Ayyanarpatti, a one-road village in Tamil Nadu, forms the canvas of the short story collection A Place of No Importance (Juggernaut). Veena Muthuraman’s debut anthology contains 13 short stories, one for each month in the Tamil calendar. Some characters appear in more than one story, allowing the reader to get a sense of the dynamics of relationships between the people in the village, the role played by caste and privilege, and the strict hierarchy that seemingly even education cannot break.

The following are excerpts from an interview with the author.

What is the inspiration behind creating Ayyanarpatti? Did you have Malgudi in mind?

Ayyanarpatti is based on a real cluster of villages my parents grew up in and where I have spent many summers and the odd winter, though I must say that I have never lived there for any extended period of time. The village evolved to the extent that the stories required it to evolve. For instance, I have added my fair share of temples. But my intention was to remain true to the real setting as much as possible. So it remains a self-contained, one-street village but one that’s just a stone’s throw away from the outside world and hence not insular in any way. Its denizens are fictional too, but drawn from grandmother’s tales, ghost stories, overheard snippets, newspaper headlines, caricatures of uncles and cousins and grandfathers and rebellious nieces, and friends who want to save the world.

It is difficult to get away from Malgudi when one is writing about small-town/ rural India, so Malgudi was very much on my mind along with a number of other places primarily from the regional language space, such as the fictional worlds of Basheer, MT Vasudevan Nair and Sundara Ramaswamy.

What led you to mark each story with a month in the Tamil calendar?

Ayyanarpatti, or the idea of it, used to be a place where, over the centuries, life revolved around seasons, the rains, the harvest and festivals, so the months are hugely important. This place has changed with the times and not much is sown and grown any more, though the festivals are celebrated with great aplomb and a great many gods (not just divine ones) have sprung up. I started writing these stories a few years ago in order to chronicle and capture a dying way of life before it entirely vanished. So the device was an organic choice in this context. Also, if I may step away from my quasi-creative avatar for a minute, I must admit that my real life is all about frameworks and breaking down things into 2X2 matrices and so on. I’d have struggled without an underlying structure!

Do you have a favourite character, a favourite story?

I alternate between Nithya and Muthu and if I have to make a choice, it would be Muthu. Nithya is too much of a know-it-all while I think Muthu is more realistic and rounded. My favourite story in the collection is not an obvious one: ‘Macondo Thatha’. This is a personal favourite as it has a couple of personal connections and I am conscious that it doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the collection. It is based on a bedtime story my grandfather told me decades ago. Also, I wrote it in a couple of hours during Easter weekend in 2014 just after I heard about the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

How did you evoke the flavours of a dusty, hot village sitting in Edinburgh? How difficult was this? Did you hit any roadblocks on the way?

The village is not a research subject to me: I mean, this is not a location I spent a few weeks or months in to gather sufficient material. In some sense, it is some sort of a home; a historical home rather than a real one, but one I know enough of from first-hand knowledge over the decades. So I don’t think evoking it was particularly difficult. Having said that, most of the stories, or rather the core of the stories were written (or thought of) when I spent a year in India a few years ago.

I must also say that my parents retain very strong ties to the villages so there’s always something about these places that I hear every week. It is fair to say that it never feels very far to me — even though physically I am a continent away.

What can we expect from you next?

I have been writing (or attempting to write) a novel for some time now. It is set between ancient Rome and south India. But I spend too much time on research rather than writing the story. I am also working on a few translations from Malayalam to English.

Fehmida Zakeer is a Chennai-based writer

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