Transverse

கறுப்பு அணில்

The young man at the center of “Black Squirrel,” Logidasan, is an undocumented immigrant from Sri Lanka living in the bright, cold margins of a Canadian city. He is a janitor who polishes other people’s glass doors, trying to leave some trace of himself in his new society. The story does not dramatize his arrival or his legal peril; it begins after the dust of migration has settled and the silence of invisibility has set in.

What the story captures with almost clinical clarity is this immigrant’s craving for acknowledgment. The protagonist yearns not merely for romance but for the simplest form of visibility – for someone to see him. Lara, the Mexican woman who assigns his cleaning duties, speaks to him once to correct his pronunciation, but never lifts her eyes: இவனுடைய முறை வந்தபோது இவன் முகத்தை அவள் பார்க்கவில்லை. பார்க்க முயலவுமில்லை. That brief exchange is the story’s first heartbreak: an encounter that’s not an encounter. Later, the Chinese neighbor, walking her dog, answers his “hi” with a reflexive “hi” of her own, already looking past him. It is acknowledgment without recognition.

This isolation is only punctuated by the one companionship he finds: with Daniel, another undocumented worker from Guyana. They clean houses and office complexes together, but their friendship is purely transactional, not comforting. This dynamic reinforces the protagonist’s dilemma: the comfort he seeks through recognition and approval, the author strongly suggests, can only come from the “natives.”

But the recognition he seeks is not purely social; it is deeply, erotically charged. The story’s power lies in its candid attention to sensual detail, linking his profound isolation to hormonal frustration. In describing Lara: அவளுடைய அலங்காரம் அன்று முற்றிலும் மாறியிருந்தது. ஆழமான கழுத்துடன், இறுக்கமான மஞ்சள் பிளவுஸில் வந்திருந்தாள். வேப்பம்பழ சைஸ் செயற்கை முத்துக்களால் செய்த மாலை ஒன்று அவள் ஸ்தனங்களுக்கிடையில் சிக்கிக் கிடந்தது. இதை போடுவதற்கு அவள் மிகுந்த சிரமப் பட்டிருக்கவேண்டும்.

His observation of the Chinese neighbor is similarly charged, a raw mixture of desperate hope and objectification: அந்த சீனப்பெண்ணின் முகம் மஞ்சள் நிறத்தில் இருந்தது. சூரிய ஒளியில் இருந்து பல வருடங்கள் மறைத்து வைக்கப்பட்டதில் கிடைத்த வர்ணம் இது. அவளுடைய கீற்று கண்கள் இயற்கையாகவே பச்சையாக இருந்தன. உதடுகள் ரத்தச் சிவப்பு. இப்படியாக பச்சை, சிவப்பு, மஞ்சள் ஆகிய மூன்று சிக்னல் விளக்கு வர்ணங்களுடனும் இருந்த அவள் அவனுக்கு வேண்டிய சமிக்ஞையை தருவதற்காக காத்திருந்தான். This characterization – a man who is social isolation, cultural alienation, and hormonal disappointment all rolled into one – is elevated by the author’s linguistic play, rescuing the story from the flat, documentary realism that often dulls immigrant fiction.

The metaphorical black squirrel appears late. On a snowy morning, the protagonist watches it dart across the white expanse – uncertain, erratic, but very alive. In that brief moment, he sees himself reflected: a foreign creature negotiating alien terrain (தெரியாத இடத்துக்கு அவசரப்பட்டு வந்துவிட்டது போல திகைத்து இரண்டு கால்களிலும் நின்றது.) Something shifts. He breaks open his piggy bank, coins gathered from the parking lot over months of scavenging – his small, methodical rebellion against poverty. He counts them: fifty dollars. At this rate, he calculates, he can buy a used Toyota in eighty-three months. The precision of that math is the last heartbreak of the story: a prospective future, which may never arrive, but arithmetically possible.

This realization triggers an explosion of his repression, centered on a Heineken beer can he had saved for a special occasion. He opens it, drinks fast, and refuses to savor it. The act is both celebration and despair, a single-breath rebellion against a life of joyless endurance. In that one gulp, the story condenses the psychology of the displaced: the inability to enjoy even what one has earned, because the future never stops demanding.

The story is a study in disciplined futility – saving coins, opening offices, climbing stairs, enduring. Yet within that endurance glimmers something unmistakably human: the stubborn wish to be acknowledged, even once, as a presence among others, without ever romanticizing suffering.