A child not yet a week old is laid on a blanket in the middle of the walkway to the Pazhani temple. It is hot, he squeals, and that exactly is the point. Because a squealing baby with one arm and one leg earns more. The man who put him there, Pothivelu Pandaram, goes home later that week, and at some point in the night he gets up and walks out into the dark to buy golden bangles for his youngest daughter, because she cried that he hadn’t kept his promise.
The Tamil title of Jeyamohan’s novel, Aezham Ulagam (2007), means the seventh world, the last and worst of the seven underworlds of Hindu mythology. In Suchitra Ramachandran’s translation it becomes The Abyss. The title points downward, and I think Pandaram is best read along that axis. While the novel’s themes and characters are wide-ranging, in this piece I’ll focus on the worldview of Pandaram – a trader in beggars, married to Ekkiyammai, with three daughters: Subbu, twenty-five and ready to be married off; Vadivu, in her late teens and stubborn; and Meenatchi, the youngest.
The easy reading is that he is two men: a brutal trader and a doting father. But Pandaram is not divided. He lives by a line. Above it are the people who count, and for them he is capable of real, even extravagant tenderness. Below it, everyone is subhuman, and their suffering registers as noise. Lacking any capacity for introspection, he believes the line is natural, a fact about the world. And when his own daughter pushes him below her line, he feels the slap but fails to notice the symmetry.
Below the line, everything is arithmetic. Pandaram owns human beings he calls “items,” and the trade grades them by how disabled, disfigured and pitiable they are. His job is logistics: which temple, which festival, which swap. Muthammai, bought long ago and now delivering her eighteenth child, is his best asset, a goose that lays golden eggs. She is one-legged, one-armed and one-eyed, and when her similar looking son Rajinikanth is under two, Pandaram sells him without a word to her. When Pandaram decides she is due for another, he and his lieutenant, shopping for a beggar, spot a disfigured hunchbacked young man, calculate that he’s the right guy to keep the cycle going, and force her to sleep with him like a cattle owner readying his herd for the breeding cycle.
Jeyamohan has spoken of a brief period in the 1980s when he wandered with no money and spent his days among beggars and you can feel it in the book. The beggars of The Abyss have likes, dislikes, frustrations, grudges and ambitions, and the novel won’t let them be furniture, even when Pandaram does.
Pandaram does grant respect to a few, and the novel is careful about how. Mangandi Samy, who will not plead, sings and temple visitors drop coins; he is Pandaram’s lucky charm. Ahmed Kutty speaks whole sentences of English, doesn’t flinch at low-level policemen, and reads a better newspaper than Pandaram. Ahmed is still a beggar, Pandaram’s ‘item’, earns less than Muthammai, but he is never subservient. The respect Pandaram has for him is real, and it shows that somethings that can’t be priced away: a voice, a streak of luck, a mind. But it is still Pandaram deciding who is allowed to stand a little higher.
Jeyamohan supplies someone who looks down into the seventh world and sees a person, and he does it through an unlikely man. Pothi, the temple priest and Pandaram’s old friend, says one night, drunk, that he would like to see Muthammai naked. It is an appalling thing for a priest to say, and he doesn’t dress it up. I don’t want to make him a saint: part of the dignity he sees is her deference to him. Pothi says “Pandaram, whenever she sees me, you should see how she draws in her arm and leg gracefully, respectfully…I like that very much. There is a dignity in her smile, Pandaram.” This is Muthammai, whom everyone finds ugly, and in whom Pandaram sees only the next ‘item’ she’ll bear.
What matters comes afterward. A few minutes later, Pothi asks Pandaram to drop the request. He confesses that if Muthammai ever learned of it, she would lose all the respect she has for him, and he would have to kill himself. A man who has just asked to look at a woman’s body is ready to die rather than lose her regard, even when drunk. Pothi believes that a beggar woman’s opinion of him is something that can be tarnished and must be protected. Pandaram has never in his life wondered what Muthammai thinks of him, because it would never occur to him that her opinion counts. To be clear, most of the devotees who walk past Muthammai are either disgusted or repulsed by her appearance – which is her selling point. But Pothi, who notices her everyday proves that the line is not natural – that someone can look down and still see a human being. Pothi sees Muthammai as someone with a mind, heart and agency. Pandaram simply does not, and the novel makes sure we understand that this is his personal failure and not that of the world.
Above the line, Pandaram is another man. A policeman’s brutal kicks doesn’t stop him from handing over the few hundred rupees he’s been hiding, but when his youngest asks for bangles he doesn’t count, even if it runs into thousands of rupees. At the goldsmith’s door in the middle of the night, when told the bangles can be ready by morning, he presses: “I need them now. I’ll pay you well.” Back home, his wife asks to see them. “You can see them later,” he says. “My golden girl should set eyes upon them first.”
The novel won’t let him keep his compartments sealed. He sleeps with prostitutes as young as his second daughter, and his thoughts slide between the two seamlessly. A young girl’s throat slides, mid-sentence, into a thought about Vadivu:
I should get that young thing from last night again tonight. But I shouldn’t drink this time. That little throat of hers! My younger one Vadivammai would not be up yet. I can scold her all I want, and it would still be mosquito bites on a buffalo.
A magazine with pictures does the same:
Flipping through the pages of a magazine, he says “North Indian chicks,” … almost immediately, he remembered his troubles in the bathroom. The next moment he felt urine push against his bladder. Then he thought of his second daughter, Vadivammai. Arrogant girl.
