Existential limit

I saw him while going out in the morning to buy vegetables. The vendors had spread gunnysacks on both sides of the street, arranging their produce. Since they were all selling vegetables sitting on the ground, perhaps they could see him very clearly. Even while their attention was glued to their business, they kept an eye on him as well. He was tall, strong and well-built. Wearing a turban round his head and a bright red towel around his waist, with dancing bells around his ankles, he held a heavy, firmly corded whip in his hand. Each time his whip struck the tarred road, it snapped with a sharp pat-pat.Blood was streaming down his body. There were blood-stained scars on his chest and on his hands as well. Standing by his side was a little girl with only her private parts covered. There were blood stained marks over her body too. One of the marks on her chest was big and prominently visible. My heart, which felt somewhat relieved when he beat the floor, would start fluttering when he beat himself. For no conceivable reason, my heart lurched. One could not help paying attention to him, given the way he was shouting.I have known these vegetable sellers from the days when I was a little boy in shorts. Although I have now completed my studies, taken up a job, and settled down with a wife and children, I cannot help but continue this one task of purchasing vegetables. You could say that there hasn’t been much change in the vegetable sellers’ lifestyle either. When one thinks of the cost of the vegetables, it has gone up twenty times in the last twenty years. I clearly remember buying twenty-five lemons for 25 paise and a vῑsai of lady’s finger for 2 annas. However, their selling spots have been shifting on and off. I used to think that these vendors had developed a friendly way of speaking to all kinds of people because of their day-in and day-out dealings with them. Among the fifty or sixty people, about ten or fifteen might have died. Many have married and set up their own shops. In some cases, they have grown old and lost their husbands. A few husbands are forever given to drink and so a few women wear perpetually sad faces. These people take only one day off a year, shutting shop on the day of Kaanum Pongal. Otherwise their shops are open daily from daybreak till night, except for the afternoon recess. Nowadays, women and children are not to be found in the shops on Sunday evenings alone.Also Read | FacesStriking the floor with more force than ever before, that kallulimangan1, the obdurate fellow, now shouted. His loud voice drowned out the voices of the vendors calling out the names of vegetables and their prices. He also whipped himself sharply, with a sulir, sulir sound. Some got up and tried to prevent him saying, “Stop the whipping, stop it”. The coins began to pile up.An old woman was pleading with him, “Please vanish from our sight.” He seemed like one who wouldn’t yield to anyone. He continued to shout even louder. He also made as if to beat the child. Even the vegetable shops became utterly still. A few men got up, caught hold of him, led him to the end of the street, and returned.When I was on my way to the office, I saw him once again a few streets beyond the vegetable shops. It was a slightly wider street—one that had groceries and such other big shops. Standing in the middle of the road, he was shouting louder than ever, as if it wouldn’t be easy in this place to attract attention. When I rushed past him, I noticed that blood was gushing from the child’s chest where the whip had struck. She was sobbing aloud.All along the way, my heart was in deep anguish. The mind’s tendency to harden, or thaw, for countless reasons, became clear. The way misery is viewed and tolerated has its own ups and downs—the mind can refuse to look at extreme forms of suffering even when they are made into a spectacle, acting as if it all has no relevance to us, much like reading the newspaper intently for a mere ten minutes. Does this mean we have grown accustomed to not seeing misery as misery?When I was young, I would go to the beach often. It is the same even now. Back then it was far more crowded. On Sundays in summer, I have seen thousands of people. There would be a crowd around a radio to listen to the news. Especially when it was about the death of a well-known personality, we would come to the beach and listen to the radio as though we were intent on sharing the news with the crowd. Quite a number of people would sit quietly by themselves. There were shops too. Close to the seashore, a crowd of women and children gathered to get their feet wet in the surging surf. Apart from this, small crowds formed here and there around vendors of tooth powder, medicines, and those setting up snake-and-mongoose fights.I remember seeing one such crowd. When I peeped in, parting the crowd, I saw a middle-aged man standing in the centre. At his side, a woman who looked like his wife, and two children. He had thinning hair and a huge moustache; he had wrapped a veshti around his waist and a towel over his shoulders. His wife was beating the parai. Several small live snakes were wriggling in the sand all around them. He took the snakes one by one, folded each into four and gulped them down with water. Each time, patting his big belly over which water was trickling down, he would say: “There is still some more place left here, there is still some more place left here.” I felt uneasy, overcome by mixed feelings of fear and nausea. He persuaded