Title Kanavilirundhu Purappaṭṭa Mañjaḷ Niṟa Mugaṅgaḷ | Author Chandra Thangaraj |
Publisher Ethir Veliyidu | Year 2026 |
Why does a human being need memories of the past?
The past – which shapes one’s present selfhood, family, friendships and public image – is far more than a storehouse of old recollections. Memory of the past is, first of all, the root terrain of one’s identity. The answer a person gives to the question, “Who am I?” does not lie solely in what they do today. It also lies in what they have endured, what they have lost, who wounded them, who loved them, and the places that shaped them.
Memories are not merely a list of incidents. Rather, they are the form of our inner being. Through remembrance, the past becomes a temporal space in which one can re-create the self and inhabit that life once more.
We do not desire memories merely because they are pleasant. In truth, many memories are the opposite, bound to create pain, shame, fear, guilt, loss, and wounds. Yet the human mind returns to them again and again. Why do we retrieve from the past not only those moments that remain tender to the heart, but also the stains, humiliations, and wounds that the subconscious has buried deep within, the things we feel we should never look back upon? Why do we enter those memories and live through them once more?
Memories provide continuity to a life that would otherwise be scattered in fragments. In the present, life often appears broken. We lose the people we love. We leave behind the places we once lived. Our bodies, minds, and relationships change. At such moments, only our memories whisper within us: “All of this existed. You lived through it, and it has shaped who you are.” Memories do not recover time; they recover the self.
Can memories, then, also become a refuge? Especially when the present is empty, memory turns into a shelter. But what might be the state of mind of a woman who does not merely drift into the past and return, but chooses to remain within her longing for old memories, living continuously inside dreams she has constructed from them? If she can feel truly herself only within those memories, what meaning does the present hold for her?
Chandra Thangaraj’s novella, Yellow Faces That Emerged from a Dream, searches for answers to these very questions. In this work, of about a hundred pages, Chandra presents the adolescence of a woman named Leela through her “dream-spaces of time.” At the beginning of the novel, Leela is introduced as a woman nearing forty. Through her remembrance of the past, the novella shows her trying to make sense of her life again and again through dreams, beginning with her childhood, moving through the changes of adolescence, and ending with her marriage at a young age.
The way Leela retrieves her memories shows us that, for her, the past is not simply a set of recollections. It is the only world where she can breathe freely; she actively resists the passage of time, wishing to remain forever a vibrant sixteen-year-old girl. Her grandmas, father, uncles, and aunts, all the relationships that kept her held within childhood begin to leave this world one by one, causing Leela to kneel in exhaustion before the present.
At first, Leela dreams of wearing freshly washed, clean clothes every day and going to work as a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer. That dream slowly degrades, downsized to the hope of becoming a schoolteacher or a nurse – yet even that eludes her. She is married off to a middle-school teacher in Usilampatti, a small town nearby, and sent away. Her present life, in which she watches each passing day with a growing sense of dread, begins to suffocate her. In search of relief, she enters the dream-world she has constructed from her memories of the past.
Quite naturally, the memories begin with an incident from Leela’s childhood. From there, they move through her school, village, home, friendships, body, love, family, violence, fear, and separation, tracing the slow unfolding of her awareness of the world. Yet this is not a conventional coming-of-age story. Leela’s growth is not presented as a triumphant movement toward independence or self-possession. Each stage of her life brings a widening of perception, but also a new wound, prohibition, or loss. The growth of Leela that the author shows here is not a movement towards the light. Rather, at every stage, a little darkness enters her mind.
The five “dream-space of time” sections of the novel are not merely five age layers in Leela’s life. They span as five landscapes of her mind. Each chapter creates a new layer in Leela’s inner world.
In the first dream-space, Leela’s world is seen through the eyes of a child. School, friends, streets, the land after rain, games, and the causeless joy of childhood arrive with a hazy brightness. This section establishes the foundation of the novel’s initial innocence.
When Muttaikkan Mama, the uncle with the large, bulging eyes, who has married her elder sister, first behaves roughly with her sister and then suddenly with Leela too, all she does is cry, “He bit me. I’ll tell Appa and Amma.” Much like a forest flood after heavy rain that blankets a village in glittering golden sand, Leela’s childhood innocence, not yet fully invaded by the adult world, washes away these early traumas. Her mind preserves a space for pure happiness, granting her the exhilarating perspective of viewing the world from atop an elephant.
In the second dream-space, fear enters that innocence for the first time. Reluctantly, Leela goes with her grandma to stay for a few days in Mettuppatti, an arid village nestled in the hills,three hours away from her hometown. Though the house there is a very simple mud hut, her days are filled with memories that bring her delight: the vegetable garden, flowering plants, long stretches of dry grassland devoid of trees or shrubs, and flocks of birds flying over the valley.
Amid this landscape of hills and valleys, affectionate relations, new friends, and the freedom of nature, Leela is shaken by the sight of two of her sister’s friends sexually touching a young boy. When they subsequently threaten her into silence, that moment shatters the safety of her childhood world.
The third dream-space exposes Leela to the fractures within her family. Her father, who occasionally drinks, raises his hand and hits her mother, prompting her mother to flee the house without warning. Leela, who has always been her father’s pet, feels for the first time the emptiness of her mother’s absence. As she travels with her father in search of her mother, she encounters relatives who receive them with a mixture of concern and resentment. She sees her father weep for his mistake. She also confronts her mother’s stubborn insistence that, wherever she may be, he must be the one to find her and bring her home.
