(this is the english translation of the story from tamuse. its a pretty good translation, as i read now. thanks to tamuse.https://tamuse.wordpress.com/2017/05/04/pazhuvettaiyer-2/)
Writer Pazhuvettaiyer has fathered a child- indeed, it happened yesterday. Extremely fair complexioned, the child had the looks of a king, they said. In a city hospital, in the dead of night, as rain was pouring down, it seems the child cleaved the belly of his mother and with a loud cry leapt forth into the world. Both the mother and child are said to be fine.
Kidaram Kondan, poetic virtuoso, climbed up and down the stairs of many a shop, anxiously jangling his pockets as he searched long and hard for something he could gift the child. “Fuck, ” he sighed, “Commodities. Mere commodities.” And then he remembered the English language copy of ‘War and Peace’ that he had pilfered from the local library at Arumbalam. Having arrived at a decision, he wrapped the book in the covers of Pothys Store and with a majestic gait, went to see the child. A classic child born to a writer of classics deserves nothing less than a classical work of a classic author bestowed as a gift by a classic poet, he asserted to himself.
Pazhuvettaiyer removed his thick spectacles, laughed aloud, and embraced the poet, greeting him, “hey, Kidaram!”. His smile revealed an upper tooth broken into half in a joust of poetry the previous week. He informed Kidaram that his wife had been shifted from the labour ward just then. As the child had neonatal jaundice, he was in a separate room under a lamp irradiated with bright light. “Go and see him there,” he told the poet.
Inside the glass room where a sign warned, “Hush! Silence!”, a lean and wiry nurse with a slight smile playing on her lips was busy peering into her mobile phone. There might have been four or five children in that room. From a corner of the room, lying soaked in a flood of bright light, little Pazhuvettaiyer closed the copy of Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ and asked, ‘Jesus… Tolstoy. Not again!!! Uncle… don’t you have anything by D.H Lawrence?’
(edited by Kalathugal)
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