those in the crowd to compel him to swallow a few specific snakes. After a while, he brought out one by one, as though by vomiting, all the snakes alive, keeping count of them. They fell down on the sand and started wriggling again.He pleaded, pointing to his belly over and over again, “All for the sake of this wretched belly, oh sirs! please give me something enough at least for one meal and gruel.” The sound of the parai began to rise. The children moved around cautiously without stepping on the snakes and started pleading with the crowd, rattling their tins for alms. When the crowd started dispersing, it seemed to me that the collection might not have been enough.Musing over this, I now came to the bus stop. That old beggar woman was there near the newspaper stall where I usually stand. I have been seeing her here for years, too. Sitting on the floor, she would scribble five or six lines with chalk in the space in front of her—lines conveying her sorrow. The letters would make sense only if looked at closely. Finishing the writing, she would bow her head, and hold her palms together in an abject gesture of appeal. She would call out, almost as if gently scolding. More coins would be tossed her way than to the other beggars.As days went by, she became very frail, and now her vision was completely lost. Even now there was something scrawled in front of her, resembling the scribbles of a child who has not yet learnt to form the letters. If one tried to go anywhere near her, she would start screaming, fearing that someone might graze against her. I also noticed something else. She would ceaselessly ask the woman selling flowers, the shopkeeper next to her and everyone around, “I’ll give you dhuttu, naina, please get me kaapi, tipan, I am terribly hungry. I haven’t had anything since morning, you may also have some of it if you like.” They would chase her away, dismissing her with contempt. Maybe because she was pestering each one of them every morning, afternoon and evening? Sometimes, having fallen down and hurt herself, she would move around on her bottom, dragging her bandaged feet, unable to walk.Also Read | PonnagaramA few days ago, I was a little late getting to the office. The bus stop wasn’t very crowded. The beggar woman was there as usual, legs stretched out, head bowed. In front of her were the usual white scribbles. Her legs had swollen and turned dark purple, like rotting fruit. She had tried to cover only her lower body with a scrap of cloth, leaving her chest bare. Hunched over, she wailed aloud.Then it happened. As buses arrived one after another, those waiting in the small patches of shade rushed forward, anxious to read the route numbers. A well-dressed man came running and stepped right on the beggar woman’s swollen legs with his shoes. As she screamed, he caught his bus and was gone. Blood gushed from her legs. She rolled on the ground, crying out in unbearable pain:“Is there no one to question this atrocity? Won’t I die...? O God, how it hurts!”Suddenly, she pulled the cloth from her body to press against her bleeding leg. All at once, the bus stop fell into dead silence. Unsettled by the sight of her completely naked, several people scrambled to find extra cloth. One woman handed her a towel-like piece of fabric, telling her to wrap herself up, but the beggar woman used that towel, too, to wrap around her leg. When another woman passed her a larger towel offered by a man nearby, I noticed my bus had arrived.Resolving not to think about any of it, I waited at the bus stop.Translated from the original Tamil short story “Varambu”, published in the collection Iyandira Maalai by R. Rajagopalan (Mathi Nilayam, 2000).1. The author explained to the translators how the Tamil word kallulimangan is particularly associated with an obdurate beggar. In Tamil, uli is the hammer which is used to break hard stones. The Tamil word kallulimangan implies a person who is stubborn like the stone which refuses to yield to the repeated blows of the hammer.A retired professor of English and a scholar of modern Tamil literature, R. Rajagopalan has authored three poetry collections, a volume of criticism, and a short story collection. Awarded the Tiruppur Tamil Sangam Poetry Award and the Thisai Ettum Translation Award, he has contributed to Tamil little magazines such Zha, Gavanam, and Kachadathapara, republished Tamil translations of Krupabai Satthianadhan’s pioneering feminist novels Kamala and Saguna, and edited works by modernist poets including Gnanakoothan, Nakulan, and Devadatchan.C. T. Indra, retired professor of English from the University of Madras, specialises in literary theory, cultural critiques, and translation. Her translated works from Tamil include short stories, plays, novellas, and criticism by Indira Parthasarathy, Chudamani, Tamizhachi Thangapandian, and A. A. Manavalan (Ramayana: A Comparative Study). She has co-edited with Professor R. Rajagopalan two volumes on English-Tamil language and culture in colonial and modern India, published by Routledge.Meenakshi Hariharan, retired associate professor of English and recipient of the Tamil Nadu Government’s Best Teacher Award (2010), was a two-time Australia-India Council Fellow researching Australian young adult fiction. Her Tamil translation of Hazel Edwards’s Fake ID (Poli Adayalam, Cre-A) is the first Australian novel translated into Tamil. With C. T. Indra, she co-translated essays by P. Sivakami and Thenmozhi for the Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing.