WALKING THROUGH FIRE

Selected for the 2023 International Booker Prize longlist, Perumal Murugan's novel Pyre confronts many burning issues

- Geeta Doctor

Saroja, the small-town girl who falls in love with a sodapop vendor, is no Madame Bovary, the French provincial temptress who flaunts her sexuality with devastating effect in Gustave Flaubert’s novel. Yet there are echoes of Perumal Murugan in Gustave Flaubert’s confession: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi (Madame Bovary is me)!”

It’s a similar tone that Murugan uses when asked how much of himself he has infused in his portrayal of Saroja’s ordeals. “The writer doesn’t merely write about his own experiences. A writer could absorb the experiences and feelings of others. If writing is shrunk into one’s own experiences, it can’t be universal. It’s the ability to enter into others’ experiences that drives writing into the realm of universality. In that sense, a writer can possess anyone’s experience as his own. In that sense, this is my own experience,” he says.

The steel bands of the caste system tighten around Saroja the moment she steps into the village, walking behind Kumaresan, her newly married husband. He cautions her to step with her right foot first when they alight from the bus. He is certain that his mother will welcome the bride he has chosen for himself. The mother lives in a mud-girt room, like a termite sheltered by a rock. He does not notice, as Saroja does, the thorny bushes that surround the village like barbed wire, the bleached landscape of deprivation. Or hear the diabolic cries of spite not unmixed with fear as members of the village arrive to view Saroja, not as the trophy that he had earned for himself, but as a harbinger of discord.