A Fine Thread and Other Stories

 

A collection of sixteen stories, A Fine Thread and other stories by Tamil author Jeyamohan, translated by Jegadeesh Kumar, stands as a testament to the author's opinion that a writer shouldn't have a single political/ideological stand, for many stories in this collection feature a fierce clash of opposing perspectives. Debating on what's real and what’s an illusion, what's reverent and blasphemous, packed with accessorial information that make the reader think beyond the plot and the characters, Jeyamohan's stories pulsate with energy.

Though the collection has a somber start with ‘Ocean’s Nearby’ , it hits a crescendo with ‘Bubbles’, where a wife intends to get a breast augmentation surgery done against her husband's wishes. What happens when Mahatma Gandhi meets the Pulayar leader, Ayyankali for the first time, their imagined conversation makes up the story ‘A Fine Thread’. Curse/sin and atonement are at the center of stories ‘Shadow Crow’ and ‘Brother's Shadow’. While the former is light in tone with a man atoning for his grandfather’s mistake, the latter holds you by the scruff of your neck, sends a chill down your spine where a man suffering from schizophrenia fails to atone for a grave sin he committed. ‘The Angel’ traces a story in pre-independence Nigeria and subtly superimposes it over India at the end. What happens at the foot of Mt Yasur volcano almost over a century after the artist Charles Frazer witnessed a cannibal feast here has our complete attention in the story ‘The Volcanic Torch’.

A machine that erases a select portion of history, an attar seller from Maraikayyar community whose fortunes rose and ebbed like tides, a young man who turns jubilant when the girl he silently adores for three years comes up and talks to him; from small towns and quaint villages near Kanyakumari and Nagercoil in India to Nigeria, then to Russia in 1917 and to the Tanna island in South Pacific Ocean in Vanuatu Republic; from portrayal of casual misogyny at workplace to how injustice and oppression foments violence, how scientific research is stifled by mediocre top level officials - in themes, in locales, in emotions evoked and thoughts left behind in the end, the range in these stories is spectacular and breathtaking. A whirlwind of a collection!

Endnotes on Author and Translator - 

The author's body of work includes more than 300 short stories, volumes of literary criticism, travelogues, landmark novels like Venmurasu, Kotravai, Vishnupuram, Pinthodarum Nizhalin Kural (from which three excerpts feature in this collection). The writer of dialogues in Tamil for Mani Ratnam's movies PS 1 and PS 2 is another  feather to his cap. I usually tend to think of probable lines in the original when I read works translated from Tamil (my mother tongue). When a translation allows me this, I am content. For many stories here, I was fully involved in absorbing the arguments presented by the author. The supplementary details packed in these stories also sent me on mini Google search assignments that I skipped this thinking back in Tamil exercise, Jegadeesh Kumar's translation never once impeded my reading process. Thanks to his translation effort, these stories are now available to readers across the world.