Translator Iswarya on Jeyamohan's Detective Fiction.

 H: Today we are talking to Aishwarya, who translated Tamil writer J. Mohan's short story collection, *One Million Footsteps*, into English. In *One Million Footsteps*, which comes under the category of literary detective fiction, we meet Ausep Achchan, a jaded, maverick ex-police officer with razor-sharp wit. He turns his gaze inward, dwelling on the complex minds that commit crimes. The story collection is layered with history and myth, challenging us to confront deeper truths. To understand the depth here, we must look at the man behind the prose. Writer J. Mohan is a preeminent force in Tamil literature. His career spans over 300 short stories and several landmark novels. He is vital and wise, bridging heritage and contemporary Indian narrative. Bringing this world to life is the translator V. Aishwarya. She teaches English literature at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education. She was a 2024 South Asia Speaks Fellow for Translation. She perfected her craft under the mentorship of the esteemed Arun Vasinha. Her work captures the nuance and gravity of Tamil literature for all of us. This collection is a meditation on human nature you won't want to miss. Here she is, Aishwarya, talking about her love for books and literature.

 Iswarya: I would say I started off in a sort of reading culture, like many kids in the 90s, simply due to deprivation in some sense. We were in a world that had just globalized, and we didn't have ready access to the kind of media that children have access to right now. So, we didn't have the distraction of cell phones. K-Ball TV came pretty late to me and so on. So, I grew up on this steady diet of print culture. Very surprisingly, it was mostly at my grandparents' and aunts' houses that I grew up, in Chennai, and I read what we now understand as rather age-inappropriate reading, because it was mostly all of the weekly magazines. The weekly magazines in the 90s would actually carry a lot of, you know, sexist humor, like secretary-based jokes and fat-shaming people. All of this was super common. That was the steady media diet of that period. But I was just voraciously reading everything that I could lay my hands on. So, in a sense, I think it helped me. It helped me get a sense of what the mainstream culture in Tamil itself was. I didn't grow up, in that sense, very alienated from mainstream Tamil culture. But I think it was in my end-of-schooling years that I sort of completely switched over to reading in English. Before that, I had done all the regular reading that your average nerdy Tamil teen would read, like Kalki. Kalki was the big fan favorite of that time. So, I had read *Ponniyin Selvan*, *Sivagamiyin Sabatham*, and so quite a bit of that. I had that taste for historical romances like all teenagers. And all of that happened. I somehow didn't catch on to contemporary Tamil literature at all at that period because there was nobody to introduce it to me. And so, because of school and because I always had a taste for reading, I got into reading regular English romances as well, like your regular *Three Musketeers* and *Monte Cristo* and so on. It just went on from there to George Orwell and Charles Dickens, and I had a whole Jane Austen summer. I spent a whole summer tracking down every book she wrote, and my personal favorite even now is *Emma*, because it has a very flawed kind of protagonist. I identified so much with her very meddlesome nature. I had that kind of very Catholic reading in my youth. And from there, I went on to study English literature in my undergrad and postgrad and so on. So, once that became my field, I started reading more and more of the classical English canon. And the more time I devoted to that meant the less I could even dream of reading Tamil. I sort of drifted away from Tamil like that for about roughly 20 years, I would say. It was like a very long gap. Then it was only around, I think, the pandemic time that I restarted with a little bit of Tamil reading. It's not that I lost touch with Tamil or I was a bad reader of Tamil or anything. One hilarious episode I can remember is there was an essay competition in my school, I think 11th or 12th grade, for us to write an essay on this classic in Tamil called *Silappathigaram*; I'm sure you must have heard of it. So, I read the original along with its notes in two weekends. It was an absolutely crazy thing to do, but I managed to do it simply because I took it as a challenge. But I didn't feel that kind of a challenge with a lot of reading that came my way in the modern circle. Because once again, I was only relying on the weekly magazines and all of that. They didn't have any kind of a literary standard and were also quite shallow. At some point, I could start predicting their plot lines and so on. So, I didn't get any serious introduction to it. The best I knew was, let's say, Sujatha or Balakumaran, and that's pretty much it. And from there, because I pivoted hard into reading English, I was under the delusion, like a lot of other young people, that literacy existed only in English. So, if somebody had asked 20-year-old me to name contemporary Tamil writers, I would have been like, "I don't think anybody is writing in Tamil right now." So, very ignorant and with the overconfidence that comes from ignorance at that point. That's how I drifted away from Tamil. Back in the pandemic time, I knew that I had the ability to read Tamil, and on and off, I was reading some stuff that I accidentally came across. I would say the first serious essay by Jeyamohan that I read would be the obituary of Harold Bloom, which is a very interesting way of my two worlds colliding. Harold Bloom died in 2019, and at that point, he was one of my favorite critics growing up. And there were only two obituaries written that I could come across in the Tamil sphere for Harold Bloom. One was by a winner of the Sahitya Academy Yuva Puraskar, and I personally know him in real life from my university, and he had written something to the effect of, "Good riddance, the old man is gone." I was very, very shaken by that. I was wondering, is this the general response of the Tamil world to this man dying? Then I came across Jeyamohan's obituary note, which was very detailed, impartial, and a serious appreciation of Harold Bloom's position. I figured out that here is another Tamil writer who sees the major cultural icon that Bloom was for the English readership of a certain generation. But at the same time, was he also looking at how he was a little jaundiced about Eliot and other people because of his own baggage? This was the first serious piece of literary evaluation I was reading in Tamil, and it came as a complete breath of fresh air. I was worried I was only going to hear more condemnation of Harold Bloom. But once again, I wasn't keeping up with my Tamil reading very much because this was pre-pandemic. It was during the pandemic that, as I described in the foreword to the book, in the middle of all the doom-scrolling on social media, I came across this screenshot that says something about the contemporary writer, controversy's poster child, Jeyamohan, having once again said something very offensive about lower castes. I wondered what that was all about. Out of sheer curiosity, I went back and read this story, and then that story had such a stranglehold on my imagination for such a long time because I was taking time to process all of this and figure out where it was coming from. That was my first example, I would say, of reading a very serious Tamil short story after a very, very long time.

