Transverse

https://vallinam.com.my/navin/?p=5223

Navin’s short story வைரம் is a haunting study of power, memory, and the unhealed scars we carry into old age. The story’s narrator, Lakshmanan, recalls his schooldays under the shadow of Kumarasamy, a classmate who was smarter, wealthier and crueler. Kumarasamy, even as a boy, thrives on the intoxication of power, exacting a petty fee to tutor Lakshmanan math and taking every opportunity to belittle him.

The central thread of the narrative unravels around a small object: a marble, radiant and beautiful, a treasure in the eyes of Lakshmanan. When Lakshmanan brings it to tuition, Kumarasamy’s jealousy flares. In a gesture that is both cunning and cruel, he persuades Lakshmanan to bury it, promising that the marble will transform into a diamond after many years. What Lakshmanan buries, of course, is not just the marble but a piece of his childhood wonder and innocence which leads to a wound that will not close.

Fifty years later, when the two meet again as old men, nothing essential has changed. Kumarasamy has aged into wealth but not into wisdom. His voice, when he orders Lakshmanan to dig up the “diamond,” still carries the same menace: “தோண்டுடா…” என்றான் மீண்டும். குரலில் சிறிய மிரட்டல் – a faint but unmistakable assertion of dominance. The years have given him money, but not growth; like a diamond, his mind has remained under immense darkness, incapable of letting in light. But Lakshmanan is still not able to free his invisible shackles: என் வயதே இருந்தாலும் ஏன் என்னால் அவனை அப்படி அழைக்க முடியவில்லை என என்னையே கேட்டுக்கொண்டேன்.

Here, the act of digging takes on metaphorical weight. Lakshmanan digs not only for a family heirloom, a marble that may or may not have survived, but also to unearth the smallness of Kumarasamy’s spirit. What does it mean that Kumarasamy, now in his fifties, is still unsettled by the thought of losing, just as he once was when the neighborhood boys outplayed him? That he still whines, retreats, (தரையில் இருந்த குண்டையெல்லாம் பொறுக்கி புதர்களை நோக்கி வீசினான்) and reasserts control (“அவனுங்க எல்லாம் வேணாம். நாம ரெண்டு பேரு மட்டும் வெளையாடுவோம்,”) when his inadequacies are about to be revealed? The shovel clangs against something that shines briefly, but in a reflex of ownership and denial, Kumarasamy fills the hole back up. “மொதல்ல இது என்னோட நெலம்… வெளிய போ ஓல்ட் மேன்!” he yells. The cruelty is casual but its persistence is devastating.

What makes the story linger is not simply the cruelty of Kumarasamy but the persistence of his shadow on Lakshmanan’s life. Lakshmanan has not been crushed; he runs a modest tailoring shop, has made a family, has wrested some success out of life. Yet in Kumarasamy’s presence, even this is reduced to nothing more than an occasion for a smirk. Both men, in different ways, remain trapped in their childhood dynamic. One clings to dominance, the other to a hope for recognition that never comes.

There is, finally, a painful universality here. Who among us has not carried forward the sting of a playground slight, a petty humiliation, into adulthood? How many of us still measure ourselves against someone who once seemed larger, crueler, untouchable? வைரம் asks, with quiet insistence, whether we have allowed our hearts to grow bigger than the injustices done to us, whether we have made space in our lives for those who once wronged us, or whether we are still children guarding our marbles in the dirt.

Like the glint of that buried object, the story flashes briefly but leaves us unsettled, unsure if what we saw was real or imagined. A diamond may never emerge from the ground, but the longing for it can last a lifetime.