விமர்சனம்

ஆங்கிலத்தில் வெளியாகியுள்ள எனது சிறுகதை தொகுப்பிற்கான மதிப்பீடு

The Man Who Walked Backwards and Other Stories

Divya Shankar

I love the little randomness that a collection of stories, in most cases, grants me. When I began this collection with the 13th story from a total of 18 stories, I didn’t know my first impression would be strong enough, lasting beyond the moment to pull me easily through the whole book. Maybe it’s the story’s title ‘The Rain Diary’ that won my attention because I wanted to read about the rain that evaded my city during this monsoon. Through a conversation between a husband and wife on a rainy day, a myriad of emotions & thoughts that rain evokes in us and the little life lessons it teaches us are delicately outlined in this story which is also about a strained father-son relationship. The man here scrupulously avoids his father’s traits retaining just one of his habits – recording the rainfall meticulously in every city he resides in & maintaining the figures in a diary; this act works as a bridge in their relationship and opens up vital secrets. A certain tenderness is stamped all over in the writing in this story and in many that precede & follow it.

An array of interesting characters here- a woman who swims to vent out her frustration, a man who insists he will marry only in a library, a man who walks backwards with a steely resolve & casual ease, a man who builds a mansion atop a hill for everything but humans to inhabit, a thief whose touch heals dogs and trees, a near-retirement govt office clerk who gets a fresh lease of life observing pigeons – the oddities of these characters are often an expression of their silent protest against the society that forces them to conform to its norms. At times, their protests turn vain and they are cast into the moulds safely set aside for them.

The Man who Walked Backwards and other stories by S Ramakrishnan, translated from Tamil by Prabha Sridevan, portrays ordinary lives that shift a little something in us readers by bringing alive a vague memory or a forgotten twang of pain.

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