A grey shade of sympathy

It would be a mistake to label this debut as a bleak catalogue of beatings and arguments.

Rising Heat (Eru Veyyil in Tamil), translated into English for the first time recently by Janani Kannan, was Perumal Murugan’s debut novel published in 1991.

As most first books go, this too is semi-autobiographical, based on Murugan’s experiences, his witnessing up-close the way ‘development’ destroys the environment, long-standing agricultural practices, familial and social bonds. What sets Rising Heat apart from the usual bildungsroman is the incandescence of his prose, the power and dark humour of which comes through even in the translation.

The main protagonist here is a boy in his late teens, Selvan, whose family’s ancestral lands have been taken over by the government to build a new housing colony. Besides taking over fertile farm lands, the government has also cut down swathes of forests. Wells that served the farmers for generations have been filled in or dried up. Not that this was a region blessed at the best of times with abundant precipitation — forest wells used to hold meagre, precious amounts of water “not unlike water inside a coconut”, as Murugan describes them.

Wanting and suffering

The displacement that Selvan’s family suffers thanks to this loss leads to tensions between grandparents, uncles, aunts, sons and daughters. The womenfolk in the family find that they have some amount of economic freedom now that they are no longer toiling dawn to dusk on the land. But, for every step they take towards financial independence, they suffer from wanting too much in a deeply patriarchal society. Selvan’s sister finds a job on a building site as a labourer and runs off with a co-worker. Her story ends like most of these tales do, with the father tracking her down and hauling her back home to be married to a more ‘respectable’ man.

Selvan’s mother attempts to start a small chit fund loaning out money to others in the colony, but is soon cheated by a neighbour.

She’s beaten up for her mistake by Selvan’s father — the story is often punctuated with these beatings — and she retreats to one of her usual days-long protests against this wearying, bone-crunching violence.

At one point in the story, Selvan blames his family’s loss of the land for this never-ending cycle of grief and domestic violence. But, it’s clear from the remarks of the women that this was always in the family’s pathology — the displacement has just amplified the men’s anger.

It would be a mistake to think that Rising Heat is just a bleak catalogue of beatings and
arguments — Murugan also shows how even as this family slowly unravels, the world around them marches forward.

There are amusing arguments about the arrogance of wearing underwear where earlier, men and women used to let everything hang loose. The merits and demerits of Tamil cinema hits are debated by Selvan and his friends.

Shady politicians and their hangers-on do their part in furthering the chaos. The local communist Veeran is as close-minded and avaricious as the ruling party’s local representative, Sevathaan. The latter is very much the busybody in every transaction happening in the area, from arranged marriages to land sales to setting up soda shops to negotiating the band for a funeral. He takes a cut and lines his pockets and the residents obey his tune.

Even though Murugan’s story shows the impact of the move from an agrarian to an industrialised way of living, this is not a polemical book.

There’s no absolute hero or villain here. Each character is drawn in the greyest of shades and evokes empathy rather than disgust. And that is the true mark of a master storyteller at work.