Zero Degree Read online

  English translation first published in India in 2008 by

  Blaft Publications Pvt. Ltd.

  First printing May 2008

  Second printing January 2009

  English translation and all editorial material copyright © 2008 Blaft Publications Pvt. Ltd.

  Third Printing November 2017

  By Zero Degree Publishing

  ISBN 978-81-935283-4-1

  ZDP Title : 1

  Zero Degree © 1998 Charu Nivedita

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, psychic, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales are entirely coincidental.

  Logo design – Aditya R.

  Zero Degree Publishing

  12/7,Bay Line Apartments, 2nd Cross Street,

  R.K. Nagar, Thiruvanmiyur, Chennai 600 041

  Mob : 9840065000 | www.zerodegreepublishing.com

  Email : [email protected]

  Typesetted by : Compuprint, Chennai 86.

  Printed at : Manipal Technologies Ltd., Manipal.

  Publishers’ Note

  Writers function as representatives of their nation’s culture and language. Any country should pride itself on possessing writers – national assets – whose works in translation have the potential to catapult them into international renown.

  The Latin American Boom during the 1960s and ‘70s was a launchpad era that thrust names such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa into the Anglophone literary world where they enjoyed a plausive reception.

  Publication of translated nineteenth-century Russian literature fetched Tolstoy and Chekhov iconic status. Due to the availability of and the demand for their works in translation, Haruki Murakami of Japan and Orhan Pamuk of Turkey have become best-selling writers to watch in the present day and age.

  What we understand from all of this is that translation and publication are fruitful endeavours that engage national writers and their oeuvres with the world at large and vice versa.

  Zero Degree Publishing aims to introduce to the world some of the finest specimens of modern Indian literature, to begin with, we take great pride in introducing Tamil literature in English translation because, as Henry Gratton Doyle said, “It is better to have read a great work of another culture in translation than never to have read it at all.”

  – Gayathri Ramasubramanian & Ramjee Narasiman

  Zero Degree Publishing

  translators’ note

  We would like to let Zero Degree speak for itself, after

  taking just a moment to disavow our personal support for any political agenda that this book or its characters may have, and also to point out two idiosyncratic difficulties the book posed for the translator.

  First, in keeping with the numerological theme of Zero Degree, the only numbers expressed in either words or symbols are numerologically equivalent to nine (with the exception of two chapters). This Oulipian ban includes the very common Tamil word å¼, one, used very much like the English one (“one day”, “one of them”, etc.) The way Charu Nivedita works around this constraint in Tamil is a notable feature of the original text. However, Tamil has some better substitutes for this word than English does. For instance, there are two pronouns each for he and she: Üõ¡/Üõœ (roughly “that man”/“that woman”) and Þõ¡/Þõœ (“this man”/“this woman”). The lack of single-word English equivalents sometimes results in less graceful constructions than Tamil makes possible. We have done our best to make these sentences easily readable without using the forbidden numbers.

  Secondly, many sections of the book are written entirely without punctuation, or using only periods. This reminds the Tamil reader of an ancient style of writing, before Western punctuation marks were adopted into the script. However, in English, omitting punctuation, besides being confusing, would fail to give this effect. Therefore, we have inserted punctuation marks in many chapters, except where it seemed important to the meaning of the text to leave them out.

  Zero Degree was first published in Chennai in 1998. It is the author’s second novel, and features many of the same characters that appeared in his first, Existentialism and

  Fancy Banyan. It did well enough for a second and third edition, and was also translated into Malayalam by Balasubramaniam and P. M. Girish. In Kerala, the book generated a great deal of…

  [The remainder of the translators’ note was destroyed by a computer virus.]

  Pritham K. Chakravarthy

  Rakesh Khanna

  to the memory of kathy acker

  बुद्धिर्ज्ञानमसम्मोह: क्षमा सत्यं दम: शम: |

  सुखं दु:खं भवोऽभावो भयं चाभयमेव च || ٤||

  अहिंसा समता तुष्टिस्तपो दानं यशोऽयश: |

  भवन्ति भावा भूतानां मत्त एव पृथग्विधा: || ٥||

  Reason, wisdom, lucid thinking, tolerance, truth, temperance in thought and body, pleasure, pain, destruction, fear, courage, non-violence, equality, contentment, renunciation, charity, praise, disdain—all human qualities begin with Me.

  —Bhagavad Gita, 10:4-5

  Prayer

  MY DEAR GENNY,

  I stand outside the real world at this moment, and I think of how very long it has been since I spoke to you.

  I recall the words you said, just before we separated for the last time: “Appa, you’ll come to see me, won’t you?”

  We did not know that would be our last meeting.

  My dear daughter, what could I ever give you that would be worthy of those tears, the tears that hung from your eyes like drops of dew...?

  That first tear drop made me realize that there was still warmth left in my dry life.

