The Abyss
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Raw, tender, and darkly comic, The Abyss is widely considered a masterpiece from Jeyamohan, a writer whose body of work has shaped modern Tamil literature.
Pothivelu Pandaram is known as a successful, God-fearing man about town: he has a loyal wife, three daughters, and money to pay for their dowries. However, it’s an open secret that his success is fueled by a trade that is as profitable as it is cruel: he owns—and breeds—a group of physically deformed beggars and places them outside temples to collect money.
There is Mangandi Samy, with just one arm, no legs, and “a little head on top,” who only speaks in divine songs he himself invents; Ahmedkutty, an intellectual whose testicles hang to the floor “like two great pumpkins”; Muthammai, mother to eighteen children. To Pandaram, they are only “items,” to be bought and sold like cattle. But when he makes an impulsive trade, his luck turns.
Written with an unflinching eye and suffused with a deep existential longing, The Abyss is an extraordinary novel—for its terrain, its fundamental questions about humanity, and its depiction of human suffering and liberation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in 2003, this deeply human story from Jeyamohan (Stories of the True) tells of slavery, religious hypocrisy, official corruption, and arranged marriage in 1991 Tamil Nadu. Perennially cash-strapped patriarch Pothivelu Pandaram puts on a pious face by working as a custodian at a Hindu temple. In fact, he makes his living from the horrific practice of breeding and trading a group of deformed people he and his associates call "items," whose proceeds from begging on the temple steps he transfers to his own pocket. One has just given birth to her 18th baby, and he stuffs the pair and his other "items" in a van bound for a Hindu festival in the temple town of Pazhani. What unfolds there and back home is painful to read: Pandaram's overseers regularly beat the beggars, the police abduct and rape one of them and leave her in the hospital with a broken spine, and Pandaram, who's contracted a venereal disease, makes an ill-fated deal with another enslaver. When his plans to marry off his oldest daughter backfire disastrously, he unleashes his savagery on his own household. Yet the novel is eminently readable, thanks to the unsparing view not just of Pandaram's cruelty but his folly, as well as the wit and wisdom of the beggars. Observing the festivalgoers, one says to another, "They're going a-begging. Begging to the lord on the hill.... We beg these folks for money. And they beg the beggar God." This is a masterpiece.