This realization disrupts Leela’s notion that family guarantees permanent safety. At the same time, moments such as seeing a city like Madurai for the first time show that Leela’s world is beginning to expand beyond the limits of her village. Her father’s Communist background and the literature it introduces further expand her mind. Having envisioned a larger world from childhood, Leela is left with the persistent feeling that life has always given her too little.
Leela’s fourth dream-space centers on the awakening of her sexuality and the female body. Priyadharshini’s arrival is one of the novel’s key turning points. The daughter of a bank manager, Priyadharshini comes to live in the big house in Leela’s village that had long remained locked. She introduces Leela and her friends to another world. Priyadharshini’s home, her television, her stylish clothes, the bicycle she rides down the street, the love letters she receives, and her frank conversations about the changes that take place in a girl’s body during adolescence all usher modernity into Leela’s insular world.
Yet, this same society strictly monitors and penalizes female desire. When the girls learn to ride bicycles, boys follow them, sing songs, and tease them. Schoolboys give them love letters. New restrictions sprout both on the street and at home: Leela’s peers are pulled out of school to be groomed for marriage. The slap her elder brother delivers over a greeting card given by a classmate becomes permanently seared into Leela’s memory as an enforcement of this social control.
In the fifth dream-space, the novel reaches a very tender emotional state. During a holiday, Leela goes to the village of Periyamma, her mother’s elder sister, who cultivates pepper on the slopes of the Western Ghats. The moist nature of the hill region, the coolness of the mountain that never recedes, and the colors of the roses that captivate the eye all become memories pleasing to the heart.
As a natural extension of those sweet memories, Leela meets Unni in that village. Through the mountain, birds, streams, wildflowers, and the yellow feather of a bird whose name she does not know, Unni introduces Leela to nature and imagination. He turns her into a woman of refined sensitivity. The unspoken love that blossoms with Unni, paired with a newfound appreciation for nature, induces a sense of inward rapture for the first time.
As Leela lovingly applies the henna Unni gathered for her, his memory stains her psyche as deeply as the vibrant red dye on her fingertips. But the red of henna does not remain forever. In the same way, her relationship with Unni too comes to a sudden end. Several life decisions quickly arrive: the twelfth-standard final examinations, followed immediately by an arranged marriage. The novel ends there. After that, what remains in Leela’s life is only the act of recovering the memories of a past life as her dreams.
In one sense, Chandra Thangaraj’s novella may be read as an autobiographical note or as a collection of memory records. But this novel, which begins as the memory collection of an individual or a family, is in truth an inquiry into how the human mind gives meaning to memories of the past. By charting a young girl’s adolescence, the text excavates the sensory landscape of her past – the buried smells, tastes, environments, and seasons – alongside the conflicting emotions of joy and pain they evoke.
The greatest strength of this novel lies in the way Chandra reflects the nature of Leela’s memories. She does not remember the past as a mere historical record. Instead, by rendering her memories with precision, she causes readers to relive Leela’s memories: the landscape in which she lived, the cold she felt, the smells she received, the bodily sensations, shame, revulsion, fear, and attraction.
The world Chandra shows is indeed a rural fictional landscape. Yet remarkably, she introduces a geographical and emotional terrain rarely seen in Tamil literature, successfully avoiding the trap of melodramatic rural caricature. The world that returns in memory is lush, sensory, and intimate, but never innocent.
The Seenthalar section within the first dream-space offers the most striking illustration of this. That recollection opens with a lush sensory tapestry: cool rain, the vibrant green of the tea estate, damp earth, fragrant flowers, and local food. Chandra’s dense, tactile prose allows readers to feel as though they could reach out and touch this world. Then suddenly, entirely stripped of melodrama, a deeply buried trauma bursts to the surface: the violent sexual assault inflicted by Muttaikkan Mama. Her body registers the trauma first, manifesting its visceral aversion through headaches and vomiting long before her conscious mind fully processes the assault. It is a sequence rendered with immense narrative power
Similarly, the fresh sand deposited by the forest flood, the solitary arid hill overlooking the valley, the overwhelming outer world that forces a sheltered girl to marvel at its sheer scale, the incongruous bungalow, and the quiet mountain country filled with wildflowers and pepper gardens all serve as organic extensions of Leela’s interiority.
Another notable aspect of this novel is that it avoids framing female adolescence through overtly ideological language. Yet beneath the surface, it illustrates how an omnipresent social structure monitors and molds a woman’s consciousness. The text never explicitly preaches about the surveillance over the female body, unspoken sexual violence, systemic domestic patriarchy, the policing of female desire, or marriage as an inescapable destiny. Instead, these forces loom like shadows behind every recollection.
Chandra Thangaraj’s prose style is another major strength of this novel. Avoiding both indulgent poeticism and artificial literary affectation, her language flows with the natural rhythm of memory. Nevertheless, certain chapters lean towards the passive cadence of diary entries, and there are moments where the dialogue lacks a desired density and sharpness.
The faces that emerge from each of Leela’s dreams, and the memories that return with them, become inner spaces where she can hide from the pressures of the present. But this refuge offers no complete consolation. It is dangerous as well, for memory not only shelters her but also leads her back, again and again, to the same wounds.
As Leela herself seems to realize by the novel’s end, only a fragile glass partition separates her from a present that pulses with life and light. One day, she may shatter that glass and step into the open world of waking reality.