  I have compiled 1800 pages of conversations with my women friends and lady readers, and of my own history. Most of these pages were discarded, but what remains, I send to you now. I have no way of knowing if these words will make it past the snow-capped mountains to reach you.

  Having thus burdened your tender heart with the ancestral brutality of man, I trek alone through the snowy wasteland, not knowing if it is day or night.

  It has been ages since I have uttered or heard human speech. I will not say that silence is protecting me. I believe that the strain of music at the very bottom of that silence is what still keeps me alive.

  Or perhaps...

  my heart is still beating only because of you.

  You created this misty desert.

  You are Creation.

  I hope that the vacuum of this dialogue I had with creation will come alive in the reading.

  It is only your tender touch that can revive my life, a life that is slowly slipping away...

  1

  MY DEAR LADY READER, as I begin to transcript this text, 0°, you may be…

  lying on your tummy fantasizing about your wedding.

  writing a poem or a letter.

  puzzling in front of the typewriter over the impenetrable notes your boss has dictated.

  travelin
g by bus, train, or car.

  quarrelling with your husband over the telephone.

  walking across hot wet tar, wearing gunny sacks as socks on your feet, to fill the potholes in the road with rubble.

  sitting at the edge of a pond in which the water is warm on top but cool lower down, with your skirt tucked around your knees, flapping your feet in the water.

  working at a granite quarry.

  yawning in a physics class when the teacher is trying to explain the formulas.

  you may be changing the boring Sanskrit news channel.

  lying in a deep coma in the hospital.

  picking at your wounds in a lunatic asylum corridor.

  swallowing sleeping pills.

  fretting, alone, after a divorce, refusing to sacrifice any more of your life for a man.

  sitting amidst ninety sewing machines, pedaling, and sighing when your thighs rub hard against each other.

  skipping rope to give yourself an abortion.

  dropping a stone on the head of your son who dared to spy on you and your lover.

  branding your daughter’s thighs with a red-hot iron rod.

  plotting your dishonest husband’s murder.

  demonstrating the dance steps choreographed by the dance master to the irritated heroine, for the ninth time, at an outdoor location, in the hot sun.

  wondering whether the whiskey breath of the hero kissing you is left over from last night or is from this morning’s shot.

  at your office desk, chewing your lips because of menstrual cramps.

  milking a cow.

  trekking with a group.

  copulating with your lady friend.

  laying your baby on a sheet at the street corner and begging.

  drinking beer with your boyfriend.

  manicuring your nails.

  removing hair from your armpits with Anne French*.

  dreaming about having sex with your brother, or God.

  planning on offering only your clenched thighs, instead of your hole, to the ninth customer of the day.

  burning a literary journal.

  praying.

  berating the eunuch who refuses to give you your cut of the money, using forbidden swear words relating to the genitals.

  smoking ganja.

  rolling a beedi.

  filling matchboxes with matchsticks.

  breastfeeding your baby.

  knocking on a stranger’s door to sell a new soap product.

  discussing Hélène Cixous with your friend.

  rehearsing for the part of Claire in Maids.

  reading the paragraph on CUNT in Madwoman’s

  Under-clothes.

  blacking out the breasts visible on the dirty poster.

  kneading cow dung with your feet to make dung cakes.

  listening to Kenny G on your walkman.

  carefully carving out the yolk from your fried egg.

  screaming because your husband’s mother is holding you down while your husband douses you in kerosene and throws a lit match onto you.

  swallowing oleander seeds because you failed in your exams.

  suddenly happening upon your mother fucking a stranger in the living room.

  cowering in a corner and shivering with fear looking at the customer undressing, after the lover you eloped with abandons you in a brothel.

  thinking about space, while the hero spins a top on your navel and the camera records a tight close-up.

  training to be a terrorist.

  groaning because a prick as large as a wild banana is being shoved down your throat for a porno film shoot.

  disgusted with the hero who is groping at the exposed part of your breast, just above your skimpy blouse.

  chanting “Sriramajayam.”

  buying tickets on the black market for your favorite film.

  losing consciousness because nine policemen have stripped you in front of your husband and are now raping you continuously.

  screaming in labor pain.

  sticking a vibrator up your pussy.

  clenching your butt cheeks around the prick being rubbed in your crack on a crowded bus.

  * Translator’s Note: Throughout the text, boldface type is used to indicate English printed in Roman letters in the original.

  2

  THE “I” THAT APPEARS at the beginning of this novel refers to me, Charu Nivedita, the author. But there are actually several other “I”s responsible for the book. First of all, there is Surya, who wanted to write a novelization of the life of Muniyandi, and dedicate it to his daughter, Genesis; he made pages and pages of notes, and pasted in lots of clippings from the daily newspapers. Then there is Muniyandi himself, who later went through Surya’s notes and made all sorts of corrections and revisions. But this material alone could never have been organized into a complete novel. In the tangled mess, it is often confusing who the “I” refers to—sometimes it is Muniyandi, other times it is Surya, other times it is simply lost in a fog.

