Jeyamohan has long been India’s most prolific secret, a writer whose hundred-plus novels, essays, epics, and criticisms have shaped Tamil literature while remaining largely invisible to the English-speaking world. That may change with “Stories of the True” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection born when he was worn down by the irony-soaked landscape of postmodernism, leaving him depressed for the first time in decades. Literature, he felt, had grown too clever to believe in the possibility of meaning. To pull himself out of that impasse, he began sketching portraits of people he had known, who even under unrelenting pressure, refused to abandon their sense of decency. In a few weeks, the stories accumulated into a collection; more importantly, the lives they conjured rekindled his own faith in endurance, in the kind of idealism that is unfashionable but vital.
In this collection, he doesn’t merely sketch out the struggles of the downtrodden or the compromises of the talented, but also asks what does it mean to remain steadfastly human in a society that rewards opportunism, punishes virtue, and in the process erodes dignity? The collection of short stories does not so much celebrate heroism as it gently nudges the readers to reflect on brushings with truth – those moments when individuals, often with little power, discover that their refusal to bend to cynicism or self-interest is itself a form of resistance. The “true” in these stories is less a static quality than a current that runs through lives, unseen but unyielding.
At the heart of the collection is a meditation on justice – not in its institutional form, but as an instinct that rises, unbidden, in unlikely places. In “Aram”, the first story of the collection, it is the publisher’s wife Aachi, neither writer nor activist, who erupts in fury at the exploitation of art and insists on redress. Her indignation, untethered from personal gain, reminds us that fairness is not a legal principle alone but a visceral impulse. Similarly, “100 Armchairs” shows us how social injustice carves itself into the very gestures of everyday life – what is power? and who gets to sit in that chair? Yet even in the face of inherited humiliations, Dharmapalan holds fast to his dignity, his refusal to be absorbed into bitterness constituting a kind of justice to himself. Together, these stories trace the ways people negotiate with entrenched structures, revealing that the ethical spark survives despite a cynic’s expectations.
If justice is one motif, another is the quiet endurance of service without recognition. In “Elephant Doctor”, Dr.K labors unacknowledged, ungarlanded by state awards, yet utterly at peace. His fulfillment lies not in symbolic validation but in the tangible care of elephants, in the living creatures before him. The story becomes a counterpoint to our contemporary obsession with accolades, showing how truth often resides in work done without an audience. The same theme resonates in “The Churning Curd”, where the professor, haunted by a student’s collapse, embodies fidelity not to an institution or to his own reputation but to the fragile possibilities of another human being. His lifelong ache for the student is a kind of inverted service – an unrecognized, unredeemed fidelity that testifies to the power of human bonds even when they fail.
Running parallel to themes of justice and service is generosity. “Meal Tally” dramatizes this through Kethel Sahib’s radical hospitality, a restauranteur’s refusal to measure or weigh, to tally or ration. Against the backdrop of an aunt who keeps a ledger of bites and a mother who cannot shed the habits of scarcity, Kethel Sahib’s trust – eat what you will, pay what you wish – becomes not only an act of feeding, but of faith in the moral capacities of others. The young man’s later decision to marry out of obligation rather than desire is framed not as sacrifice but as continuity: an ethic of giving that binds generations. What makes these acts generous is not their grandeur but their ordinariness; they affirm the world not with spectacle but with persistence.
Transcending pain is another theme that’s rendered quite starkly in “Peruvali” – a word that means both “great pain” and “great strength.” Its protagonist, a playwright dying of spinal cancer, sets out to climb Mount Kailash. The ascent is less a feat than a reckoning: a penance for having borne silent witness to atrocities. Crawling, dragging himself upward, he seeks absolution through endurance. When the golden crown of Kailash finally emerges, the disgrace of the world briefly disappears, replaced by something untouchable, pristine. He still suffers, but the suffering has shifted register: the torment of conscience has lifted, leaving only the pain of the body, and with it, a hard-won peace.
In “One World”, the last story of the collection, Garry Davis, a former fighter pilot turned self-declared citizen of the world, gradually sheds his individuality to become less a man than the embodiment of an idea. Violating national boundaries, enduring arrests, and in a distinctly Gandhian spirit, seeking allies among local activists and intellectuals, he spreads the conviction that all people belong to one world. The narrative lingers on his four and a half year solitary confinement in South Africa, where, rather than succumbing to madness, he inscribes a private cartography on the walls of his cell, on his body, merging so completely with the Earth itself. This is survival, but also a startling metaphysical erasure of self into humanity entirely. Yet the most haunting turn comes with his release, when the sky above no longer suggests boundless freedom but a prison too narrow for human possibility. Captivity becomes liberation, freedom becomes captivity, and the story unfolds as a philosophical parable. What begins as a didactic plea for peace deepens into a touching meditation on scale: the smallness of nations, the immensity of solitude and the suffocating intimacy of a planet.
Priyamvada’s translation merits special attention for making sure that we ‘hear’ the story in the accent in which the original is written. The translation demands a certain adjustment from readers only accustomed to the idioms of American English. Phrases such as “Komal’s wife came in and placed coffee on the teapoy” may sound a bit awkward when measured against the smoother cadence of “Komal’s wife entered and set down a cup of coffee on the table.” Yet to revise them for ease would be to alter the texture of a particular linguistic moment: the Indian English of the eighties and nineties, in which these stories are rooted. Here’s another example where she maintains this fidelity: in “100 Armchairs”, a mother long acquainted with hunger and estranged from flavor asks for more food not with “more, more” but with “put, put.” Such choices are deliberate preservations of Indianisms that locate the stories firmly within their cultural and linguistic milieu. V.S.Naipaul put the distinct Trinidadian Indian English on the map; Rushdie did the same for Bombay English. Priyamvada, in this culturally faithful translation, brings Tamilian English to an international audience.
The translator’s decision to retain these Indianisms is itself an act of resistance against erasure. That same spirit animates the stories: people who, despite humiliation or abandonment or neglect, preserve a stubborn core of decency. One may not be a paragon of virtue all the time, but virtuous sparks emanate: they stumble, they ache, they sometimes do little more than carry on. But across these disparate lives runs an unbroken thread: a refusal to allow society’s meanness, its inequities and indifference, to fully define them. The cumulative effect of “Stories of the True” is not uplifting in the conventional sense; it resists the easy satisfactions of triumph or redemption. Instead, it offers the recognition that endurance itself is meaningful, that decency can remain intact even when unrewarded, and that truth, however fragile, persists not in grand victories but in ordinary lives. Against jadedness and cynicism, the author offers persistence and hope. Against the false shortcuts of life, the author offers the enduring contentment of being true.
Transverse 