"If she gave me neem seeds to eat, they tasted sweet; if she gave me hot water to drink, it was cold... She was the form, I was her shadow. I burnt like a lamp, a ghee fuelled lamp, and Kamala was the ghee that kept me burning.'
Kamala, a beautiful, self-possessed and fiercely independent widow, comes to a village, where she has been given a clerk's job at the village school on compassionate grounds, with her two daughters. She meets the narrator for the first time at a phone booth, and almost immediately, becomes the object of his lonely, consuming passion. He's a drifter, educated but jobless, low on self-esteem, and his love for her will soon become a derangement. He will seek debasement, he will rage and inflict violence, and eventually set in motion a desperate plan that might destroy both Kamala and him.
Translated with brilliant skill from the Tamil original- En Kathe-this is a compelling and unsettling study of obsession. It is an unforgettable work by one of India's finest and most powerful writers.
Imayam is the pen name of V. Annamalai, a schoolteacher and writer in Tamil, who has published six novels. He has won several prestigious awards, including the Agni Akshara Award (1994), Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers' Association Award (1994), Amuthan Adigal Award for Literature (1998), Iyal Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), and the Sahitya Akademi Award (2022).
Dr D. Venkataramanan is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, University of Madras. He joined the Department in 2004, before which he worked as a Sports Editor at Chennai Online (2000-2001), a sub-editor at The Indian Express (1997-1998), and as an Assistant sub-editor at Orient Longman (2001-2004). Many of his book reviews appeared in The Indian Express in 1998.
Dr Venkataramanan has freelanced for Vijay Nicole Imprints and The Hindu, and has also done pre-publication reviews for Vijay Nicole Imprints, Sage Publications and McGraw Hill India.
His areas of interest include Russian Literature, Poetry, Translation and World Literatures.
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