Lockdown diary: Books they are re-reading and why- Tree and the newspaper

If it is not sad and embarrassing enough to not being able to read stories in one’s own tongue, it is even sadder, worse and more embarrassing when the mother tongue happens to be a language as rich as Tamil.

I had carried with me this guilt all my life, but it reduced a nano bit when a book of Tamil short stories translated into English came my way. It came with all the reasons that would make me read it from cover to cover, and I was determined to do so. The name of the book was compelling—The Tamil Story: Through the times, Through the tides. It was edited and curated by Dilip Kumar, a big name in Tamil short story writing.

The curios- ity around the collection becomes that much more because his mother tongue is, well, Gujarati! The translation by Subashree Krishnaswamy-a former editor of the Indian Review of Books, a monthly magazine devoted to books –is perfect, and even in the best of times translation is a difficult art to pull off.

In keeping with its name, the book is an anthology of 88 short stories spanning almost a century, and the authors are known names and those who have in a sense been discovered by the editor and his team, who read thousands of stories, written not only by the authors who have been included, but also those who have not found a place in it. But in spite of all these reasons that should have made me read it at one go, or at best two or three sittings, I could not do that.

The book has 522 pages! And it is not what one would want to “speed read”. As the COVID-19 lockdown had me eye my little library again and again, this big fat book was what I finally picked. I am not revisiting the book, nor re-reading. I am continuing to read, and not even from where I left off.

Remember, it is short stories that, as the jacket says, “traverse through the changing land- scapes of different times, highlighting at once the uniqueness and the universality of life”. What more could one want, at this point in time—not counting rice, wheat flour and some vegetables? The title of the first story did not ring a “you have read it” bell. Translated as “Expectation and the Event”, it was first published in 1931.

And the author is a woman! Ammani Ammal. Covering less than four pages, it is the story of a casurina tree in a forest, where wood cutters arrive every year to fell some trees, chop the branches and deliver them to ship builders. Most other trees were content to even- tually become a mast for a ship.

But not this one, so it did everything to avoid being felled. When paper made with rags gave way to paper made with trees, this casurina tree was happy to be felled. They will write only interesting, good things on me, it told the sparrows. It became a newspaper. The teacher who narrated the story of this tree to his class asked the students what the moral of the story was.

And AmmaniAmmal’s last two lines refer to a student’s unexpected reply and should resonate in these times of fake news. “...We elders are tortured daily by many such newspapers which give us error-ridden information, poorly printed on shabby, dirty paper, yielding nothing in return for the effort we put in. Shouldn’t we endorse this view?” (Vijaya Pushkarna is a journalist, writer and commentator based in New Delhi)