She did not reply, but just placed her face on his chest.
‘You will have one,’ he said. He caressed her lips. ‘You won’t talk?’
But her hands spoke.
‘Will you name the child after me?’ he asked.
She softly murmured, ‘Hmm,’ in his ear.
Then he said, ‘Whether it is a boy or a girl, you should name the child after me, will you?’ He felt her nodding in agreement on his chest. ‘My name is . . .’ he said. ‘Tell me, what did I say my name was?’
And like she had done before, she whispered in his ear, ‘. . .’
He said, ‘You voice feels like moonlight spilling into my ears.’
Then he lifted her face in his hands and, bringing it level with his, said, ‘I have another name too,’ and laughed. ‘Look, when I laugh, my mouth appears big, doesn’t it? Look and tell me if I have a big mouth—am I an aalavaayan, one with a wide mouth? Tell me.’ He opened his mouth wide. It was indeed big. But how could she tell him that. He sensed her laughing a little.
‘It is big, isn’t it? That is why in my village I have a nick name: Aalavaayan. Do I have a big mouth? Tell me. Am I Aalavaayan? If it is a boy, name him Aalavaayan. If it is a girl, name her Aalavaaychi. Will you?’
Ponna could not help but laugh at that name.
‘You are laughing? Do you know what all a big mouth can do?’ And then he pulled her face towards him. Once again, she felt the coolness of the moonlight. ‘Do you know which village I am from?’ he asked. She placed her hand over his mouth to show she did not want to know. He said, ‘Don’t worry. I am from this very hill.’
He went on, ‘You should come next year too. With the child. I will be expecting you. Will you? You will. I know you will. You won’t forget me. Even if you forget me, I won’t be able to forget you. Do you want to go away with me? Tell me. I will just take you with me. I like you very much. Why don’t you come with me?’
His words kept growing until they fell like blank noise in Ponna’s ears.
THIRTY-TWO
Ponna looked over and again at the baby’s mouth. It was big. A big mouth. Aalavaay . . . And there was a resemblance.
The baby now closed its mouth and looked at the flame, enraptured, before turning its gaze back to Ponna. This way of communicating with silence—that was Kali’s face.
Her mother and mother-in-law came into the hut and warded off the evil eye from the infant.
Seerayi said, ‘Look at how intently it is looking at the lamp! What do you see there, darling?’
Vallayi said, ‘He has his father’s face.’
In the one month since the baby was born, how many times had people made that remark! Every visitor had said the same thing. But Ponna alone saw another face in the baby’s expression. And that face said to her, ‘You should come and see me.’ It will be Vaigasi in just a month. And this year, apparently, the chariot festival was scheduled for the very beginning of Vaigasi. Perhaps she could go and see that face again?
That face would definitely wait for her. It would firmly believe that Selvi would come. Would it recognize her in the white sari? It will. It will hold Selvi’s hand. But what would she tell Kali? Kali’s face was an illusion, wasn’t it? But despite being illusory, it still appeared in front of her, clear and full of life. And she kept explaining herself to it every day. Now both faces appeared alternately in front of her, laughing. She could not fall asleep even late into the night. But later, when sleep finally overtook her, she would not even hear the baby crying. Her mother woke her up, saying, ‘When you have an infant, you can’t sleep like this.’ Ponna did not even hear her mother clearly. She went about breastfeeding the baby as if by reflex.
When the baby placed its mouth on her nipples, she closed her eyes. Which mouth was this? Kali had small, pouty lips. The other man had a big mouth. Which one was this? It felt like a little mouth sucking with a big one. She felt Kali’s hunger in its rapid feeding. She switched breasts. It looked like the baby had had enough milk. It was teasing her nipple with its lips. This was Kali teasing. The baby dozed off with one of her nipples still in its mouth. She lay the baby on the cot and gently wiped some milk from its mouth. The baby then closed its mouth. Whose lips were these? Ponna stepped outside the hut.
It had been long since dawn. Why did she feel so muddled? Her gaze fell on the portia tree. She looked askance at its magnificent form. It had spread like a giant umbrella over the entire barnyard. It was not going to leave even a tiny space uncovered. It would keep spreading its branches in all directions. Losing that one branch had increased its vigour. In the ten months since Kali’s death, it had thrived, with leaves and twigs and branches extending further and further. For the first time ever, she tried imagining what the place would look like if the entire tree was felled and removed. If it became just a plain expanse, she could plant a fresh stalk. Or she could just let it be a sun-drenched space. But even after she felled the tree in her mind, it returned and stood firm. She used all her energy to cast it away from her mind. But it stood immovable. The tree was not out there on that spot, it was in her mind—in that place where neither saw nor axe could remove it.
Asking her mother to watch over the baby, Ponna went out to the field. The stones they had placed around the shrine shone in the light of the early-morning sun. The rock she had planted had firmly claimed its place. She had planted it and nourished it with blood. It could not be removed now. Lamp ceremonies and pongal offerings would take place here from now on. Once in a while, it would demand a blood sacrifice. ‘Can’t you help me live without suffering?’ she asked. She did not know what else to ask. Then she returned to the enclosure.
She felt like something was shadowing her, but there was nothing. ‘Yes, this is how you fool me,’ she said. The baby was still asleep. She sat down on the rock outside the hut and drank the dry-ginger concoction her mother had given her. This was supposed to ensure the child didn’t catch a cold.
