CHENNAI: In Kuzhali Manickavel’s 'Sugargun Fairy', Stalin Rani’s uncle hands her a shoebox that smells of wood and old honey. He claims the box contains sugary fairies and recommends she eat them to obtain the coveted superpower of saying ‘supercalifragilisticleexpialidicious’ backward. One morning, she begins coughing out black, hard revelations that soon pile up in this shoebox. Her uncle reasons, “everyone must keep a box of things they don’t understand and can’t throw away.”
Then, like most women I know, she leaves home to escape the time that “collected in the corners and clung to people’s heels if they stood in one place too long.” She writes postcards to her uncle, and at the end of the eight-page story, she tears and throws these unsent letters into a river.
This fragment finds a home among the 35 short stories in Manickavel’s 2008 collection, Insects Are Just like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings. Other short stories in this book feature a nameless man pulling small, white cats out of his mouth on a sidewalk; a girl named Muhil with wings that looked like dried leaves; the ghost of a man who returns to ask why his wife buried him with his shiny watch.
These seemingly plotless strands of the surreal continue to weave themselves into Manickavel’s other works, all published by Chennai-based Blaft Publications. Her second book Things We Found During The Autopsy baffled readers in 2014. Her other works include chapbooks like Eating Sugar, Telling Lies (2011) and The Lucy Temerlin Institute for Broken Shapeshifters Guide to Starving Boys (2019), and How to Love Mathematical Objects (2019).
Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Manickavel moved to Chidambaram as a 13-year-old. In a childhood straddling Canada and Tamil Nadu, she seems to have acquired an eye for the odd or unimportant ways in which people express themselves. As she tells CE later, “That’s something that has always interested me.”
The Bengaluru-based writer wrote her first story when she was five years old, she recalls in a recent literary podcast titled Arcs. Based on a dream about a large dark tree, it featured two women turning into bats. “I remember trying to write it down. I was hampered by the fact I couldn’t write very well and I didn’t know many very words. I had this feeling of telling to tell people about this thing,” she says. Decades later, her professional foray into the writing world began in 2004 with forums and e-zines.
Her writing also took shape in ‘the late thirdworldghettovampire blog,’ which ranges from song recommendations, and unfiltered thoughts on racism and sexism, to critiques of how the English speak the language. Weird. Fantastic. Experimental. Slang. Manickavel takes ownership of these words and redefines them.
Whether readers stumble across her books and blog, they cough out black-revelation-like questions: Should stories have a clear-cut point or morals? Should fiction have a protagonist, beginning, middle, and end?
While all my high school English teachers would vigorously nod and violently gesture yes, Manickavel’s writing would giggle at those questions. Her stories would methodically turn that idea inside out, hang the question mark out to dry away on a warm Sunday afternoon.
Latin American writer Gabriel Garica Marquez comes to mind: “My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.” Miles away from Latin America, Manickavel’s tales deliver sharp images of small towns and distinctly relatable experiences in a language simmering with slang. There are boys who threaten to kill themselves if girls they like do not date them or women who remember the Puveli song while they were groped on a bus and called a ‘sexy whore.’
If her short stories hand us bizarre existential questions with no answers, it certainly doesn’t end without giving us an escape route from reading and living rigidly. In a world that tells us who to love, how to dress, or bans certain books, this author — like Stalin Rani’s uncle — presents us with shoeboxes. There is the courage to discard convention and own the absurd. With this shoebox, she asks, should and can fiction (and life?) ever be written and read just one way? The answer is somehow ‘supercalifragilisticleexpialidicious’ backward.
Excerpts follow:
Your writing ranges from flash fiction, and vignettes to short stories. Why did you choose shorter prose? How do you know when a story has reached its ending?
I just haven’t had the time or bandwidth to do a novel, hopefully, that will change though. For me, stories don’t really end at the end. I believe that if you keep working at it, a story will just continue to grow and change. I choose to stop that journey at some point, but I’m not sure if that is the actual ending.
How did ‘the late thirdworldghettovampire blog’ carve a space for your writing?
My blog was just a place for me to write about whatever I wanted. I ended up writing a lot about racism because, as a friend once pointed out, I am obsessed with white people. I also remember writing about Drag Race from way back in the day when the show looked highly fuzzy. It was fun, I liked the gifs. For me, the challenge has always been finding outlets that would give my writing a chance. Anyone who was/is willing to give my work a chance is important to me.
In previous interviews, you mentioned the importance of accessible fiction. How does one write accessibly?
It’s a naïve idea, but to me, accessible fiction means fiction that is available for consumption to everyone, not just to people that know a certain language or have a library card or an internet connection. It means allowing people to tell their own stories however they choose to tell them. Those of us who are privileged enough to write and be read is benefitting from a system that doesn’t allow any of that. I feel it is always worth remembering that privilege probably has more to do with a writer’s success than we would like to admit.
Could you explain the inspiration behind the diagrams of insects in your book 'Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some Of Them Have Wings'?
I think I was looking through old textbooks around the same time we were putting the book together. One exercise I like to do is to put unrelated things together to see what happens. It’s not a very useful exercise.
Some of my favourite characters in your books are women like Kalai who retorts that her genitals fell off when people asked her when she’s getting married. How do you write your female characters?
I feel like these things are important, there are a lot of stories hidden in these kinds of details. We can trace them to other things that have gone into shaping this person. Some people express themselves in small ways which appear odd or unimportant, but that’s something that has always interested me.
In 'Allegedly Problematic' on FirstPost, you dissect and laugh (and rage with satire) at some films and books, and with 'Small Talk' on Swaddle, you detail conversations with you and your niece, what was it like writing columns like these?
Those were a lot of fun to do, and I wish I could have kept doing them. I enjoy my current column with Strange Horizons because I get to listen to old sci-fi, fantasy, and horror radio dramas, which I honestly enjoy, and I get to write about them in a way that I’m comfortable with. Most of the venues I have written for were generous enough to allow me to write about what I wanted, in a style I enjoyed.
Tell us about the title of your new book 'Conversations Regarding the Fatalistic Outlook of the Common Man' that’s releasing on December 3.
If you studied the Tamil Nadu State Board syllabus in the ‘90s, you may have come across a section in Civics where they list out all the reasons for the population explosion in our country. One of those reasons was the fatalistic outlook of the common man. I have never forgotten this, and if you think about it, it is the reason for so many things in our world.
THINGS I ENJOYED
Who Exploded Vivien Stone by Kill the Beast: I’m honestly a little flabbergasted that more people aren’t aware of this show.
The Left Right Game: Solid story, would have loved to see where it would have gone as an audio drama.
Wooden Overcoats: I honestly did not think I would enjoy this as much as I did.
Woodland Grey: Not amazing but a comfortable, solid horror movie with nice trees and stuff.
Hellraiser 2022: A fun, good-time movie, which I feel is what a Hellraiser movie should be.