The cradle of two Tamil writers 

Next to the sign board Idaiseval on the national highway, a board in Tamil reads, ‘The birth place of Sahitya Akademi award winning writers Ki. Rajanarayanan and Ku. Alagirisamy.’

Entering this village road at Kovilpatti in Thoothukudi district, a visitor will first see the tractors. Half-a-dozen, mostly in green and red, and a harvester are parked on a yard to the right. Then half-a-dozen street dogs clamber around you when the houses start appearing one by one.

It looks like the village has been painted anew. Many of the houses look bright and spotty, sporting shades of yellow, green, lavender. Though a centuries old village, it is alive and kicking. Kids play around, the goats meander, the women walk carrying pots and children – yes, the rural landscape is still alive. The panchayat office is crowded. People wait in queue. Another colonial tradition dutifully followed.

There is no trace of the magnificence of the written word in any of the faces encountered. They all seem happy and content — and some of them even joyful. The weight of labour is not much evident at first sight. Maybe, the colony is somewhere else on a corner of the village. Or, the mechanisation of farming, pretty evident, has packed the farm workers off to urban slums.

The village has had these two illustrious sons. Both literary giants in their own right. Both from Telugu-speaking families. Both are no more. Not many remember Alagirisamy who left the village first. “He was young when he left our village. He must have been in his late teens or early twenties,” recalls Rajaram, an old man struggling to walk with a stick by the pond.

Most in the village have no knowledge of him. All that they can say is that he left early and never returned. He died early too. At the age of 47. It has been 52 years since he died. It is natural that people tend to forget someone born nearly a hundred years ago. He left a government job where he had to dutifully and unapologetically register documents daily. He went on to work in the literary journals of Madras. He had begun publishing short stories by the 1940s. Later, he worked in Malaysia where he found the love of his life but returned to be with his literary friends and the Tamil literary circle that had several luminaries back then.

Half-broken

His ancestral house in the village is half-broken. The tenant though graciously pulls up a cot to sit. “The family lives in Coimbatore,” she says.

Perhaps, he was one of the first to translate Maxim Gorky, the great Russian writer, in Tamil. Russian literature had found its way into thousands of Tamil homes in the 20th Century. It is a wonder how Gorky found his way into the heart of a young man, possibly the first one to complete school in a village, out of nowhere in the dry, scorched soil.

‘A communist’

“Back then, he was a communist. And almost everyone in the village became a communist,” laughs Rajaram. He was talking about Ki. Rajanarayanan. “There were at least 200 communists then.” Now, there is no trace of communism in the village. There are small temples in all directions. There is the wall painting of ‘Amma’, who is famously dead now, and the Indie version of Dalit Panthers are portrayed prominently on the main road itself.

“Most communists shifted their loyalty. There is only one communist [in the village] now,” chuckles Bojaraj, leading us to the home of the second writer, whose stories revealed how the Telugu-speaking community came down south and settled in the dry land a few hundred years ago. The characters described in his stories can be seen alive on the streets of the village even today. Most remember him. He lived longer, and died only last year in Puducherry. Also, the folklorist tends to live longer than a studious littérateur.

Ki Ra’s family has returned home. Nearer to home, his son Prabhakar is rushing out to sell a giant goat. He has no time to talk. “The buyer may leave. Come some other time. The government has, as promised, renovated the village school in honour of ‘Appa’ [father] where he studied. We are planning a memorial. Kanimozhi [the local Member of Parliament] has promised help,” he says, walking away jauntily. He says he is also a published writer.

By the pond, there are a group of girls and boys. The girls giggle when asked about the spruced-up school. One reluctantly remembers that it was to honour the writer. The boys are busy throwing stones into the pond. “I hit the snake,” exclaims one. You take a look at the pond. There were only twigs in the pond. The snake, the imagined.

The setting sun dangles over the mossy waters. The bare-chested elders gossip in groups under the shades, keeping the story alive. On the way out, a traveller is seen trudging his way out of the village with a suitcase.