The Solitude of a Shadow is about revenge, and the road to it. Its publication marks Devibharathi’s first novel after decades of novellas, essays, and plays—one of which won last year’s Sahitya Akademi Award. It has now been translated from Tamil by N Kalyan Raman for a wider audience. The story is straightforward: a young boy watched his family suffer at the hands of one man, Karunakaran. As a child, he vowed to make Karunakaran pay, and as an adult, he finds himself in a position to fulfill his promise. But things are never that simple, and the unnamed narrator avoids revenge at all costs. But baser things like plot fall into the background in favor of exploring the transformation of one man, and the result is a puzzle of a novel that the reader must piece together.
Thirty years after his childhood promise, when he’s just started working at a local school, the narrator bumps into Karunakaran, who’s stopped by to meet the headmaster, presumably to extend a loan. Despite his rage, the narrator realizes that since Karunakaran doesn’t recognize him, he can use this situation to fulfil his wish. Slowly, he grows embroiled in Karunakaran’s world, serving as the jack of all trades right-hand businessman that so many upper-caste Indian men seem to have. The goal of revenge grows increasingly distant, for three clearly identifiable reasons. First, the narrator is plagued by a paralysing passivity. Second, though his increasing camaraderie with Karunakaran troubles him, thinking about murder is vastly different than enacting it. And finally, he doesn’t know what his life without the looming presence of Karunakaran looks like. After all, having built one’s life around one thing, there’s no purpose to be found after it’s achieved. So he delays, finding every possible excuse to avoid meeting his promise, much to the dismay of his family.
When he finally finds himself in a position to seek vengeance, holding a knife to Karunakaran while he sleeps, he realizes
time was crumbling to ash. I couldn’t tell whether it was in the past or present that I was standing atop this heap of time’s ashes. I also tried to pretend that this had happened to someone else.
The overlaps between past and present coupled with the desire to be “someone else” is the beginning of the identity crisis that threads through the whole novel, and marks the first of many attempts to overlook the promise he built his life around. He is doubly tormented; by the sight of himself with the man he hates, and with himself, a person he sees as being too weak to act. The past blurs into the present, forcing itself into every moment and thereby robbing the narrator of any peace. Houses begin to resemble those of his childhood village, strangers mistake him for Karunakaran, and he can no longer recognise his reflection. Everything “felt as though an incident from long ago was playing out again. I thought I was repeating the sentences I had spoken long ago to someone else.” The unnamed narrator’s extreme passivity turns comedic, then tragic, until they combine into a pleasant, warm wave that propels the story forward. He is at once the mere observer of every event that unfolds and the catalyst; he doesn’t enact revenge, yet he dedicates his life to it. He is a conscious and tormented NPC. He is an Indian Raskolnikov.
The novel seems (at least to me) to be replete with literary references, which add texture and depth to every page, making the fairly slim novel (about the width of an index finger) feel richer. One prominent and important example is the title which, coincidentally or otherwise, echoes TS Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow
The narrator exists entirely within this shadow, with the emptiness of solitude but unwilling to bridge the gap between his desires and actions. Revenge is isolating, but he finds no purpose without it, or so he told himself. By the time the explosive ending arrives, everything we had taken as fact—relationships, timelines, and events—lie as shattered as the narrator’s identity. It is then up to the reader to retrace steps—regressing into the past just as the narrator did—to grasp for clues.