Transverse

கொழுத்தாடு பிடிப்பேன் – அ.முத்துலிங்கம்

“கொழுத்தாடு பிடிப்பேன்” takes the form of a letter written by Shanmugalingam, a middle-aged Sri Lankan man who has migrated to Canada and found himself entangled in a domestic scandal. The letter, addressed to an immigration officer, recounts his version of the events that led to his arrest. Through this framing, the story attempts to reveal the contradictions between self-justification and self-incrimination, using the limitations of Shanmugalingam’s own language to expose his moral blindness.

What makes the story distinctive is that it resists the expected narrative of immigrant hardship. Shanmugalingam’s Canadian life is not one of deprivation. He has a small but comfortable room, steady work at a restaurant, and is well fed under the roof of his sister-in-law’s family. The family that shelters him lives modestly but with stability. In this setting, the letter’s underlying tension does not arise from economic struggle or social exclusion but from the unease of living among people who are both family and strangers at the same time.

The first fracture appears when Shanmugalingam glimpses his sister-in-law, Vijaya, showering when he opens the bathroom door. In his telling, she’s not shocked by his entry, and doesn’t try to cover herself quickly, as if she’s extending a sexual invitation. The prose is plain, the voice unadorned, but the reader senses the shift in moral temperature. Vijaya, in his eyes, resembles his wife left behind in Sri Lanka. The story begins to explore how memory and desire blur within confinement, and how guilt can disguise itself as nostalgia.

The letter continues to move through recollection without apparent structure, reflecting a mind trying to make sense of chaos. The ten-year-old niece, Padmalochani, in his view, is cunning and sly, an adult in a child’s body. Whether this is projection or perception is left unresolved. When the pair later play a children’s game, “கொழுத்தாடு பிடிப்பேன்”, in his telling, the innocence of the play gives way to misunderstanding. The girl’s pants slip as they run around the bed, and her father walks in at that instant. The scene collapses into violence, accusation, and the arrival of the police.

This half-educated, unreliable narrator’s weary insistence that events have been misunderstood take a sharp dive when he concludes, “இந்தக் கொழுத்த பிள்ளையின் வயது பத்து என்பது எனக்கு தெரியவே தெரியாது,” lands like a heavy blow. What exactly does he mean by that? If she had been older, what else would he have done? The phrase exposes the thin line between denial and confession.

The letter’s tone is fractured, veering between sincerity and evasion. At times, Shanmugalingam appears to believe that honesty will free him, even as that honesty reveals what he cannot see about himself. His plainspoken Tamil, stripped of literary polish, becomes the story’s greatest strength. It creates a realism that feels uncomfortably close to testimony, the kind of voice that neither invites empathy nor allows complete judgment.

“கொழுத்தாடு பிடிப்பேன்” is not a story about immigration in any political sense, but about moral isolation within domestic space. It studies how desire curdles into misunderstanding, how shame turns into speech, and how the act of explaining oneself can become its own form of exposure. What lingers after reading is mild outrage and an intense unease. Shanmugalingam’s letter, written to clear his name, becomes instead a record of his confusion, and his closing line leaves the reader suspended between pity and revulsion, but closer to the latter. It is a story that insists on staying inside that discomfort, without any relief of resolution.