"All that he and she had was 'today'; they couldn't even conceive of 'tomorrow'. 'Tomorrow is Monday,' Kandan thought to himself meaninglessly. What date is this? Who knows what date it is? When it's time for Naidu's rent, the date's the sixth, that's all."
This was an absorbing read, and Nagarajan is a masterful writer who manages to make you feel like you're right there in a small town in Tamil Nadu, along with the protaganist Kandan who we follow in the course of a day as he weaves in and out the lives and conversations and troubles of the people in his town, as he flirts with married women, smooths out neighbourly disputes, listens in on passionate political tirades on socialism, and looks with no great agony at the state of his life and there is a tone of disturbing indifference as tragedy after tragedy strikes. For the people living in that town, their great tragedies are suffused with the oppressive mood of normalcy, the writing itself refuses sentimentality. It is just another day for them to live through.
There is kaleidoscopic effect to the novella, and the quiet and suffocating despair builds throughout, before it finally crescendoes at the end. But even at the end, as we read Kandan bearing a great injustice, the mood is still one of a deep, celestial indifference. In the great scheme of things, this is just one more day.
I was reading up on Nagarajan online after I finished and read the following passage:
"G. Nagarajan (1929-1981), the most marginal of contemporary Tamil writers, a master of precision in his prose, a Brahmin and an atheist, a militant Marxist who broke with the Communist Party, a sensitive and brilliant teacher of English and Mathematics, an adulterer, a smoker of Ganja, an alcoholic, a vagabond and bohemian, a loving father of two children who instructed them to be bold and courageous at all times, died alone in a Government Hospital in Madurai, that temple-centered city in which he had roamed around and lived most of his life, the landscape in which most of his stories are set and narrated."
Hard not to see that Nagarajan had infused some of his disposition into the character of Kandan.
One of my best reads this year, and I feel a great respect for translators like Abbie Ziffren who dedicate their lives to making literature reach wider audiences.