 H: Which is that short story?

 Iswarya: *One Million Footsteps*. That is the reason I then chose to pick it up for translation.

 H: Wonderful. You preempted my question. Then how did this journey into translation happen with Jeyamohan?

 Iswarya: Yeah, primarily I would say that my major introduction to contemporary Tamil reading was from Jeyamohan. And I think there is a very important role that was played by Suchitra Ramachandran, a fellow translator and very good friend who introduced us also. I had been in touch with Suchitra for quite some time before all of this pandemic started, usually because she was also a post-doctoral student working on consciousness at that point. My PhD was on consciousness, and I generally used to cry, like all these PhD kids, about when am I going to finish the thesis and I'm feeling such imposter syndrome. So, I was doing all of that, and we were friends in a very long-distance sense since she was living in Switzerland at that point. But when we met once in person, she got me this book, *Sangha Chitrangal*, and asked me to read it. I remembered this is something I had read before, because I had read parts of *Sangha Chitrangal* back when I was a reader of Tamil magazines like *Vikatan* and *Kumudam* and all of the things that used to turn up at home. *Sangha Chitrangal* was a series that used to come up in *Vikatan* where Jeyamohan was explaining Sangam poetry with anecdotes and illustrations every week. Incidentally, he has now restarted a series for the weekly magazine *Vikatan* called *Megangal in Kural* after a gap of 20–25 years, which is amazing. What happened was I sort of came across *Sangha Chitrangal*, we met briefly once or twice, and then she went back. I was somewhat aware of the existence of Jeyamohan, I had come across this story, and that is when the MBI Prize was announced for its inaugural edition. The first edition was interestingly also restricted only to Tamil translations. I had worries about whether this would be a conflict of interest if I submitted to it because I knew Suchitra personally, and she was like, "What? We met twice, what do you think is happening here?" She was like, "No, I'm not even going to be on the jury. Please go ahead and submit. I'm encouraging everybody I know, all the Tamil readers around me, to try their hand at translation." So, then I wanted to translate *One Million Footsteps* for that collection. But I realized quickly that it's a story that will probably not meet the criterion of 7,000 words in English. It's huge. I started wildly casting about for what to translate now. I went to social media and asked people for help: "Hey, can you all catch me up on some contemporary reading?" Sure enough, there was a friend called Melinda who suggested a story called *Ammayappam*, and once again, it was mind-blowing. It was mind-blowing because specifically, it spoke to my life situation at that point. It's a story about a carpenter—not any carpenter, but a sort of very incompetent carpenter, a drunkard, a wastrel. This man is not even trusted enough to repair a chicken coop. He comes and coaxes this lady of the household to somehow let him make a ladder, and he botches the whole job so badly that he is left shame-faced in the end. This is just surface-level. But you also realize quickly that there is a whole different personality for this carpenter. He is called the "crazy carpenter" in the story because, fundamentally, he is a sculptor. He is a sculptor who is capable of making the Shiva Tandavam come alive in sandalwood. Now, this is the man who is being entrusted with doing menial jobs like repairing chicken coops and making ladders. Naturally, he is frustrated, and he treats this job too lightly, which is the reason he ends up