THE SOLITUDE OF A SHADOW

This Tamil work by the awardwinning Devibharathi ends on such an explosive note that I must now read it all over again.

The Solitude Of A Shadow by Devibharathi, translated from the Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman. Published by Harper Perennial in 2024. The original, Nizhalin Thanimai, was published in 2012.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

~~~Theodore Roosevelt

I read Devibharathi’s The Solitude Of A Shadow during my flight from India to California on Friday. It compacted my flight by about half. The book even made me forget about the possibilities of this new flight fear called clear air turbulence. Let me admit that I also became someone I did not recognize by the time the story ended.

The man who had occupied my vengeful heart for thirty years as the epitome of evil was there in front of me in flesh and blood. I felt disoriented for a moment. Then I remembered my sister Sharadha’s brown eyes wandering endlessly like in an unfulfilled quest for revenge.

Even before Karunakaran’s name was squeezed out from my lips reluctantly like toothpaste and released into the room, Sharadha had become edgy.

The Solitude Of A Shadow is one man’s quest for revenge. It soon became mine too. As the story progressed I was baying for Karunakaran’s blood and in complete support of the narrator’s (the brother’s) need for justice for his sister’s rape thirty years before.

“All right. What are you going to do?”

I told her I didn’t understand.

“How are you going to kill him?” Crinkling her brown eyes, she looked directly at me. I was stumped by the question.

“Some day, after I’ve earned his complete trust, I can mix poison in his coffee or food.“

She burst into laughter. I felt humiliated, as if I had suddenly become a caricature. She berated me harshly for not having freed myself yet from the naivety and fantasies of that ridiculous little boy who had stood with a raised sickle in his hand thirty years ago. She had visualized other ways of killing him. It must be an unforgettable and horrible sight, she said.

The Solitude Of A Shadow begins thirty years after the rape of the narrator’s sister by a loan shark called Karunakaran. The narrator, one of the story’s protagonists, remains unnamed and is referred to most often as “Clerk-Sir.”

Kamakshi Amman temple in Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu. It may have been founded in the 5th-8th century CE by the Pallava kings,whose capital was in Kanchipuram.

Early on in the novel, we understand that Clerk-Sir, a clerk at a school in the village, plans to ingratiate himself with the local benefactor Karunakaran so that he can find the right moment to kill him. As time goes on, however, he is hired by Karunakaran to tackle problems in his business. As Karunakaran begins to entrust even more of his business problems, Clerk-Sir, who is in the thick of it and could have found ways to knock him off, tends to procrastinate more and more. His original zeal to avenge his sister’s rape slowly evaporates as his own feelings towards Karunakaran and his family become complicated.

The moment of vengeance becomes a constantly moving target that is subject to the vagaries of the narrator’s fancy. Soon enough, he is also entangled in a cat and mouse game with his prey’s beautiful daughter Sulo.

We begin watching a man whose intentions are so compromised that he has deviated from his original commitment to his sister. Our narrator is so cowardly that he does not disclose the truth about his feelings on the matter. Wreaking vengeance on Karunakaran begins to consume his sister’s life, however.

I began to dislike the narrator more and more as he wavered and waffled. The power of this novel lies in the slow putrefaction of almost every character that’s central to it. Stench itself figures in a literal sense in its pages and is not just a metaphor in the story. Karunakaran’s wife has a bad odor and by the time the story rolls to a close, one of the central characters, Karunakaran’s daughter Sulo—who is our narrator’s lover and a woman whose fragrance always evoked a strand of braided jasmine—begins to stink of rotting flesh.

What makes this story unlike any I’ve read is the protagonist’s propensity for procrastination and inaction. He has taken on the job of avenging his sister’s pain; yet when the opportunities present themselves and are handed to him on a golden platter, he shows himself to be a prevaricating scalawag.

For a while, we read on believing he’s a good man, one who simply cannot will himself to kill. Soon enough, however, we begin to see that he’s a disingenuous cad who is unwilling to let go of his newfound power, one in which he actually begins to resemble his target, Karunakaran himself, more and more. When the narrator breaks the fourth wall and writes about his role in it, it’s especially disconcerting.

To incapacitate the lungs of this loan shark who was stubbornly drawing his last breaths and expel the life cowering in his ruthless and nearly moribund heart a slight pressure with the back of one’s hand on his rib cage, with its diseased, hollow bones in which the marrow had dried up, would be more than enough. If the denouement of this story was to be the death of that man called Karunakaran, it would end at that precise moment. But what would I or anyone else gain from ending this story in a flash when it would have ended anyway in the natural course in a few weeks, days or even minutes?

I shot this photo of my father-in-law last week when I visited his home. He’s a proud man who has been roiling in the aftermath of an unforgiving illness. This picture of him and his helper in the background is one that exemplifies the closing chapters of all our lives. It seemed apropos for this book somehow.

The brilliance of this novel is contained in the games it plays on its reader’s mind over and over again. I’m supposed to understand the predicament of the narrator in whose mind I live, but by and by I actually began to empathize with his victim instead. In Devibharathi’s hands, I was the oiliest putty. The closing line of this brilliant novel translated so tastefully by N. Kalyan Raman sealed it for me.

In a review of this novel in the Asian Review of Books, writer Mahika Dhar refers to the many literary references by Devibharathi in the book. Dhar recalls the lines in "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot which reflects the despair, apathy, and spiritual emptiness of a post-war society. Perhaps the painful incident so early on in the narrator’s life has left him scarred and disoriented. A person suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can often seem uninterested or distant as they try not to think or feel simply in order to block out painful memories. If this is a possibility, our narrator is only half alive. Dhar’s summary leads us a step farther. “The narrator exists entirely within this shadow, with the emptiness of solitude but unwilling to bridge the gap between his desires and actions,”

By the time we arrive at the discombobulating closing line of The Solitude Of A Shadow, it’s clear that all the characters of both the narrator’s family and those of Karunakaran have not just been alienated from others both physically and emotionally. Having lost the ability to find meaning and purpose in life, they are all lost, like ghouls wandering about on earth.