Though-provoking, witty, inventive and stylish, but also deeply moving, Ambai’s stories are among the finest of contemporary short fiction in Tamil. This book is a translation of her third collection of short stories, Kaattil oru maan (2000). Included in this book is also a long story, ‘A movement, a folder, some tears’, which is not yet part of any collection. Ambai’s intricate stories constantly reinvent the short story form, teasing and delighting the reader. They interweave lives, juxtapose the past and the present, the mythical and the contemporary, articulating the real experience of women and communicating their silences in words and images. A mix of narrative forms– letters, dispatches, journals, emails, memos and articles–adds variety. The stories, located in Tamil Nadu and Mumbai, in Europe as well as the United States, touch upon themes of displacement, exile, and identity; the way people describe themselves and the communities to which they choose to belong. In ‘Journey 2’, Dinakaran defines himself narrowly as a person from Tirunelveli, who can only face the day after his bath in the river. The narrator of ‘A rose-coloured sari’ wonders about her individual self, in contrast to the artificial ‘Indianness’, which she sees in the Festival of India abroad. These translations, profoundly relevant to today’s world, will appeal to students and scholars of regional Indian literature, as well as general readers.
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