blundering. Now, this spoke to me because I was stuck in a dead-end job. I was stuck in a dead-end job teaching English to people who didn't care two hoots for English. I was trying to make sense of, say, Tom Stoppard and Helen Gardner, and I was trying to go and talk to people who would not read three pages together and who would just stare at your face like you are some alien standing in front of them, gesticulating. I realized this is a universal story. This is about artists everywhere in the world who are forced into a menial day job that kills their potential. No wonder the man became a drunkard and his wife left him. It's a really hilarious story, but it's also extremely poignant because it's speaking to the condition of artists all over the world. It spoke to me at that point about the kind of academic engagement I was caught up in. I was not even getting to teach a literature paper. I was just explaining nouns and verbs and tenses to first-year undergrads who could not care less. It really rang true for me, and that's basically how I made my way back into Tamil reading. So, I would say I am a relatively new Tamil reader. Most of my reading belongs to the last three and a half years at most. I am also a bit of a slow reader; there is not much that I have read in the last three years to list out. Anyway, I am glad, though, that because of my comparatively better English reading experience, I have a sense for what I really like and what I am looking for in a writer. I quickly tire of certain writers; I quickly queue up on certain writers when I feel like this is not engaging me at the level I really want. For that reason, I am a bit of a very selective reader in Tamil.

 H: So, other than Jeyamohan, if some of our listeners want to read contemporary Tamil literature, whom do you recommend?

 Iswarya: This is the challenge, actually. All of my prelude was to tell you that if you push me to name specific Tamil writers, I can at most tell you some of what I've read, but I don't think I'm qualified enough to even recommend.

 H: As a reader, you can always recommend.

 Iswarya: I'm saying I'm a very poor Tamil reader because my Tamil reading is very limited. I started strongly with Jeyamohan. Interestingly, I've read more of Tamil literature through English translation than in actual Tamil script. So, I've read a bunch of Perumal Murugan, and I also incidentally translated one of his non-fiction books recently. It is this book called *Students Etched in Memory* that came out through Penguin Random House last year. That was my first book-length translation. My favorite Perumal Murugan book is *Kulam Adhari*—I think in English, that is *Seasons of the Palm*. Right now, the interesting writer I am exploring is Yuvan Chandrasekhar. He's not been translated very much into English, and very interestingly, I'm reading this book called *Enkona Manidhan*, which I can loosely translate as *A Man of Eight Dimensions*. It's written in this very interesting style where you can't tell who's talking at any given time. It's all in the form of dialogue, but it's not dialogue attributed to specific people. It's just free-wheeling conversations with his uncle that he recalls. It's the narrator, and the narrator gives you multiple footnotes into which he goes into different anecdotes—there are pages where the size of the footnote exceeds the actual text on the page. It's a very experimental kind of form. This is me discovering Tamil literature on the go as I'm working as a translator. I am stumbling into all of these important writers, and when people tell me, "Hey, you should read this," I faithfully pick it up and start reading. I'm pretty excited about reading Yuvan Chandrasekhar right now, and I hope somebody translates this into English too.

 H: You have been reading and you started translating, and you said a couple of books you translated and probably some short stories too. Do you think your reading experience—the literature that you are now translating, the stuff you are reading because of translation—do you feel that, as a reader, you have evolved because of your translation?

 Iswarya: Interesting question. I think these two are going in parallel tracks for me. One thing that has happened when I read in Tamil is that in my head, I am constantly stopping the text and thinking about how this would sound in English. That's something that I am doing in moments when I don't even notice. Most of the time, you are carried along by the tempo of the story itself, so you don't stop and think about things. But becoming a translator has now made me sort of stop and often wonder, specifically about the texts that are very rooted in their culture, "How would this sound in English? What a delicious job it would be for somebody to turn this particular line into English?" It's acquired that second layer. Because I don't translate two ways—I don't do anything from English to Tamil—my reading in English is still unaffected. But one thing that I have become much more acutely aware of ever since I started translation is about how words sound. I was always aware of that as a reader; I would follow along with the rhythm of things. But I think I have now developed more of a nose for what really sounds fake. I can explain with the example of the recent controversy about the Commonwealth Prize. When I read that story, I had that feeling like "the serpent in the grove" as I was reading. I had a strong feeling of, "My God, how terribly fake this sounds!" Every third sentence, I felt, "What? What?" That sense of an authentic human voice, a certain lilt to the quality of the prose, and a certain vision behind the image—all of these things I think I'm much more finely tuned into now than when I was just reading for pleasure.

 H: As a reader, have you slowed down your reading speed?

 Iswarya: Sometimes in my very bad moods, I attribute it to the fact that I am probably spending too much time online, when probably my attention span has shrunk, or maybe it's old age. We all have those mini existential crises every now and then.

 H: Now, you told me why you chose to translate *One Million Footsteps* because of that first story that you read. Give us a detailed introduction to *One Million Footsteps*, the short story compilation.

 Iswarya: *One Million Footsteps*, the story that gives the lens its title to the pre-anthology, is the first story, as I said, that I came across from contemporary Tamil. It stood out to me in two ways. It uses the very common form that we associate with genre fiction, which is detective fiction, to try and go beyond what detective fiction usually does. Detective fiction, as we all know from reading Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie from our childhood days, is usually interested in how a certain crime happened and who was the killer or the criminal mind behind it. Very often, the end of the story comes with figuring out who did what. We are barely given a couple of lines of explanation for the "why." And very often, detectives who are explaining this to their Watson—the reader-stand-in—would tell you, "That is how sometimes people do things." There is a certain mysterious quality to why people do the things they do. That perfunctory sort of close happens with a lot of detective fiction. Sometimes people don't even go into the "why" at all. You have all of these incredible monsters who are uncovered in the course of a story, but you leave it at that. You just shrug your shoulders and think, "Yeah, this is how sometimes people are," and walk away. The first thing that stood out to me in this story was how these stories really begin with their explanation for the "how," but the emphasis is on the "why"—not much emphasis on the "who," as the "who" is almost incidental. All the historical background and the metaphorical, cultural notes added to it are centered on the "why." That is what I like about the explanation Jeyamohan gives in the preface to his book: he says, "I think of these stories as investigating human nature itself." It's written for questions of what makes people do the things they do. Crimes of passion you can explain, but this titular story is fundamentally not at all about a crime of passion. There is a crime of passion that happens with this young man infatuated with a married woman, but the core of the story is really not about the crime of passion at all. The crime of passion is easily excused—in fact, excused by the reader, by the narrator, but not by a certain character. That really forms the crux of the story. How do you produce an individual who does not operate on the level of "we must be forgiving about crimes of passion"? What kind of blood and iron must have gone into making an individual who is unforgiving of human frailty? That's the kind of question you are left with. That is the kind of question that lingers with you long after you have closed the book. That was the first feature that stood out to me. The second was that the story was in no hurry to tell you a story in the first place. There is so much scene-setting. You see so much banter. He goes on for, let's say, about 20 pages very coolly, just telling you all sorts of meandering details in the history of shipbuilding in the port of Vepur in the case of *One Million Footsteps*. The tone of the banter is also...

