S.Mauni's Tavaru: Translation from a non-European language

by Lakshmi Holmstrom

In the deep waste of the night, darkness itself appeared to glow brightly, and to make visible many objects and forms. Then this light too frequently became darkness. He heard the lone cry of a soul, parted from the body, formless, yet yearning; full of horror. Darkness, loss, light - all these had slipped away from their own essential rules and natures, it seemed. The severed head of a cock leapt about, unable to find its body in the darkness, and attaching itself to whatever it could find, called out the dawn most strangely. And why indeed should not a date-palm, a coconut tree, a goat, a cow, a dog or even a man call out the cock's crow in that dimly-lit hour? Knowing this basic principle, how can we avoid mistakes and illusions? Only be perceiving the whole world as a place of transformations, perhaps.

Text copyright © Katha, May 1997

Context: the story

This passage, a translation from Tamil, comes towards the end of the last story that Mauni, S. Mani, wrote. The title, Tavaru, plays on a range of meanings: error, mistake, illusion, transformation. There is only a minimal plot to the story. A man who is unnamed, and who lives alone, wakes up in the middle of the night and recalls a past love affair which ended acrimoniously many years ago. He is reminded of it because the previous evening, by chance, he met his successful rival in love. The two men had met on friendly terms and made an appointment to meet the next day at the narrator's rooms, at four-thirty in the afternoon. Here there is a gap in the story, suggesting the passage of time. On the next day, the narrator does not wait for his visitor, but sets off alone, losing himself in the streets. Suddenly he finds himself in front of the railway station, a large terminus, where people are bustling about in all directions, going away, returning, changing places and identities. It is a place where transformations happen, sometimes in error. A train, packed with passengers is about to leave. Quite by surprise, he finds himself inside the train, bent double, crouching in the luggage-rack. He falls asleep, wakes up wit h a start, and before the ticket-collector can catch up with him, jumps off at a small station. Once again, in the darkness, he is aware - as he was in the railway station - of living creatures and objects slipping away from their essential natures, of crucial changes and transformations occurring, sometimes by mistake. The story ends with the protagonist once again in his lonely room, fast asleep, 'lost in a dream-world, itself the shadow of some else's dream.'

Context: the author and his work

'Mauni' means 'the silent one'; it is the pen-name of the writer, S. Mani, who was born in 1907, and died in 1985. Mauni came into prominence in the 1930s, and along with Pudumaipittan, is considered one of the great modern short-story writers in Tamily. His is a writer's writer, an innovator and self conscious stylist, who wrote only about twenty-four stories in all. Mauni's stories, unlike Pudumaipittan's are concerned with the inner world of imagination rather than the external world of social change. The abstract world that he develops is at its most intricate in the last of his stories, 'Advana veli' (wasteland, 1968) and 'Tavaru' (Error, 1971). It is in such stories that the fictional world we recognize as Mauni's is summed up: an anonymous 'he' in an unnamed place; waste spaces, single huge trees, street scenes, chance encounters which recur as symbolic or dream motifs; disturbing states of mind between sleep and waking which slide easily into dreams and hallucination. We might describe these stories as surrealistic. But they are also to do with seeming and being, examining the illusory nature of existence; and in that sense they fall in with the Vedantic tradition of Hinduism. The psychological and the metaphysical, or a modern vision and a very traditional one are constantly playing off each other in Mauni's stories.

A constant preoccupation in Mauni's work is the tenuous borderline between dream and waking, between the living and the dead, between imagination and reality, and the ability of men and women to move between these states. Sometimes he pushes these notions further, suggesting a cross-over of lives through dreams, or the doubling of the self in certain encounters, for example, the younger self meeting the older across time. In 'Tavaru', a question mark falls over the meeting (and non-meeting) between the two men, rivals. The chance encounter between the person who is, and who might have been, leads to the meditation in front of the station, where lives appear to change and cross; and then to the dream sequence at the end, where the whole world is seen as a place of transformations. The passage we are looking at, with which I began, is the penultimate paragraph of 'Tavaru'. The story ends with the protagonist in his own bed, dreaming.

Read more... The Source Text in Tamil

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