These seamless transitions are a critical aspect of how Pandaram’s mind works. This absolute lack of self-awareness is what keeps the line dividing his ‘items’ from his daughters strong. Even when he encounters a wrenching situation involving stolen kids, the event registers as a biological stimulus, with his heartbeat racing and knees trembling. But his mind does not take a minute to truly introspect what he had witnessed; instead it just wanders off to a song he’s heard earlier in the day as it gradually lulls him into sleep.
When it comes time to marry Subbu, his eldest, and he learns that her future mother-in-law is a monster of a woman, Pandaram breaks down over the girl: “Such a delicate child…takes the tiniest sips of cold water…” This is a man who left a week-old baby on a hot pavement. He holds both thoughts, the hot walkway and the tiniest sips of cold water, and they never touch.
Vadivu is the daughter he cannot hold high enough. She has his mother’s face and the same stubbornness, and that is what breaks his heart. When he learns she is seeing an older, married man whose business is extorting protection money, he goes home and beats her with a log, shouting “Die! Bitch, die!” She swears on him and on Lord Murugan that there is nothing between them. The next morning she is gone, along with all the cash and jewelry saved for Subbu’s wedding.
That morning Ekkiyammai lies down and will not eat. Her bitterness comes out: she warned them all, and no one in this house heeds her. “Father and daughters gang up against me.” She is naming the alliance of the two parties who never respected her, and who are about to teach each other what disrespect can do. Pandaram comes home from the police station and asks his youngest, Meenatchi, whether her mother has eaten. Then he heats coffee, makes kanji, and asks Meenatchi to carry both to her mother and Subbu. He says nothing to Ekkiyammai. He leaves. When he returns, he asks Meenatchi whether her mother ate the kanji.
I read this scene as the smallest act of care in the book but also the coldest. For a man who has made his wife rise at ungodly hours to feed him, it is a leap to make kanji for her. But look at the shape of his care: it passes through a young girl, in the form of food, with no words. He provides his wife with goods, and nothing in him goes to sit by her and ask what she needs or how she feels during this difficult time.
Compare that with this incident: when Pandaram trades a young Rajinikanth, Muthammai refuses to eat for five days. She had always understood that the boy was never fully hers, and it squarely belonged to Pandaram. When her fast is mentioned, Pandaram brushes it off: she’ll get over it, she’ll eat. The same grief triggered by a child that’s gone, the same refusal of food, but two different responses. He reads Ekkiyammai’s grief as a problem of the stomach, and he reads Muthammai’s the same way. The difference is only that Ekkiyammai’s was a grief he had decided was worth solving.
Weeks after Vadivu leaves, Pandaram learns where she lives and waits outside in the dark, imagining a Vadivu who is contrite:
She will come to him crying, “I’m sorry, Appa, I’m sorry,” and he will stroke her hair and tell her it’s all right, that Appa is not angry.
It is among the most tender passages in the book, and it is a tragic fantasy because Pandaram has no idea of how Vadivu sees him. The Vadivu who walks out the door in her new home is nothing of the kind. She comes out with a broomstick, sweeps the yard, and lifts her voice his way, looking in his direction so there can be no doubt who she’s talking to: “Dogs are coming right into the house! Run, dog, run! Get lost!”
The sound falls like a slap on Pandaram’s heart, and he wails for her. He now sees the line Vadivu has drawn. Pandaram has spent his life addressing those below him in the vocabulary of animals, and the one person he cannot price has handed it back to him. Dogs belong outside the house, below the threshold, and she sweeps him down to where they live. The beggars believe they deserve their fate. Vadivu, who has everything, believes her father deserves his. Of everyone in the novel, she alone holds him accountable for his earlier physical and verbal assault, and her answer is not forgiveness.
Another aspect of his imagined conversation portrays that Pandaram thinks he has a big, welcoming, forgiving heart. He imagines himself as an accepting father who’s just waiting for the return of his prodigal daughter. But in reality, the only means through which he has shown love to his daughters is by financially providing them. We don’t see him sitting down with his daughters and laughing at a joke, or sharing a meal, or going out shopping. Pandaram thinks he has it in him, he would like to be that kind of a father, but his behavior provides no grounding that he was that man.
If Vadivu’s departure was loud in drawing her line, Subbu’s was subtle. After her wedding, scaled down because her sister emptied the family’s savings, she complains that Vadivu stole her mango necklace. Pandaram mentions that she got the fig-leaf necklace instead. She says it is an old design; she wants the mango. When he promises one in six months, she answers: “I don’t want anyone’s charity. I’m going.”
Charity is the vocabulary of Pandaram’s trade. Both daughters, when they leave him, reach for words from the world of beggars. When she is gone he breaks down: “Little one! Baby, Subbu, my little one…” He weeps as he did at Vadivu’s door, over a girl who has just refused his gift, but the weeping leads to no introspection. We feel for Pandaram because his love is real. We are appalled because it stops exactly where it does. Jeyamohan’s achievement lies in fleshing out an all-too-human Pandaram who lacks serious self-awareness and is not in any danger of moral awakening. He’s not a changed man, and there’s no redemption. The novel does not ask us to forgive him. It asks us to notice what he can’t: that he has spent his life deciding who is above the line and who falls below it, and that someone he held above it has finally put him below theirs.