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Revathi, an engineer, is besotted with Ravi, an auto driver, and marries him against her family?s wishes. As her life unravels, we are brought face-to-face with the realities of narrow-minded, small lives, where it remains impossible for people to rise above the societal chains that shackle them. The novel explores one?s helplessness and vulnerability in prose that is deceptively simple, it lays bare the insidious ways in which class, caste and misogyny infiltrate our lives and eat away at our humanity. Relentless and intense, most of the story unfurls in the hospital to which Revathi is brought as a burn victim. Her father, mother, brother and sister-in-law are in turns enraged, sorrowful, aggressive; her father carries around lakhs of rupees in the hope that he can use it for his daughter?s treatment but is the money worthless now? Can it bring his daughter back to him? Imayam?s is a voice to watch out for ? he writes with clinical precision, laying threadbare the hypocrisies of family life and the society at large in a manner that spares no one and offers little redemption.
Imayam (pen name of V Annamalai, b. 1964) is a prominent and well known Indian novelist writing in Tamil. He wrote five novels, five short story collections and a novella. His first novel Koveru Kazhuthaigal (Beasts of Burden) created heated debates on issues like the role of a Dalit writer in the context of oppression seen on Dalit Community. The book won Imayam many awards and accolades. Among his other works, Arumugam and Sedal (2006) and Pethavan (2012) are very well received.A secondary grade teacher in a school run by the Adi Dravid Welfare Department at Pulichapallam, Imayam has been closely associated with the Dravidian Movement and its politics. TRANSLATOR: Lakshmi Holmstr?m (1935 ? 2016) was an Indian-British writer, literary critic, and translator of Tamil fiction into English. Her most prominent works were her translations of short stories and novels of the contemporary writers in Tamil, such as Mauni, Pudhumaipithan, Ashoka Mitran, Sundara Ramasami, C. S. Lakshmi, Bama, and Imayam. Educated in Madras and Oxford, she was the founder-trustee of SALIDAA (South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive) and was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to literature.
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