyday life. His writing was informative, culturally rooted, and accessible to those outside elite English-speaking circles.
The author-engineer wasn’t alone in this vision. Rangarajan’s friend from college, President Abdul Kalam—India’s beloved head of state—shared the belief that science should serve the people. A nuclear scientist by training, Kalam carried that conviction into public life. Not everyone is fortunate enough to do research; nor do they have access to world-class libraries — but scientific knowledge belongs to all of us.
No matter what subject a science writer majored in, she must understand the essence of any piece of research and explain the how & why of it clearly to anyone who cares to know. It is craft. It takes practice — it is so worth doing.
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Not all my Tamil reading was high-minded. I found a series of Appusami stories by Bhagyam Ramasami featuring an old couple. Sita Patti [full name: Sitalakshmi Appusami], a madisar-clad sixty-plus bombshell, the president of a ladies club called PMK (Patti Munetra Kazhagam). Patti keeps her husband, the Madras-Basha speaking Thatha, (real name: Appusami), busy with work around the house. This makes Patti look like a despot, but the errands keep Thatha out of trouble. What trouble can an eighty-plus man get into, you ask? Well, for that you have to read the kite-fight episode or about the time when Thatha, a Kushboo fan, had the actress’s name tattooed on his chest. The convent-educated Patti peppers each sentence with English words. These books were a breeze to read, besides being a total hoot.
Listen to: Come On, Appusami, C’mon
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Some popular contemporary novels, I found on my own. I stumbled upon the black-and-white film based on Jayakanthan’s 1970s novel, whose title translates to “Some People in Some Situations.” The book grew out of the conservative backlash to Jayakanthan’s short story “Agni Pravesham,” about a young ingenue seduced by a rich, married playboy. The outrage was swift, impossibly outmoded. What did the conservatives want the young lady to do? Kill herself? Jayakanthan responded not with apology, but with art—he took all the vitriol and shaped it into an award-winning novel. At the core of the book, he placed the original story—the one that had caused the furor—and gave himself a role: a librarian at a women’s college, a penurious part-time writer, quietly observing the world around him. At one point, his protagonist even comes to him for advice.
The novel’s structure is sophisticated and self-referential, a topic worthy of an academic thesis, but the book, in itself, is not a difficult read. Or watch the movie first. Lakshmi’s acting is superlative. But it is a different world now in the 21st century and you do have to wonder what the fuss was all about.
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One day, I was finally ready to embark on the adventure of reading the multi-volume historical fiction, by “Kalki” Krishnamurthy, featuring the eleventh century emperor Rajaraja Chola I. The story was serialized in a magazine in the 1950s, so chapters tended to end with cliff-hangers. Maybe, I was being too ambitious trying to read this now, I thought. But very soon, I was on horseback, a third rider galloping through the ancient landscape with the protagonists, the prince and his friend. When I finished all five books – over 2000 pages in total — within a few months, my mother couldn’t have been prouder of me.
What have I achieved with all this desultory, non-literary reading over the years? The fragments of Tamil I’ve gathered have added up to something more substantial. They’ve become a kind of homecoming. Now, when I hear old film songs or a childhood prayer, most of the words make sense to me. The revolutionary poet Bharathiyar’s verses no longer pass me by like distant thunder: they strike with clarity, urgency, and grace. I still read slowly. I still reach for translations, but the language that once felt out of reach now feels like a quiet companion. It is mine. It was always mine.
Sometimes, I feel like I left the lab door open in New Orleans, and Tamil found me.
A version of this essay was published in The Hindu.