 H: Yes.

 Iswarya: ...in such a way that it doesn't feel like exposition. That's the other thing you feel with a lot of literature, where you're being fed details—this is going to be significant later, like Chekhov's gun, you have to watch out for this sort of thing. It doesn't feel like that. There's a lot of rambling among these friends, and they are drunk, and each of these people has a character—all the people surrounding Ausep Achchan, like Kumaran...

 H: One of them being him.

 Iswarya: Yeah. You have this Kumaran Master, you have Sridhar and Nair, and they are constantly flinging some caste-based insults at each other. They make fun of this stand-in figure for Jeyamohan, like you say. They make fun of Nair's family histories, they make fun of Christians, they make fun of Christian conversions, and they also make fun of the Prime Minister of the country, which is there everywhere in the narration. All of this happens at the periphery, so you feel you ease into this conversation and you are not specifically looking for one story to follow or a lead to discover. You do not get that particular thrill of being a co-investigator of a crime that you usually get in the genre of detective fiction, where you are trying to be one step ahead of the detective. None of that happens. This is very rambling; it's like eavesdropping on some very interesting uncles in your neighborhood. That's the general vibe you get. They're making jokes that are only permissible in these all-male circles. It goes on and on. You don't feel that there is any kind of an agenda to whatever they're saying at all for a very long time. By the time you are cued into where the story really picks up steam, you are already at the edge of your seat because you know something important is going to come up. After that, the way they are listening in rapt attention, the way Ausep Achchan goes into detailing the history of Kerala, for instance, in *Onayimukku* (*The Trail of the Wolves*), where he talks about how right from the time of the Zamorins, the traders who were in coastal Kerala perished and how certain Nair families were left behind—there's a whole history to it. Then you get into all of this myth about the land of the Bhagavathis and the goddesses of the land, the notion of the women turning into vengeful goddesses. All of this is given to you as background information before you even start processing what is happening in this particular story. That, of course, is again a sign of a very confident storyteller who knows they do not have to constantly appease you with red herrings in order to hold your attention. My contemporary favorite writer in English—unfortunately, he's not very contemporary right now because he passed away a few months ago—is Tom Stoppard. That's a very interesting way again to connect to both Jeyamohan and the larger conversation we're having here. I did my PhD on him. The reason I was mainly attracted to Tom Stoppard is also, in some sense, the reason I'm attracted to Jeyamohan's fiction, which is that beyond the storytelling, beyond the plot, there are some fundamental philosophical questions that both of these writers are deeply interested in. The parallels keep coming back to me. Tom Stoppard was constantly interested in questions like, "If everything is relative, where do you find truth?" Or things like, "If mortality is the only constant in life, what values do people live by?" He could take these very serious moral questions and turn them into high comedy—extremely humorous and, at the same time, very erudite comedy. There's also a lot of scholarly areas he goes into; he can research some 300 years of Russian history in order to write a trilogy like *The Coast of Utopia*. I'm sure now you would see the parallels. Both of these writers have an interest in history, in philosophy, in deeply human questions, and the belief that literature matters beyond just polishing your prose or presenting a story that will leave the reader on the edge of their seat. In the end, it's a very romantic notion of literature—that there is some form of higher truth-telling about fiction or drama that you find through literature alone and not through any other mode of engagement in the world. That conviction is something that led me to naturally transition from being a big fan of Tom Stoppard to being a big fan of Jeyamohan.

