| Ki. Rajanarayanan. |
This is an English translation of “Thel Visham” a comic short story written by Ki. Rajanarayanan. Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam.
***
There was a farmer in the village. His wife was a very
beautiful woman. Her breasts were exquisitely beautiful. She developed an
illicit affair with a shopkeeper in the next street. What sort of an affair it
was! If she went to his shop with one bundle of cotton, he would give her a
ration worth two bundles. If she brought a quarter of a kilogram worth of
grains, he would give her items worth half a kilogram of grains—almost double
the items in every dealing. One night she was late. He was eagerly waiting for
her. She brought some grains as usual. After their usual dealings were over, he
noticed her standing hesitantly. He looked up to her as if asking her what was
up.
She told him, “You grow weaker day by day. Why don’t you
consult a doctor and take proper medicine?” Hearing her loving words, he opened
up his heart and confided to her his desire to have her, hesitantly though.
Without directly engaging his words, she was asking him something else or the
other. This man was just attending to her meaningless queries. They were
talking to each other like this for some time without knowing what they were
actually talking about. At one point, both remained silent as to what to talk
further. That time, he asked her, “Can I come to your house tomorrow?” Not
responding to his question directly, she threw a brief smile at him and left.
The farmer left his home the next day early in the morning to
plough the field. In minutes he started ploughing the land; he saw his water
pot being toppled by a crow. As he wouldn’t be able to work under the scorching
sun anymore without water, he stopped ploughing and went back home with the
empty pot to fill water in it. He found the door of his house locked. As there
was no justifiable reason for the door to be locked at that hour, he peeked through
the keyhole out of inquisitiveness to see why the door had been locked. A grand
visual came in front of his eyes through the keyhole—the shopkeeper’s mouth was
on his wife’s breasts…. The farmer knocked at the door fiercely. The door
opened. On seeing her husband standing at the door, his wife started howling at
him, “O! My good heavens! You have come here at the right time. Haven’t you?
Look at my deplorable condition. Would you ever find such a pathos anywhere? If
I hadn’t found him, I would have died by now” she cried inconsolably.
The poor husband stood in front of her, unable to understand
anything. The shopkeeper was standing with his head hung, looking down. The
farmer asked his wife to explain what had exactly happened. His wife told him,
“How can I explain such a shameful thing to you? Such a shameful thing. After
collecting cotton from the field, I was coming back home cuddling the bundle
against my breast. Suddenly I felt a piercing pain on my breast as if a live
ember had fallen on it. I dropped the bundle down and saw a black scorpion
falling off from my breast. It was excruciatingly painful. It was simply
unbearable. When I was screaming helplessly, I was informed that this man was
an expert in sucking out scorpion's poison. When I called him, he denied as he
wouldn’t enter anyone’s house if the male member was not present. I
somehow convinced him that my husband was not that type of a person who
suspects my integrity and it wasn’t wrong since it was an emergency. So I
brought him home. The pain is relatively better now compared to that time” she
explained her husband amidst crying.
Her husband comforted her, “It is alright. Don’t cry. Such
things do happen at times. It is beyond our control. Thank God this man came to
rescue you at the time of the emergency. Actually, I came here to collect water
as the pot was toppled by a crow.” He expressed his sincere thanks to the
shopkeeper, filled the water in the pot, and left.
After some days, one day the farmer came running home yelling
that a scorpion had bitten him. His wife, who was busy in the kitchen, came
running to him anxiously and asked him whether it was really a scorpion that
had bitten him. He told her that it was a well-grown, dark-colored scorpion,
and he had caught it too.
He started yelling again, “Aiyo… I am unable to bear the
pain. Go to that shopkeeper and bring him immediately. Please run fast and
bring him,” he hurried her up. She ran to the shopkeeper and explained
everything that had happened and insisted he come along with her. If he didn’t
come now, her husband would then suspect her, she told him. The shopkeeper
thought that this could be a drama just to check whether he would be available
on call for any emergency. He went along with her as he had no other excuse to
deny. The shopkeeper asked the farmer where the scorpion had bitten him. The
farmer lifted his dhoti up and showed his….
We, along with our grandfather, laughed listening to this
story. “Then what happened after that?” we asked our grandfather. “Afterwards?
It happened afterwards. That was it. The shopkeeper was caught as he had no
other way to escape,” he said.
***Ended***
