Chellapoo and Malaiyandi are fictional characters, but represent real-life couples who fall victim to honour killing for marrying outside their community. The death of the protagonists of ‘Erithazhal Konduvaa’, one of the short stories of poet Vairamuthu unmasks the deep-rooted caste pride, especially among the intermediate communities in Tamil Nadu.
The pride dehumanises Chellapoo’s father, who burnt his daughter in the brick kiln, owned by him.
Contemporary issues of urbanised Tamil Nadu, which struggles to retain its old-style values and virtues along with 10,000 year old agricultural tradition, underpin the 40 short stories that would be released as a collection on October 10 by DMK leader M. Karunanidhi. Actor Kamal Haasan will receive the first copy.
The stories deal with the Buddha and a butcher. Fishes and monkeys are also elevated to the level of protagonists in these tales.
Mr. Vairamuthu does not agree with the view that the requirements of a popular magazine like Kumudam, which serialised the short stories, decided the form and content of his stories.
“On the contrary, the magazine gave me a free hand. We have no time for lengthy short stories. So I devised a style for the SMS age, which has no space for superfluousness,” Mr. Vairamuthu told The Hindu .
He also explained that he deliberately recorded his opinion in the story ‘Enda Makkale Engade Thalaivare’, narrating the life of Kadirkaman, a Tamil militant, who lost his leg in the last phase of the civil war in Sri Lanka. Kadirkaman’s wife, struggling to get him a prosthesis, even sells her thaali , only to find that he has been picked up by the Army.
“Let people say it is propaganda. I wrote the story when the war crimes and human rights violations dominated the debate in the United Nations. The pain decided my style,” said Mr. Vairamuthu, adding that he rewrote and revised each story a dozen times.
“Like some writers I do not want to say that I wrote everything in a single sitting and never cared to revise them. The process of revision gives me an opportunity not only embellish the prose, but also to remove unwanted passages,” he said.
