Earlier in the week, Paul Beatty became the first American to win the Booker Prize for his novel, The Sellout. A day or two before the Booker announcement, the shortlist for a slightly less popular prize was announced back home in India — the Crossword Book Award. The award reads works in English and celebrates Indian writing in four categories: fiction, non-fiction, children’s writing, and translated literature. It has no doubt some importance in a country where the dearth of such prizes may be seen as another reason for a literary scene to be rapidly receding from the zeitgeist.
This year, the fiction shortlist has big names Amitava Ghosh (Flood of Fire, Ibis trilogy #3) and Anuradha Roy (Sleeping on Jupiter) placed alongside other reasonably big names in C P Surendran (Hadal), Anjum Hasan (The Cosmopolitans), and Mamang Dai (The Black Hill). The shortlist doesn’t deliver a shock, and is mildly disappointing perhaps only for this reason. The more interesting category was the translated literature one, where the nominees’ names seemed completely new and there was a thrill of discovery.
I picked up one of the shortlisted books in that category: Farewell, Mahatma by Devibharati, translated from Tamil by N Kalyan Raman. It is a thin collection of short stories. The Harper Perennial edition, containing an author interview and a translator’s note, runs to about 190 pages.
In the titular short story that begins the collection, Devibharati, taking a spectacular imaginary leap, shows a Mahatma Gandhi disappointed with the India of January 1930, and who thus steps out of Birla House and undertakes a train journey towards Amritsar, for no reason other than that he wants to die like Leo Tolstoy, in a station in the middle of nowhere. During the journey, he meets numerous other mahatmas, impersonators who imitate his style and attire and use the likeness to get things their way. In a way, Devibharati presents us with a Gandhi with the peculiar misfortune of seeing his very identity become a kitschy item before his eyes. The Gandhian way is already mutilated by the realities of corruption and communalism; all that remains is the joke that repeats itself again and again.
In another superb story titled Reversal, a malfunctioning clock begins to work backwards, and being the only source of time in a house, slowly leads to the mental disintegration of a woman who has just murdered her husband and is awaiting her lover to come back with help to dispose off the corpse that has begun decomposing in her bedroom. Read the previous sentence again, for that is indeed the story.
In all, I found Devibharati’s stories to be charged with a strong imagination that repeatedly places characters in nightmarish situations. There is also a delightful perversity about it all, and owing to that I found reading Devibharati to be a more entertaining experience than reading Perumal Murugan. A good choice in the shortlist, I would say.
(The writer’s first novel ‘Neon Noon’ is now available)