 H: Now, *One Million Footsteps*—the title itself. In fact, there is a lot of discussion and he used a lot of details about the Mappila Muslim community. It struck me in a very, very different way. They have been here for a long time, probably came here centuries ago, and the culture is intertwined now, and the current political discourse is taking all this into different directions.

 Iswarya: I would like to point out something that you also said, which is that today, when we talk about writers, very often you would see it repeated everywhere that writers need to be politically engaged, they need to comment on today's political crisis, and they have to offer some sort of running commentary on every burning issue. But if you see a lot of interviews, you would see Jeyamohan commonly remarking that he is very apolitical, and that is often interpreted as him not caring or not engaging with the problems of the day, as if he is sitting in some kind of an ivory tower. But I think what you pointed out is an excellent example of how his engagement with Muslim culture, especially the Mappila Muslim culture in this particular story, is deep, sustained, and insightful, as opposed to merely raising slogans about one particular crisis, one particular ruling party, or one particular situation of persecution. I think what he is doing there is—and this is something I commonly go back to with Tom Stoppard—turning every political question into a larger moral question. Political questions can change from moment to moment; people can switch allegiances and alter their behavior and tune based on whichever party is in power. That's pretty fickle. But your moral stances come from a certain kind of unchanging instinct. If you want to do right by what it is to be a good person, then your engagement with the Muslim community cannot just be superficially decided by external factors that are happening today, but by your deep understanding of the ethos of the community itself, by treating them as full human beings about whom you have a perpetual curiosity, just as you have curiosity about everybody else. I think his engagement with these questions is deeply moral rather than just political, because the word "political" can often be misused at the service of something that is very time-saving.

 H: Right. The other one we discussed briefly earlier: it's about the story "Gunning," I think—I think that's the first story. The women characters, as it appears till the story comes to an end, they are in the background, and suddenly the way he turns the character in the end—in fact, I see this in *The White Elephant* too; Elisa, she has a relationship with the protagonist, and the way in the end he gives the brief details about that lady, and she becomes a full-blown character, she behaves like a true heroine in the end. This particular thing I observed in other stories too. What has been your experience of reading Jeyamohan's women characters?

 Iswarya: Very interesting question. I would like to say that this is somewhere coming a little bit also as a woman reader—as somebody who reads a lot of feminist fiction. I agree that Jeyamohan creates some very complex, nuanced female characters. You can certainly see their character arc. But sometimes, yeah, it's a mixed bag—in some places they are just there, following a certain expected line, and sometimes they do very unpredictable things. What I would say is interesting about both the complex characters and the characters that are just there to move the plot a little, whichever way they are, is that I think they all have a sort of deeply symbolic placement in the stories. I would, as a reader, prefer to look at it this way. There are several characters—for instance, I will specifically speak about this one novel of his which is widely read as a sort of feminist story, *Kanyakumari*. It is a novel that he wrote primarily around a man's insecurities regarding two different powerful women characters that he has associated with. This man called Ravi is a successful film director. He is moved and haunted by his memories of his ex-girlfriend, with whom he is out, and there is a whole traumatic episode involving her being gang-raped. Somehow, this man feels emasculated by that entire incident; he sees his inability to protect her from it as a sort of personal failure of his own masculinity. It continues to haunt him to the point that he becomes a womanizer, a drunkard, and a general-purpose misogynist and failure in life. It is a very interesting character study of the man himself. But I would say that in this story, and in say, *Aram*, where you have the central lady who turns the fortunes around for the poet, and in the other story that I am going to talk about, *Pintu Raamviyal in Kural*—in all of these, you actually have women characters whom you can read at one level as flesh-and-blood human beings. But I would feel that reading them at that level just takes away a lot of the symbolic significance, the layers that they have as archetypes. So many female characters in Jeyamohan's fiction very interestingly have this additional layer of being a very powerful archetype. I've read, for instance, Suchitra arguing that the lady in *Aram, the Song of Righteousness*, is a sort of modern-day interpretation of Kannagi, the myth. Similarly, you can see these two women in *Kanyakumari*—the one who is previously violated in that gang-rape takes the image of the goddess in that Kumari, also as an archetypal image onto which this man grafts all the female relationships in his life. You get this strong archetype, the "archetypal feminine," frequently occurring in Jeyamohan's fiction. For instance, this particular image of the *Yakshi*. I recently watched a play, a dramatized version of this story called *Kadashi Moham* by Jeyamohan, which talks about the way the *Yakshis* cast a spell on men who pass by that area. There are these very powerful archetypes that he employs—very often goddesses—who are drawn from myths, local legends, and these stories of Neeli and Bhagavati and *Yakshis* from the southern Tamil Nadu and Kerala area. That particular color, that layering, is visible in a lot of these women characters. Now, what interestingly happens in *Kanyakumari* is the man is forever stuck in this loop of self-condemnation because he cannot get over that incident and feels emasculated. But you get to see that the woman herself very easily moves on from that incident, becomes a scientist, and goes about exploring the purpose of her life because she does not want to be reduced to one traumatic incident. There are very often times when these women emerge as very striking individuals—they are very powerful—but at the same time, there is a lot of this particular perspective of a man, often the narrator, staring in the face of some kind of a mystic feminine archetype that beats his comprehension. You will see that in the character of Radha Muni in *One Million Footsteps*.