One day, her mother said, ‘Ponna, it’s been three months now. Let us go to our village and stay there for a couple of days. Your mother-in-law says we can also name the child while we are there. What shall we name him?’
Seerayi, who was near the cattle floor, said, ‘This is god’s child. We have to name him Maachaami, after the deity. But if we name him that, the entire village will come to know. We won’t be able to explain it to everyone. So let us give him that name but call him by a different one. Some twenty or so years from now, when it is time for him to get married, we can say that his real name is Maachaami. Who is going to question us then? There is nothing wrong in having two names, one for the house and one for the world. We have a thousand names even for god. So why not for a man?’
The baby made a sound. Ponna ran inside the hut to check. It was awake and it laughed at her, kicking its tiny feet in the air. Then it burbled in its own baby language.
‘What is your name?’ she cooed. ‘All right, I will call you Kannu, my little calf, my little treasure.’ The baby laughed, opening its mouth wide. ‘I am going to give you another name. But you shouldn’t tell anyone, all right? Aalavaaya, the wide-mouthed one—hey, Aalavaaya!’ She whispered this secretly and lay down close to the baby, embracing it to her chest.
Ponna found great joy in that embrace.
Translator’s Note
It has been my pleasure and privilege to translate Perumal Murugan’s sequels to his celebrated Tamil novel Madhorubagan, which I translated to English some years ago. One Part Woman portrays the agrarian life of a loving young couple, Ponna and Kali, who are unable to conceive a child. The social expectations around marriage and childbirth and the couple’s own intense longing for a child weigh heavily on them. Towards the end of the novel, we see Ponna going to a temple festival where, on one particular night, consensual union between any man and woman is sanctioned. She meets a man who—because custom accords him the status of a god for that one night—might help her get pregnant. The Tamil sequels Aalavaayan and Ardhanaari imagine
two possible, alternative futures for Ponna—one as a widow after Kali’s suicide, and the other a life with Kali, bearing his judgement, rejection and eloquent silence.
In A Lonely Harvest (Aalavaayan), we see Murugan detailing Ponna’s life after Kali succeeds in committing suicide, unable to bear the thought that Ponna could have consented to being with another man, even if only for a night, even if only for the sake of a child and even if in a way sanctioned by custom. In this novel, we encounter Ponna’s grief and confusion as well as the amazing ways in which solidarity, friendship and care operate among women. Her mother and mother-in-law close ranks around Ponna and do all they can to support her and protect her from the judgements of the world.
In Trial by Silence (Ardhanaari), Murugan imagines a different future, where Kali survives his suicide attempt but is unable to forgive Ponna or any of the others he holds responsible for ruining his marriage and life. Ponna is faced with Kali’s incredible silence and withdrawal, his inability to even inhabit the same space as her. This novel, then, is a portrayal of the attempts at forgiveness, reconciliation and reclaiming of happiness and love.
I could not take ‘Madhorubagan’ simply to be the name of a deity and translate it as ‘The Half-Female God’, because the novel and its title are not about the deity in any significant sense. Despite its discussion of human attachments to divine forms, worship and practices, the novel is about the relationship between Kali and Ponna and their intense love for each other. It is about Kali’s understanding that Ponna is an inseparable part of him—he is unable to imagine himself without her. And hence the intensity of his suffering when he sees her decision to go to the festival as a great betrayal of that oneness. Hence the poignance of his torment. Similarly, though at a superficially cultural level, the words ‘Aalavaayan’ and ‘Ardhanaari’ could be read as names of different forms of a deity, the novels have little to do with them. Translating them as such would have been misleading.
As someone who grew up in Tamil Nadu, and with caste and class backgrounds different from the one Murugan details in these novels, I am forever fascinated by both the familiar and the unfamiliar I find in his descriptions of people, land, food, customs, practices, animals, plants and so on. I have attempted to keep some balance of familiarity and distance alive in the translation. We find in these novels an agrarian world of a particular region in a not-so-distant past, with its social structures, relationships, values, possibilities and constraints. My focus has been on the tone, texture and feelings that rise up to meet us as we follow these richly imagined characters navigating their world.
It is not necessary to read One Part Woman in order to understand the sequels. Perumal Murugan’s narrative beautifully catches you up with key aspects of the earlier novel’s plot that animate and give force to these sequels and their imagination of alternative futures for the main characters.
I can only hope I am getting, at least, a little better at this work with every act of translation. And I hope you enjoy reading these novels.
Austin, Texas
Aniruddhan Vasudevan
19 September 2018
Glossary
aaya: grandmothers or women of that stature
kizhavi: old woman; a more casual way to refer to an elderly woman
maama: how women of certain communities address their husbands; also the same kin term for maternal uncles
mapillai: literally, son-in-law; also a mode of affectionate address towards men who have married, or could potentially marry, a woman from one’s kin group
nangai: a regional kinship term for sister-in-law
paatti: grandmother or anyone who is considered to be of that stature and worthy of respect
saami: a word with a complex set of social usages—as a term of endearment, as a mode of address marking caste-based hierarchical relationships, as a word for a religious deity, etc.
THE BEGINNING
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This collection published 2018
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ISBN 978-0-143-42834-3
This digital edition published in 2018.
e-ISBN: 978-9-353-05358-1
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A Lonely Harvest Page 19