Review: She & I by Imayam, translated by D Venkataramanan
Translated from the Tamil original, this is a compelling account of a man’s obsession for a woman, and how he contemplates violence to end it all
The novel’s unnamed narrator is astounded when Kamala, a beautiful 28-year-old widow, arrives with her twin daughters to work in his nondescript village in Tamil Nadu. Kamala’s husband, an elementary school teacher, was run over by a lorry while returning from a funeral, and she has been accommodated as a clerk in the village government school on compassionate grounds.
The unnamed narrator, who is educated but blissfully jobless, describes her arrival as being akin to a shower on arid land. Taken in by her fair colour, Chidambaram Pillai rents his house to her telling her to “pay what you can”. At school, the headmaster wishes her when she walks in, as if she is his superior, does all her work, and agrees to whatever she desires – from planting saplings in schools to building a toilet for girls to allotting a separate room for clerks. Within days, Kamala, who is a fiercely independent and self-assured woman, is the talk of the town.
The lonely, impulsive and emotional narrator, who is 33, meets Kamala at a phone booth owned by his cousin. Kamala goes to the phone booth often, and the narrator starts waiting for her “like a dog waiting at the doorstep of a house where dried fish kuzhambu, was being prepared”.
He forgets about his half-hearted attempts to get a job, or ways to extract money from his parents on the pretext of writing entrance exams. He becomes obsessed with Kamala. She is his “new disease”.
Over time, Kamala starts seeking his help – to buy vegetables and salt and wood, and he becomes like “a parrot caught in the hands of an astrologer who uses it for tricks and keeps it caged”. He runs errands for her yet she never fully acknowledges his contribution. If he misses a chore, she snubs him. Even then, he hangs around her like “a hungry puppy”.
He starts enjoying this phase of his life and takes to writing poetry. Kamala, whose response to everything is a monosyllable – endorses his poems with a cold “It’s nice”.
Before Kamala becomes a part of the village, and the narrator a part of her household, he addresses her as “madam”, and then briefly as “di” (sister), before dropping both. Soon, the two are in a nameless relationship – Kamala endearingly calling him “my calf”. For him, she is like “a family deity!”
The villagers start noticing them together, and when someone dies in the village, all eyes are on Kamala, not the corpse. The narrator’s parents insist that he marry someone, worried that he would mar the family name (“Why did he catch a cow with two calves?”). His sisters quickly come up with proposals of fair-complexioned girls – even though theirs was a family that “could have competed and won in a contest for who had the darkest complexion”.
In the tenth year of their relationship, Kamala gets a promotion and is posted to the district officer’s (DO) office in Cuddalore. The narrator visits her there like a “thief” every week. Soon enough, the peon at the DO’s office steps into the narrator’s shoes and starts running errands for her. The narrator’s queries stemming from his low self-esteem and insecurities are absentmindedly addressed by Kamala with her brief “Is it?”
Their relationship starts to sour. “Using my words as a knife, I stabbed her. She was not an easy target. She was a thousand times more arrogant and headstrong than me; she retaliated and struck me with words made of granite,” the narrator recalls.
Even after a decade, the narrator (as also the reader) knows very little about Kamala – except that she has three cups of coffee a day, holds a BSc degree, is from a higher caste than the narrator, is in control of her finances and gets money from both her parents and in-laws, goes to the beauty parlour every Sunday, and feeds a dog outside her house. Not a single soul in the village is privy to the inner workings of her mind.
The new adornments in her house – human and non-human – drive the narrator mad. Jealous at the attention she is getting, and how he doesn’t figure in the new scheme of things, the narrator starts marching down a path of self-destruction. He smashes over half a dozen phones in anger and on one particular night, gives her 500 missed calls. He even asks her point blank, “How many more men will you change?” Her cold responses make him rage like a “mad dog”.
In his extreme frustration, he spends days and nights scheming about her downfall and his too, punishing her and himself. She too becomes resentful: “Both of us simultaneously started feeling bitter towards each other. Almost like a competition.”
Translated from the Tamil original, En Kathe, this is a compelling yet disturbing account of a man’s obsession for a woman, how his intense jealousy makes him deranged, and how he contemplates violence to end it all. Imayam explores this complicated decade-long relationship in a deceptively simple and straightforward manner. It is up to the readers to decide who is at fault (if at all) here – the obsessed and entitled narrator, who cannot share the object of his love with anyone, or the emotionally stable, reserved and worldlywise woman who doesn’t reciprocate in the manner she is expected to in a misogynistic world.
Imayam has littered his novel with intriguing animal metaphors -- there are cats, dogs, goats, bulls, parrots and elephants. My favourite was when the narrator tells Kamala: “I am a cow for the oil press. You are a cow for ploughing.” When Kamala doesn’t understand the implication, the narrator stuns her with his cryptic reply, “The oil press cow keeps rotating in one place. The cow for ploughing does not do that.”
Even in the book’s most intense moments, it is difficult to suppress a chuckle. Therein lies the brilliance of Imayam’s writing. For instance, when the narrator gets tired of Kamala’s monosyllabic answers, he thinks to himself: “Making her talk…was like digging a new well to draw water” and at another place, her mouth “was like a lock that had lost its key”.
Imayam is the pen name of V Annamalai who is counted among the finest contemporary Tamil writers. He has published six novels and several short story collections and has been honoured with several awards, including the Tamil Nadu State Award and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2022. She & I has been exquisitely translated by D Venkataramanan, an associate professor of English at the University of Madras.
This is essential reading.
Lamat R Hasan is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.
