https://www.sirukathaigal.com/கடிகாரக்-குருவி/
Yuvan Chandrasekhar’s கடிகாரக் குருவி is a playful experiment in narrative unreliability. The story operates through three distinct voices. Raghavan is an insomniac, anxiety-ridden man prone to wearing mismatched sandals to work, where colleagues remark on his sluggishness – a walking advertisement for his own unreliability as a narrator. Sowrirajan, his roommate, makes this explicit, warning readers to discount anywhere between 60% and 70% of Raghavan’s assessments – just in case we had any lingering doubts. Sowrirajan then proceeds to paint himself as a cool intellectual who can literally dive into books and travel to strange lands, equally transported by concerts and paintings. He is an aesthete, a cut above the rest, perpetually misunderstood by lesser minds.
And then the wooden cuckoo from a cuckoo clock speaks to Sowri one night. When the cuckoo explains the evolution of clocks, a baffled Sowri responds: குருவிகளைப் பற்றியா சொல்கிறாய்? It’s a delicious moment. The reader is left wondering whether Sowri is the rarified intellectual he claims to be, or a self-aggrandizing fool whom the cuckoo dismisses with a single swoop: அட கிறுக்கா.
Stepping back, my question is what Yuvan is trying to accomplish with this story. My sense is that this is a literary puzzle with no intended solution – the reading pleasure lies entirely in the attempt to slot these characters into coherent boxes and watch the effort collapse. I found myself wondering whether there is really only one narrator, and whether he might be schizophrenic. I also wondered what present-day event prompted these characters to revisit something that happened twenty years ago. There is social commentary scattered throughout – the dangers of feudalism, the persistence of male desire even under dire circumstances – but it is never clear to what end.
I appreciate that the story doesn’t reach for weighty themes, or offer a well defined conclusion. But I’m not sure a story that is purely experimental, floating in the air with nothing solid beneath it, fully earns its ambiguity. There’s a difference between a story that resists resolution and one that simply doesn’t cohere – and I’m still deciding which side of that line கடிகாரக் குருவி falls on.
Transverse 