It says, "The fire I saw in her eyes was something that I could not fathom at all." This particular kind of filmic mystery that eludes the perception of the male narrator is a very common image that you see in a lot of fiction by Jeyamohan. It happens once again with the feminine as a sort of mothering and grounding influence that you see in *Tintara Ramya Nil in Kural*, where the wife of the protagonist is actually a rather common woman. I am specifically bringing this up because this is one particular way of writing the feminine, which I think is very true to where Jeyamohan is coming from as a writer, as opposed to a lot of other feminist writing, especially by women, where we speak so much about female agency, about women being the people who decide their lives. You definitely have that in a character like Vimala in *Kanyakumari*, but that's not the only way of imagining feminine power. Sometimes the power of the feminine really comes from the substratum of that culture in which it is embedded, and I think he is constantly exploring this clash between the very matrilineal system of Kerala that he comes from and the very patriarchal Tamil culture in which he is writing.

 H: Perfect, correct. Very good observation. So, what has been the reception so far?

 Iswarya: I would love to hear from more readers, but whatever I have heard, people have been a little bit stunned by the fact that these were circulated as detective fiction, but this is very different from the kind of detective fiction they usually read. Some very perceptive comments have come so far from the Tamil readers of the novel who speak about how much this delves into the archaeology of its culture and how far it talks about the limits of rationality. That is something that happens at the roots, if you remember—he says there are things that your rational mind can never comprehend at all. That's where he says we wait for God to open a door for us. So there is sort of a mystical intuition that leads people to discovering things. In some stories, for instance, the last story in the collection called *Kaimukku*, any amount of rationalizing does not finally find you an answer; you know why they did it, and still it is not even the criminal at this point that stuns you, but the father of the criminal. I think he is the most interesting character in that entire book because you get to hear so much about his upbringing, his circumstances, and what kind of unbending moral stance he had maintained. When you subject that to some sort of an acid test, it is a very interesting premise. If you think about what Jeyamohan said about *Aram*, he says it is about all of these human beings being subjected to some kind of acid test. In that sense, *Kaimukku* is very much that kind of an acid test. It is really seeing how far you can go and still hold on to your morality. As much as it shocks us when people really withstand that test—which is what happens a lot in *Aram*, where people withstand physical pain and mental trauma and still go to Mount Kailash—it's about subjecting human beings to this utmost level of acid test. You are stunned both by the people who survive it, as in the case of Periyavalli, and also by the people who fail it, as in the case of this father in *Kaimukku*. It is really about subjecting human beings to that extreme kind of duress to see what really lasts, what comes out of it. How far can you stress-test human nature?

 H: Now, what are your upcoming projects?

