Diaspora short stories

Now in Melbourne I came across a selection of Tamil Short stories translated into English titled being alive compiled by L Murugapoopathy on behalf of the International Tamil Writers Forum Sri Lanka-Australia. The Forum operates from 3 B, 46th Lane, Colombo 6 and Craigburn, Victoria 3064, Australia.

The stories are translated by Shiyamala Navaratnam of Canada and Edilbert N Rajadurai of Australia.

There are 15 stories in this 106 page collection neatly printed by Kumaran Press Private Limited at B3, Ramya Place, Colombo 10.

The writers concerned are S Krishnamoorthy, Ravi, Kallodaikkaran, T Nithyakeerthi, A Chandirahasan, Buvana Rajaratnam, Nadesan, Rathi, Aasi Kantharajah, Arun Vijayarani, L Murugapoopathy, Aaliyal, T Gnanasekeran and T Kalaamani. The last two writers are resident in Lanka, but they had lived in Australia previously.

S Krishnamoorthy’s story Hunger is a felt experience of reality

Published on January 1 this year, the book has a foreword by Murugapoopathy who is the livewire of the Forum. Now resident in Australia he writes: “In this land of Kangaroos, after 1987 some art and literary magazines in Tamil kept coming to life and dying away.

Ever since I came to Australia, I had this as one of my long term dreams - to integrate all the Tamil writers of this land-respecting their individuality.”

S Krishnamoorthy’s story Hunger is a felt experience of reality concerning the hunger of the four year old daughter of a well to do Lankan man in Australia and the news he had read in a newspaper of the killing of a man in Vanni his own three children and himself out of hunger without food for a long time.

The character in the story realizes that his own daughter’s hunger is nothing when compared with the hunger of people in Vanni.

The Surreptitious Cobras is the story by Ravi. It’s a satire on the mindset of a sample character of a person belonging to the older generation and a set of young people running a flourishing restaurant in Melbourne.

The so-called love for the birth place (Valvettithurai) in Yaalpaanam (Jaffna) seems to be withering away in the light of materialistic reality in Australia. The next story has a long title - Can the fragrance of the Land be Forgotten - and it’s by Kallodaikkaran.

The opening description of too cold Melbourne is well written. The character in the story is from Maddakkalappu (Batticaloa).

He works hard with his machines and reminisces his fond memories in his own birthplace during the cold season in December.

However as the description goes: “His whole house looked beautiful filled with many different electronic items and beautiful furniture.

Though his house was filled with prosperity, his mind somehow was not fulfilled. He felt an identifiable vacuum there.”

This story would be interesting to a non-Tamil reader who knows English as it gives aspects of Lankan Tamil life and customs.

The male character dreams nostalgically of the lost past in distant Lanka.

His wife brings him down from the clouds saying: “Look here! Please think practically about what I tell... Why do you want to spoil the happiness we have here by always thinking about our home village?” The story is a positive one in that it is not idealistic in the sense of blind mouthing of ‘patriotism’ from my point of view.

The late T Nithiyakeerthi wrote That was a Game of Age. Here too the descriptive portrayal from the beginning makes one read further. Just two lines from the first paragraph:

“The cold air of Wellington coming through the space in the door was pricking her legs sharply and disturbing her waves of thought. Vaani raised her legs and folded them over the chair.”

The writer’s evocative and effective writing is beautiful and so is the translator’s ability and I wonder which of the two did the rendition.

This story is really unfulfilled love story of a married woman with her son in America liberating herself from her unloving domineering man.

Though the story takes place in New Zealand most of the happenings told had been in a rigid closed class conscious Yaalpaanam (Jaffna).

A Chandrahahasan’s story Riding a Horse in a Round Frying Pan loses its focus point by the irregularity in the narration but picks up at the end.

The hypocrisy among a set of Lankan Tamils in Sydney is exposed satirically.

While the father elected as President of an association wanted the parents speak in Tamil so that their children would know Tamil, his wife scolds their son speaking to her in Tamil in public for she feared that the public would come to know that she couldn’t speak English.

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