| Ashokamithran |
This is an English translation of “Avanukku Miga Pidiththamaana Natchathiram”, a Tamil short story written by Ashoka Mithran. Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam.
***
Sriram was twenty-one years old. His B.A. exams were recently
over, and the results were to be out in the month of June. It was April now.
Ramasamy Iyer was his neighbour. He was a clerk in a
pharmaceutical company. He had five children. The first three were girls, the
fourth one was a four-year-old boy, and the last one was a girl, a toddler of
nine months.
Sriram had subscribed to an English daily. The newspaper
would be distributed at his house at about six every morning. Since his regular
newspaper man had to attend a court case that day, he had deputed his son to
distribute the newspapers. When Ramasamy Iyer got up in the morning, he saw a
newspaper sticking out of the window grill. He didn’t know whose newspaper it
was. After washing his face and drinking coffee, he started reading that
newspaper so attentively.
A tamarind vendor was on his way selling freshly collected
tamarind for an unbelievably cheap price. Ramasamy Iyer came out of the house
and approached the vendor to buy a mananku 1 of tamarind. The vendor
weighed two veesai of tamarind each time. Some sort of
wrapper was needed to take all the tamarind balls into the house. Ramasamy Iyer
was holding a newspaper in his hands without knowing to whom it belonged. When
he was taking the third tamarind ball in with the newspaper, he saw Sriram
speaking to someone, inquiring about the newspaper man. Ramasamy went into the
home swiftly, threw out the tamarind ball, wiped the newspaper with the best of
his efforts, came out, and asked Sriram whether the newspaper he was holding in
his hands belonged to him. Sriram nearly snatched it from his hands and opened
it. The front page of the newspaper carried a full-scape advertisement of a
movie. A blow-up of an actress, often praised as the most beautiful woman in
all of South India, was printed in the advertisement. Her beautiful face was
found grotty with the half-cleaned patches of six veesai tamarind
smeared on it. Sriram had an insurmountable crush on that actress. He
reproached Ramasamy Iyer for his depraved intention of picking up someone
else's newspaper. Ramasamy Iyer told him that he didn’t know anything, and he
found the newspaper inserted in his window grill. Sriram mumbled something
inaudibly and started reading the newspaper. The face of that actress looked
awfully ugly. Sriram muttered audibly, “fool.” Ramasamy Iyer heard it and asked
him, “What did you say now?”
“I said nothing about you. Fool”—Sriram repeated it again. In
the next fifteen minutes that followed, Ramasamy Iyer came out with his
opinions that Sriram was a fool, scoundrel, cheat, and rogue. Sriram responded
that he also had similar opinions about Ramasamy Iyer. That day, Ramasamy Iyer
went late to his office by one hour.
A couple of days later, Sriram saw Ramasamy Iyer carrying a
bunch of neem leaves in his hands. Sriram’s mother told him that Ramasamy
Iyer’s son had smallpox. Sriram had planned to go to the employment exchange,
bookstore, and then cinema. Soon after he left his house, he wrote an anonymous
letter to the health department and dropped it in the post box.
The day was completely hectic for him. When he returned home,
it wasn’t fully dark. He felt that something was not alright with him but
couldn’t understand exactly what it was. His heart cried for peace.
When he was drinking the coffee kept in the flask in slower
sips, his mother told him that someone had informed the Health Department about
smallpox; some persons came to Ramasamy Iyer’s house when he was not there and
took his son along with them to the cholera quarantine hospital. Iyer’s wife
cried inconsolably and begged everyone who came there to spare her son. But they
paid little attention to her words or tears and left with her four-year-old
boy. No one could do anything. ‘It is the law here,’ they said.
Ramasamy Iyer’s wife wept hysterically, running behind them in the street like
a mad woman.
It caused immense pain in Sriram as he didn’t expect all
these turns of events.