 Iswarya: My immediate upcoming project would be finishing a set of non-fiction again by Jeyamohan. It has become the theme of the talk that I'm circling around this one particular author. Anyway, I translated some of the political essays by Jeyamohan for *Frontline*. I am also translating some more of these political essays by Jeyamohan on subjects of nationalism, Hindu nationalism, the mixing of religion and politics, and censorship on account of religion. Those essays will be wrapped up in a month or two, and they are probably going to be released somewhere in early 2027, coming out from Jagannath. But the thing I am very excited about is the next upcoming project—for which I have applied to some grants—which is *Pintu Daram Nizhal in Kural*. It is an epic saga of a South Indian union leader called Arunachalam who, in the 90s following the fall of the Soviet Union, has a mental breakdown. He is a staunch believer in the communist ideology, a member of the communist party, and in some sense, he is subjected to a moral crisis. He comes to know of this character, a communist thinker from South India in the 1950s called Veerabhadra Pillai—I think this is a fictional character, but it might be based on some real people. This Veerabhadra Pillai has been buried from the official history of his party, like the Orwellian notion of an "unperson," where records are removed and the person is dropped into a "memory hole."

He has been officially scrubbed out of all records of the Communist Party, all because this man dared to discover that there was an economist in Soviet Russia called Nikolai Bukharin. At that time, in the 1950s, when he comes to know of the existence of Bukharin—who was executed after a trial by Stalin—he discovers this Stalinist purge. But his widow, Anna Larina Bukharina, is sent to Siberia for exile. She is starving, but for decades, she stays alive after memorizing the dying declaration of Bukharin on why he is innocent and how his memory is to be vindicated. She stays alive solely to bear testimony to this man's life. Post-Khrushchev, there is an actual inquiry in which she is able to repeat this statement verbatim in front of a court, and she gets Bukharin's name cleared. This novel is really about—the title, *Pintu Daram Nizhal in Kural*, means "to follow the shadow of the voice." Very interestingly, this week, Jeyamohan was interviewed by a weekly magazine in Ukraine.

 H: That's interesting.

 Iswarya: In that particular interview, he talks about this novel where Bukharin is buried in Soviet Russia in the same way that Veerabhadra Pillai, who discovers his fate, is also buried by the local Communist Party. There is a certain pattern to this, so Bukharin starts haunting Veerabhadra Pillai until Veerabhadra Pillai becomes a complete drunkard and dies on the streets. This man, Arunachalam, who starts reading the unpublished manuscripts of Veerabhadra Pillai, is similarly haunted; he loses his mind and is confined to a lunatic asylum. That is where this feminine influence comes in—he is redeemed only because his wife is able to pull him out of the ideological trap he has gotten into. What is exciting for me as a translator about this book, beyond the theme and the vast scope of history, is the fact that it is an extremely experimental form of novel. You start with a straightforward third-person narrative, which tells you about Arunachalam, his family, his estate, his fellow union workers, and what is happening in the Communist Party. And then, it segues very suddenly—the book is divided into 12 sections—into the unpublished manuscripts of Veerabhadra Pillai. It comes up in different forms: diary entries, short stories, one-act plays, translations he did of Alexander Pushkin or Ossip Mandelstam. Then you have a short story or a play in which Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are characters. Then you get stories in which Bukharin is a character along with his wife, then a story of his wife's Siberian exile, then a collection of poems apparently written by refugees or exiles in Siberia. Then, Jeyamohan becomes a character in this—Arunachalam starts having a debate with Jeyamohan within the novel—and he writes letters. The novel actually ends with a letter written by Jeyamohan to Arunachalam saying, "Yeah, this is how I'm telling your story."

 H: How many pages, total novel?

 Iswarya: My God, it's 758 pages in Tamil, which you can generously assume is double the page count in English. It's such a challenging story in terms of form; the form is constantly shifting.

But fundamentally, it's about the dangers of ideology—how you can get sucked into a certain ideology and start justifying things. You can very quickly lose your moral grounds because of your submission to that ideology, no matter what the ideology is.