HT reviewer Suhit Bombaywala picks his favourite read of 2023

Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan from the Tamil into English, was among my most memorable reads of the year. It effortlessly made me empathise with the caste-crossed lovers Saroja and Kumaresan as they paid the price of forbidden love.

Like Murugan’s other book I’ve admired – One Part Woman by the same translator – Pyre draws your attention away from the nuts and bolts of the writing and sucks you into the plot. This is well honed craft – the writing is adroit and the vocabulary and form are kept accessible in the service of the story. Formal experimentation or lengthy exploration of interiority, which can be great depending on what you’re writing, are judiciously pared down in this story, with the result that the narrative moves fast. To speak of intense but quick reads, the story hurtled to its red-hot climax. Without exaggerating, this tragic story was a string of firecrackers planting an after-image in the mind’s eye. Literary and pacy is a great combination, and if I may say so, ergonomic design. In Pyre, there is plenty of craft but the point is not sleight of craft, rather it is the lament that we still have a regressive system which grades you high or low by birth, dictates whom you can and can’t marry, and repays transgression with death. The story in itself is gut-wrenchingly tragic, but gains even more power through being told without mawkishness and being couched in simple words. A special word of appreciation, too, for the dialogues framed in realistic, everyday language, making them ominous.

This story emerged from the same mould as other tragedies of caste violence, such as the splendid Marathi movie Sairat by Nagraj Manjule, which was also inspired by countless instances of real-life caste violence happening today. There must be many such stories, written or filmed, which I haven’t yet come across. As long as caste circumscribes all aspects of Indian society, such stories will be relevant. Among the printed ones, Pyre tugs especially hard at my heartstrings.

Vivid scenes flash past the mind’s eye: the meet-cute of Kumaresan and Saroja, their moments of tenderness in a working-class city lane, their romance, marriage and elopement into the countryside, their vivid passage through semi-arid plains along the road to Kumaresan’s village. And just as clearly, them bearing the brunt of violence by speech and actions at the hands of his mother, his relatives and other people in the village. And all of a sudden, a ring of fire forms around the couple and constricts. The climax moves even the jaded reader.

READ MORE: HT reviewers pick their best reads of 2023

Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad. He tweets @suhitbombaywala