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| Piramil |
This is an English translation of Neelam, a Tamil short story written by Srilankan Tamil writer Dharmu Sivaramu, popularly known as Piramil in literary circles. Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam.
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He was a painter. That too, a Chennai-based painter. He used
to display his paintings in exhibitions occasionally. Some of them would be
sold for a handsome amount. The petty traders of paintings, having some
rudimentary understanding about the famous modern painters of the West, used to
come to visit his exhibition. Like feathers flying in the air in rooster
fights, their visits would usually end up with throwing up myriad observations
around his paintings.
That said, he had an office to work in, which was in no way
associated with his profession of painting. He had a family too. He had some
fan following as well. His head hung heavy as he was repeatedly preoccupied
with the observations of some of his high-profile followers. The heaviness was
so unbearable that he wouldn’t even look at the human excreta, and the
wildflowers blossomed amidst them along the shortcuts he would take for
catching his bus.
One evening he left his office late, and while on his way
home on the bus, he realised that he had missed his usual bus stop and got down
after two stages from his usual stop. The externally visible reason why this
had happened was the thick crowd, which didn’t allow any passenger to come out
easily. But the internal reason was his hot discussion with a fellow passenger
on J. Krishnamurthy’s book, which he had come across in a television programme
recently.
‘Computers can handle all the human creations, such as
writing fictions and poems, better than humans themselves’—this’ was the
genesis of their hot discussion. ‘If so, what else are you for? - It was the
Krishnamurthy’s question. Our painter was beating the bush around, trying to
convince his fellow passenger that nothing was said about computers that were
capable of drawing paintings.
His fellow passenger was still stubborn and voiced his
opinion in a rather emphatic pitch. “Computers can perform all the tasks
ranging from drawing paintings and sculpting to music. In Japan, computers
manufacture cars,” he said. It appeared that his eyes behind his spectacles
were gradually bulging up. Along with his roaring assertion, a tinge of light
was reflecting in his spectacles, penetrating the crowds in the bus through the
available gaps.
“But…you see…while human beings can feel the beauty of the
moon silently, the computers can’t, our painter asserted his view. “Here comes
the terminus,” he added.
The crowd got dispersed in seconds. The painter also alighted
from the bus. He searched his co-passenger and found him missing.
Suddenly our painter felt that he was standing on an alien
planet. He felt an interrupting realisation silently running through his mind
that he was an unknown existential reality who could be found without place,
time, and self. The bar of light from the street electric poles was falling on
the faces of people dispersing. Two pieces of square-shaped glasses on the two
dark-skinned faces were glistening in the light.
He started walking as the streets were moving behind him in
the form of huts and disorderly burrows of rabbits. Suddenly, he saw the world
coming in front of him in its actual form. Mammoth clouds were found moving as
if showering the world with the secrets that were buried in them, in silver and
mercury. A rustic voice from an unreachable distance was heard and disappeared
as an empty sound like a lisp of nature that lacked meaning in it.
Another voice, “kooooooo,” was heard all of a sudden behind
his back, sending a chill into his spine. A fear of death, for a moment, though
unwarranted in that deadly silence. In utter shock, he turned back. A small,
rustic boy in his fifteens was standing there, smiling at him in the moonlight.
The boy didn’t allow our painter to speak. “By this time…yes,
by this time. Only a little distance ahead,” he said. He pushed the painter
back, asked him to follow him, and walked on. Before the painter could
recollect anything that was strutting in his mind, the boy showed him a big,
dark crater. The night grew thinner under the patchy moonlight, and the crater
grew into a mossy pond. The boy swiftly jumped into the pond and disappeared
under water.
At that moment, our painter thought that the appearance and
disappearance of the boy were a manifestation of a life form of some
supernatural element. Before he came out of his thoughts, the boy appeared
again from the pond, fully wet, and carried something in his hands.
It was a spectacular magic in blue! The blue water lily was
just blossoming in his hands. The painter received it from his hand, which he
extended to him with due care.
It was Blue Lily. It would blossom underwater only during
nighttime. Who would know the beauty of its bloom? Someone standing on the bank
was muttering that someone had seen it somewhere, some time ago. ‘Was it
that fellow passenger standing on the opposite side, watching him after
commissioning the boy to do all this?’
The painter turned his eyes to the boy. The dense moonlight
falling on his wet face was giving his big eyes, his nose line running from his
forehead without dents, an appearance resembling a face that had been chiseled
by nature with extreme care for thousands of years.
The painter asked the boy, with an explicit obeisance that
had overpowered him, “Who are you?”
The boy didn’t reply. The voice heard at a distance that
lacked meaning in it did now become a spectrum of patterned sound and emitted
the word, “Krishnaaaa.”
By the time the boy responded with a ‘khooooooo’ and ran
towards the sound that called him out through the expanse of space lying under
moonlight, the Blue Lily lying in the painter’s hand bloomed its bluish petals
all through the sky.
***End***