  To confuse things further, there is even a third “I”: Misra—the same Misra who, in each of the 999 copies of

  Existentialism and Fancy Banyan, commits suicide on page 144. A few days before he actually went in for suicide, he, too, was thinking of writing a book, and had started collecting material for it. Many parts of this novel are taken from his Hindi notes, and so it is possible to think of it as a novel translated from Hindi. I was not, however, able to bring the exact essence of the Hindi into Tamil—e.g., lines like mayi avaa behen dhi lund maa dhi lund maa dhi phudhdhi were very difficult. Please, dear Lady Reader, do forgive me for that.

  My guru in translation was a fellow named Kottikuppan. When I was in primary school, we used to walk from our village to the school in groups of four or five, and Kottikuppan would come along as our escort. The path to the school from our village was long, and passed through the cremation ground. We were very scared of the cremation ground; that was where the dead roamed as ghosts. But Kottikuppan was brave. He feared nothing.

  Do not assume, just because I speak of him so familiarly, that Kottikuppan was a young boy. Sami Sir guessed that he might be around thirty-six. Sami Sir had settled in our village after he retired from the military, and Kottikuppan, too, had arrived there a long time ago. My mother used to say that even though he looked as though he was in the ninth standard, he was really as old as a donkey.

  Dey Kottikuppan, what’s your age.

  Age means vayasu, page means pakkam, cage means koondu, tej means light, mez means table, rage means anger, wage means income.

  Which place are you from.

  Place means edam, space also means edam, face means mokam, race means ottam, case means case.

  Well means kenaru, wall means suvaru, wool means kambli, pull means izhu, full means fullu.

  Talk means pechu, walk means nadai, chalk means chalkpiece, cock means kunju, lock means poottu, rock means malai.

  He would talk like this until we had crossed the cremation ground. The way he talked, it was almost as if he had come to our village to enlighten the illiterate villagers. Give him work, and he would never refuse; he fed the cows and hens, herded the goats, dried dung cakes, cut wood, carried crying babies on his shoulder and pointed at the moon, plucked coconuts from the trees. But when he spoke it was nothing but randi nondi sondi pandi mandi kundi sandi kindi kendi... just that. It never went beyond that.

  As I write this it strikes me that Kottikuppan was perhaps the world’s last great translator. It is on the basis of what he taught me that I managed to translate Misra’s Hindi and Muniyandi’s butler English and link them to Sur
ya’s Tamil notes. I took enormous license in editing out most of those notes; I even contributed some of my own. I have taken all those “I”s and added my own “I” to them. My dear Lady Reader, you may add your own to them as well. Or…

  3

  What follows is a collection of notes gathered for a 999-page historical novel that is yet to be written:

  Presently the Kasarmanians are massacring the Karmenians in the regions of Bucharek and Nazorno in Kasarmania. The Karmenians are retaliating by killing Kasarmanians. This feud, which owes its origins to religious differences, has been going on for two thousand seven hundred years. The total Karmenian population today is thirty-six lakhs, many of whom form a minority population in the north Caucasus. Of these, around eighteen lakhs have migrated to Greece, Syria, France and America. As far back as 900 B.C., the area was home to a well-organized state. Later, however, the Romans and Parthians began warring with each other for control of Karmenia, and a massive genocide ensued. In 333 A.D., the Parthian Empire was destroyed, and the Sassanid Empire began to rise. The Karmenians converted to Christianity very early, even during the time of Christ. The Arabs intruded into the Caucasus in 702 A.D. and ushered in an era of prolonged war and much bloodshed. Karmenia was conquered by the Tsar of Russia in 1800. In 1818, a long contest began between the Tsar and Iran; the east of Karmenia remained with Russia, but large portions of the land were annexed by Turkey and Iran. In 1917 the Turkish parts of Karmenia disappeared from the face of the Earth. Of the 27 lakhs of Karmenians living there, 18 lakhs were butchered. The 9 lakh survivors escaped to Mesopotamia where a further 5.4 lakhs were massacred; of the survivors, 1.8 lakhs fled to Russia, and 1.8 lakhs to Europe. Then followed an internal struggle, in which the Kasarmanians killed some 54 lakh Karmenians. Many Kasarmanians were killed in retaliation, and so a long ethnic struggle proceeded, with much killing on both sides. Human bodies were axed, tongues hewn, arms amputated, stomachs gouged out, breasts torn apart, yonis speared with red-hot iron rods. Countless bodies were burned. Masses of half-cooked corpses lay around in piles. The grandson spake thusly: “When a banyan tree falls, of course the Earth will quake.” The words sprouted wings and flew off: tree earth quakes falls tree falls quakes earth tree earth falls quakes earth tree quakes falls quakes earth falls tree quakes tree falls earth. The religious leader cautioned women against wearing silk saris and footwear, saying that the making of such articles necessitates the torture of animals, which is, of course, a sin.