A visit to grandma’s was something Veena Muthuraman would look forward to as a child. She loved listening to grandma’s tales; ghost stories were a favourite. If she was lucky, she was even privy to local gossip. With each trip, she started noticing how life in her grandmother’s village, and those nearby, revolved around the seasons, rains, harvests and festivals. She also noticed that it was fast changing, nothing much was sown or grown, migrant money started sustaining the villagers’ lifestyle and it was increasingly becoming a consumerist society.
Trying to capture the remnants of life in the villages is Veena’s A Place Of No Importance . The book is a compilation of short stories that are set in a nondescript village called Ayyanarpatti, which is at the cusp of urbanisation.Ayyanarpatti forms a perfect backdrop as the author explores the life of the villagers who are embracing the modern, while still entrenched in superstitions.
Says the Edinburgh-based author: “The stories are fictional for the most part but drawn from real life – stories I have heard, newspaper headlines, caricatures of uncles and cousins, and friends who want to save the world. The scorching sun, large courtyards, power cuts, motor pump sets, cane fields. the Ganapathi under the peepul tree, pretty much everything and everyone had a story to tell. Ayyanarpatti is based on a group of villages in interior Tamil Nadu. And it is not just memories, as these villages are very real and in the present, and I visit them often. I wanted to tell stories set in a seemingly self-contained world that is not usually featured in the predominantly urban narratives we are used to. Dig a bit deeper, and this world is not that different from ours, and their stories, despite the external appearances, may not be as well.”
Each of the 13 stories in the book, though different from one another, has a few common characters like Nithya, an inquisitive college girl and Muthu, the village councillor. The tales are set on the months of the Tamil calendar starting with Aipasi, the month of Deepavali. The book begins with Arumugam, a village drunkard, who tries to commit suicide by drinking poison on Deepavali as his family doesn’t care for him. All, except his family, are worried about Arumugam killing himself.
Most of the women in her book, like Rukkumma and Kalai for instance, are silent but strong. “Because strong women exist in real life all over the world, so it would be remiss of me to depict a world without them.”
The stories were written over a few years. “I wrote the first three or so several years ago but then forgot all about them. It was while spending an extensive time in the villages that I decided to write the rest of the stories and see if they could form part of a collection,” says Veena, who grew up in Karamana, Thiruvananthapuram, and is an alumnus of Holy Angels School.
A debut author, Veena, says that although she likes to write, she was and still remains more of a reader than a writer. “I used to read everything I could get my hands on. R.K. Narayan has an obvious influence both in form and content in my style of writing; I have always been interested in stories that explore local subcultures set in self-contained worlds. The works of Basheer and Sundara Ramaswamy have influenced me too.”
Not a “morning person”, the 38-year-old tends to write at night when her partner and kids have gone to sleep. “However, I write fervently when there is a deadline looming!”
Veena who works in financial services has just finished a new Ayyanarpatti story in the context of demonitisation that should be out soon. She translated Benyamin’s Kumari Devi and is in the process of translating another one. She is also working on a historical novel that is set in ancient Rome and Southern India.
The author will be releasing A Place Of No Importance today at Press Club, Thiruvananthapuram.
