Chandra Thangaraj’s வால்நட்சத்திரம் stays with a woman reluctantly returning to her ancestral village after her father’s death. Haunted by childhood trauma – witnessing her beloved Latha akka’s suicide – and now tormented by mysterious voices and photographs showing things she never saw, she makes a second journey to confront whatever won’t let her rest.
The story’s strength is its middle section, where the narrator ventures out at pre-dawn to speak with the voices of the dead. This extended conversation, whether it’s a supernatural encounter or a psychological breakthrough, becomes a profound two-way mourning. The narrator processes not just her father’s death but also her unresolved grief over Latha and her guilt about abandoning the village. Simultaneously, the ghosts articulate the village’s own trauma: the land’s slow death, the exodus of the living, the unbearable loneliness of being forgotten. The image of the dead refusing to leave until the land revives – waiting for the comet’s promised rain – is quite moving. Here, Chandra captures something true about how places grieve and how we carry the weight of abandoned homes.
But the story stumbles under its own ambitions. It wants to explore ancestral duty, childhood trauma, rural abandonment, supernatural horror, mental health and a few more themes, often simultaneously. Latha’s suicide doesn’t connect organically to the resolution. The eerie photographs that trigger the narrator’s return simply disappear from consideration. The ending – discovering her voice recording with ghosts is just blank and deciding to see a psychiatrist – opens yet another thematic door rather than closing the ones already open. The result feels scattered rather than stacked.
Still, this remains a worthy attempt. The supernatural conversation captures something essential about grief – how it is both quite personal and at the same time shared by the community. In my opinion, Chandra chews more than she can swallow, but her aspiration to render something emotionally honest makes it memorable despite its structural weakness.
Transverse 