Soon after Ramasamy Iyer came home from his office, he ran
out of his house without even removing his office clothes. Sriram saw him
running towards the electric train station. The quarantine hospital, which was
housing the patients with infectious diseases, was ten miles away from the
town.
Sriram was restless. He couldn’t even relish the food
provided to him. He was watching the people walking on the street standing near
his house compound wall. The time was past ten. The bustle of the town began to
settle down. The railway station was half a mile away from his house. Sriram
could vividly hear the sounds of trains passing through the station, the clangs
of bells in the level crossing, and the sound of wheels rolling on rail tracks.
This regular affair of the town going silent every night had never attracted
his attention before this. The corner house boy studying in the medical college
had also put off the lights. The parallel rows of houses were looking like dark
shadows in the night. As his eyes got heavy, Sriram lay down on his bed. As he
was unable to sleep, he got up and came to the street again. He was wearing
only a dhoti. Everywhere it was dark, and everyone was asleep. He was waiting
alone in the street. At last, the one which had been keeping him under
persistent fear, the one for which he was totally prepared to sacrifice
everything in his world just to avoid facing it, did now appear in the corner
of the street. It was Ramasamy Iyer. Arm supporting her, he was bringing his
wife, whose throat seemed to have gone dry due to unrelenting sobs of pain.
Sriram couldn’t have seen Ramasamy Iyer’s wife more than some odd ten times
during the past two years despite being their neighbour. She was such a woman
who usually preferred to stay inside her house. Sometimes, Sriram used to think
she must either be a dumb or handicapped woman. A woman of that unassuming
nature was now coming in front of him, all the way crying, throwing away all
her inborn traits of being a passive woman. He learnt that she had begged
everyone, holding their legs and crying hysterically like a mad woman.
Ramasamy Iyer and his wife entered the house. Their children,
who were sleeping till then without knowing anything that was happening around
them, woke up suddenly and started crying in unison. Their mother wept along
with them. That boy was her son, only son. He was just four years old. He would
never leave her even for one hour. Now he had been thrown into some unknown area
on the pretext of diseases he got infected with. His mother wouldn’t be able to
attend to his needs when he needed her the most while lying sick. When he
became thirty, she wouldn’t be able to provide him a mouthful of milk. They
would throw him amidst thousands of lepers and cholera patients in an
unfamiliar place. Not a single soul would be available to comfort that child.
He would shake in fear. No one would be there to attend to his natural calls. A
heavy thug with a big moustache would only be present to intimidate the boy.
“O! My God! What sin have I done? Why do all these things happen in my life?
Why do you torture my boy without showing mercy?”
Sriram couldn’t sleep that night. The boy died after two
days. Since he was infected with smallpox, they took his body directly to the
burial ground without showing his face to his parents.
After one month, Sriram summoned up his courage and entered
Ramasamy Iyer’s house. Ramasamy Iyer was sitting on a recline chair. Sriram
told him softly, “I want to tell you something about Raju.” Ramasamy Iyer’s
son’s name was Raju.
Ramasamy Iyer looked up to him and asked, “What?”
“Do you know who had informed the authorities about his
smallpox?”
“Hell with him. It doesn’t matter now. Does it?”
“It was I who informed”
Ramasamy Iyer looked at him sharply for a while and called
out to his wife, “Kamu.”
His wife came out of the kitchen. She was looking completely
changed in the past month.
Ramasamy Iyer, pointing at her, told him, “Tell that to
her.”
With heart-filling agony and guilt, Sriram felt like falling
on her feet and washing it with his tears. Swallowing up everything that rose
from his heart, he told her, “It was I who informed about Raju.”
He looked up to her, waiting for her obscene curses, and even
prayed for it. But to his dismay, she appeared as if she had regained all her
old equanimity.
She didn’t speak anything.
***Ended***
1. Old unit of weight, one Mananku is
approximately equivalent to eight Veesai, i.e., approximately 12 kg (one Veesai
is approximately 1.6 kg).
