“She & I” by Imayam

She and I, Imayam, D Venkataramanan (trans) (Speaking Tiger, March 2024)

Somewhere in Tamil Nadu, there is a small village with “a golden four-lane highway near it but not a single tamarind tree.” Here, the novel’s unnamed narrator spends his days loitering around town and smoking cigarettes. This routine—and everything about life as he knows it—changes with the arrival of Kamala, a widowed mother, a schoolteacher, and the future object of his obsession. She & I, written by Imayam in Tamil and translated by D Venkataramanan, follows these two characters over a decade to tell a powerful story about obsession, self-destruction, and the violence of unrequited desire through vignettes and spare prose. 

The narrator is contentedly unemployed, low on self-esteem, and living off his parents and sister’s money. Despite his family’s requests to find a job, get married, and make tangible progress, he has no desire to do anything other than hang around town. During this daily routine, he meets Kamala, the centre of his affection and attention. Kamala finds herself in the village to fill the position of a teacher at the local school. She is soon promoted to the District Office in the nearby city of Cuddalore. Here, under the anonymity of a fairly big city, they spend more time together.

 

The narrator spends the first two-thirds of the novel longing for Kamala. She doesn’t however reveal much about herself, limiting most of her responses to “ok” and “is it?” A source of frustration for the narrator, this is a clue that the emotional distance between them is vaster than he would like it to be—or thinks it to be. Eventually, his pining grows ugly; he shows up at her house unannounced, belittles her in front of her children, and harasses her on the phone: his obsession—previously masquerading as unrequited affection—has grown sinister and abusive. Whereas she was an angel earlier, now she’s an unfeeling and calculating “slut”. After suffering repeated “humiliation” (expecting her to spend her days and nights worrying about him after they fought), the narrator begs for her attention, and when he sees it to be unsatisfactory, he begins to beat her. But this rage is directed at them both. He wants to “break her legs”, so he slaps himself in anger, verbally abuses her, and starves himself for days.

During these extremes of emotion, Kamala reveals nothing. Seeing the narrator’s spiral into despair and violence is dramatic and stark, taking place within a few pages. The presence  of her children makes these scenes even more disturbing; remaining in the narrator’s perspective during these moments of abuse can be oppressive and nauseating. Only toward the end of the novel does the narrator consider the possibility that she doesn’t feel what he does; only then does he think, “I had misread her… I was embarrassed.” By the time he concludes that “Kamala was not mine. My mind refused to accept that,” the damage is done, and lives are destroyed. It’s a tale as old as time in that, at its core, it’s a story of a man’s violent obsession and a woman reduced to a caricature.

 

Kamala becomes the ghost of the story, somebody who is not seen but whose presence is felt, haunting the narrator into increasing acts of aggression. Throughout the novel, it seems as though she’s merely an imaginary character existing only in the mind of the tormented narrator. The facts the reader knows about Kamala are commonplace: she drinks three cups of coffee a day and has two daughters. Her thoughts, emotions, interests, and inner workings are entirely obscured.

This narrative aloofness, coupled with the constant abuse she endures at the hands of the narrator, robs the novel of any significant societal insight it might have shed, for the moment of reckoning or self-reflection never arises. As a matter of plot, women are seemingly disregarded as collateral damage. Regardless of authorial intention, the result is frustrating, because Imayam is an author who can bring societal abuse to justice and clarity, and he managed exceptionally in his Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel, Selladha Panam (translated as A Woman Burnt). Within the context of Imayam’s literary legacy, She & I feels like a missed opportunity.


Mahika Dhar is a writer, essayist, and book reviewer based in New Delhi. She is the creator of bookcrumbs and her short stories have appeared in Seaglass Literary, Through Lines and Minimag among others.