Review: Stories of the True by Jeyamohan (translated by Priyamvada in English)

Stories of the True follow the lives of people steeped in idealism despite facing immense challenges and ethical dilemmas. 

Franz Kafka’s quote, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”, is the best way to describe my feelings after I finished Stories of the True. Written by Jeyamohan in Tamil and translated by Priyamvada in English, it is a collection of twelve short stories - and follows the lives of real people filled with idealism despite being fraught with economic, social or/and ethical challenges. Some stories will make you laugh while others will make your eyes swell up in tears. However, it has two constant feelings: suffering and hope.

One of the standout stories is A Thousand Armchairs - a story about a Nayadi bureaucrat struggling to do the right thing for his tribal mother. Nagam Aiya’s manual of 1906 describes Nayadi as follows: “Nayadis. Since there’s a belief that it’s polluting to even lay eyes on them, they cannot move around during the day…they stay huddled like pigs, inside pits that they dig up…[and]…at night, they get out and hunt. They eat anything…rats, dogs…They cover their genitals with the spathe of the Palmyra tree”

The protagonist suffers. Separated from his mother at a young age, he clears civil services and become a bureaucrat. Despite trying to run away from his past, it follows him like a shadow.

The constant reminder is the armchair - which serves as a powerful and painful motif. After joining as a bureaucrat, the tall throne-like armchair is replaced by a simple wooden chair. It is a reminder that a bureaucrat from the Nayadi caste - a lower one - deserves a lower-grade chair.

However, when his mother sees him sitting on the same wooden chair, she cries, starts beating her chest, and screams, “he will kill you.” What did the armchair mean for the Nayadi? A community pelted with stones simply for stepping out of the drain, sitting on the armchair meant death.

The protagonist suffers immeasurably at home and outside. He is shunned and shamed by everyone while his mother tries to drag him back to the garbage dumps. And written in the first person, the reader suffers - at least I did, albeit temporarily. So did Jeyamohan.

 

Courtesy: www.jeyamohan.in

 

Initially, Jeyamohan wrote the story in the third person. Unhappy with the final product, he rewrote the story in the first person. As he mentions in an interview, “When you write the story in first person, empathy enters the story…Feeling another soul’s pain is fundamental to literature — if that is not possible, literature will suffer.” When the real-life protagonist of A Hundred Armchairs read the story, he wrote a letter to Jeyamohan saying he was sorry the author had to suffer, even if they were only imagined.

The theme of suffering comes from Jeyamohan’s life itself. After losing his parents to suicide six months apart, a twenty-four-year-old Jeyamohan describes his mental state during that time: “I had suffered the harshest of sorrows that a human being can be faced with. Death, ignominy, loss of my home, my land, my people and endless wandering…I set out to kill myself [and] headed towards the railway track.”

Amid despair, Jeyamohan stumbled on hope. The epiphany came in the form of a worm on a leaf: “Here is a being for which every moment of this life is of utmost significance. Death may be right beside it, still, it has its own purpose in this world, a purpose that can be fulfilled by no other…On that day, I resolved that there would be no more sadness in my life.”

Another story from the book, Elephant Doctor, is a hagiography of Dr V. Krishnamurthy (Dr V). He was a pre-eminent conservationist from Tamil Nadu who dedicated his entire life to the elephants. Told from the point of view of a forest ranger, it follows Dr K’s journey to gathering information about the forest and treating wounded animals - especially the elephant. He was a doctor, comrade, friend and admirer of the fantastic beasts. Once Dr K remarked about the elephants, “What a divine being. If there should come a day when there are no more elephants in Tamil Nadu, what’ll our culture amount to? If that should happen, we might as well throw the entire Sangam literature into the fire.” 

 

Dr Krishnamurthy (Elephant Doctor)

  

Elephants face several human-caused injuries - none more innocuous sounding than stepping on a shard of a glass bottle. Within two days, the wound will form pus, maggots will enter it, transport the pus inside - and likely kill the elephant. When one of the elephants visits Dr K with this injury, Dr K treats the wounds and administers the antibiotics.

Dr K died in 2002. Despite holding the record for the highest number of elephant autopsies and the highest number of elephant births supervised, world never recognized his contributions during his lifetime. But he never sought recognition from humans. After treating the injured elephant, the story ends with the herd of elephants forming a semicircle and trumpeting in unison. It was a fitting tribute to the Elephant Doctor.

There are other stories like Aram - The Song of the Righteousness, where a capricious publisher refuses to pay an impoverished author until the publisher’s wife intervenes. Or The Meal Tally, where the restaurant owner generously serves meals to his customers in exchange for voluntary payment.

Despite pain and suffering, it is the ability to think beyond oneself and work for others that makes someone stand out. Each character embodied Aram - in their own way - by holding idealism as their core tenet. It is such stories that renew faith in humanity.