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Dissonance and Other stories
A treadle worker slogging in a press, printing wedding cards forever and anon, can’t give words to his agony when denied, by fate it seems, to print his wedding card. A young ‘abandoned woman’ is denied solutions in the kolam patterns she draws with rice powder outside her house when the fires of desire will not ebb. An ex-convict’s attempts to enter the mainstream are thwarted when people can’t scratch off the labels stuck to his image off their minds. A pavement dweller cannot hope to consummate her marriage for want of a little private space. — Oh, ordinary men, never mind. The ordinary men in the folk tale and the ones in the book are never seen, rarely written or talked about and seldom heard. These are the people who make up a major chunk of humanity and seldom get to voice their thoughts and aspirations. Our films are tales from a fairyland, shot in picturesque locales on foreign lands. Our news channels and magazines sizzle with Page 3 stories. Our drawing rooms and boardrooms are full of talks of the latest acquisitions—a car, a farmhouse, a company perhaps. What of those who comprise the masses and shuffle fleetingly in and out of our consciousness? Quietly subversive, the book cover (with its subtle illustration) describes the stories thus. But then there are stories where the characters subvert the social constructs quite openly. As when a grandmother, in one of the stories, supports her widowed granddaughter’s decision to remarry. Or in hushed tones, when a poor widow whose daughter is molested, literally washes the blot off the daughter by giving her a ‘ritual’ bath. Jayakanthan’s long literary career, the kaleidoscopic range of his writings in all genres and his deft handling of plot not fully satiate the readers and make him a giant among writers. Add to that, he always manages to raise new questions. His political leanings (waverings?) to the Left and then a tilt to the right have nevertheless succeeded in enriching his output. The language has retained its flavour in the text. The graphics seem to be limbs of the story itself where the narrator hangs out an image or two for the voyeur reader. Readable; importantly, contemplable.
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ONCE,
as the story goes, a queen, exasperated by the dust and heat of a
journey, ordered her palanquin-bearers to stop by a pond. She wanted to
bathe. Arrangements were promptly made and the area cordoned off. Even
as the queen stepped into the cool waters of the shaded pond, a
handmaiden noticed some men passing by. When pointed out, she quietly
dismissed them, ‘Oh they are just some labourers, ordinary men, never
mind,’ and resumed her activity. — A folk tale.