A raa pichaikaran or a nightly beggar is one who survives in southern Indian villages by, typically, sleeping in the temple or someone’s cow shed or thinnai—the uniquely rural extension of the front walls of all houses that hosts gatherings, seats overflow visitors, and offers respite for travelers—and by gathering and eating the summation of the village’s daily leftovers. He (typically masculine) is either abjectly lacking in physical capital or is optimizing for sympathy and averse to being seen as an arrogant beggar—for such beggars who display a passion for their own dignity do not make much money—and, thus, carries only one vessel, a medium-sized jug, something between a sombu—a pot—and a kudam, or if you speak a slang like mine, a thavalai—a pitcher. And he gathers everyone’s leftovers, rice, curries, idlies, maybe even some fermented pazhaya soru. He retreats home, spills the day’s gains onto, typically, an aluminum plate, and proceeds to consume his dinner.
I
Vetrimaaran describes his movie Asuran (or Demon, 2019)—a film adaptation of Poomani’s Vekkai or Heat, and for what it’s worth, a fantastic cinema, where a lower caste boy and his father are on the run after the boy kills the exploitative landlord who killed and desecrated his rebel brother—as a story of estrangement, of learning the truth about a repulsive, subordinate, pacifist father, a story wherein “it is not the boy’s journey with the father, it is the boy’s journey to the father." As an aside, it is here where I find the beauty in Vetrimaaran’s screenplays where he finds gripping stories in already sufficiently potent larger settings of oppression. Asuran is a drama of estrangement, family, and doing anything for family, set grandly within The Great Indian vicious cycle of class and subjugation. The reason I bring this up though is this phrase that has cost me some sleep—what does it mean, why does it provoke me: journey to the father? Vetrimaaran’s source of reconciliation between father and rowdy son is easy: the son looks down on his father that has neither defended his family nor avenged its honor but to resolve arrives a handy flashback into the father’s own past and the class violence therein. Illuminated, the son discovers his rage in his father but realizes that his father in the wisdom of pain and experience, having fled his previous identity, merely forbids violence to break the further inheritance of class subjecthood. The film is at once a paean to father-son relationships and the inherent conflict and reconciliation therein, a son seeking masculinity and discovering greater things in his parent, and simultaneously a story of caste oppression and its unbreakable trap that passes from father to son.
Aaranya Kaandam (2010) is a neo-noir thriller, that true to its genre’s darkness couples dark comedy and action gratuitously. You may choose to watch this film, but its trailer is what interests me here. Director Thiagarajan Kumararaja, the undoubted best trailer-maker of Tamil cinema, who probably has an even better trailer in this one for Super Deluxe, deploys a contemporary villu paatu, an ancient form of musical-story telling combined with urban proverb and slur. Two of the characters that Aaranya Kaandam follows are the broke village idiot Zamindar, Kaalaiyan, who has gambled his estate away, and his son, Kodukapuli, who’ve both freshly arrived in the city in pursuit of better fares. Comically listing the characters’ tragedies as their lives get entangled, the musical-story-trailer says about the helpless and debaucherous Kaalaiyan and his foul-mouthed but street-smart lad, அப்பன் பிள்ளையாகுறான், that is, the father becomes the son! In the movie, even when fortune knocks, Kaalaiyan botches execution, and long story short, it is his lad that negotiates saving his very life. Noteworthily, the story begins with the boy managing his father, the drunk, but separated from his father and desperate to save him, the boy is equally helpless, a fool, once again powerless. He needs his father’s support but receiving just the occasional affection, the boy captains the family’s fares, only to ultimately fail, needing rescue from another—a failed family man himself. And needing protection, not just support, the father becomes the son.
Georges Polti, the French philosopher, in analyzing Greek mythology, declares that there are only thirty-six plots. In his The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, he details situations and sources of conflict, challenge, passion, love, kinship, et cetera. Citing this, in concurrence, Tamil director Mysskin—who characteristically named himself after the character from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—says that there are only five, maybe six, plots each with the sentiments of the parent, the sibling, the boss, the lover, and other finitely many relationships. There is a certain comfort in this idea; an equanimity that comes from thinking that we are all the same person with the same experiences.
So, as far as Tamil cinema cares, the father-son plot is one: An adolescent son’s shame in his father’s ways. Conflict. Competing masculinity. Estrangement. Maturity, which besets the son with crises of his own. The son suddenly learning the truth about his father and his father’s past, shocked to discover his father in him and himself in his father. The son becoming the father. A journey of the son and his father, a journey of the son to his father.
II
A tragedy in two acts:
Act I
February 2020. An idea, nay, a disruption!
“Hey Siri, add a note saying…”
Act II
google.com. July 21, 2008. Discovering one’s invention.
“Fucking ******ee!”
III
A Young Adult’s Guide to Living by Yourself
And a Little Bit of a Guide to Living Alone
First, the basics. Identify the optimally ventilated area (responsibility in pursuing cancer) and prepare it to be your smoking spot. For advanced youth, I recommend adding an ashtray and a small stool or a shelf for your lighter, mints, et cetera. Second, identify the closest liquor store and stock your fridge door with cheap but delicious, to the point where you question what is in it—was it adulterated or is the brewery infusing opium into this fizzy brown fluid, and cold Kingfisher Strong. Advanced bachelors may complement this with Old Rum, which goes in your freezer, being dark rum and much like vodka or light rum with low freezing points, I think, which must be supplemented with a supply of Coke, or Diet Coke for the health-conscious.
Once your bread and butter is taken care of and your essentials are sorted, you can move onto lighter issues. You will need a mineral water can, a unit of bubbletop water that is for the Madras fancy, probably once a week, less frequently if you’re lying about how much you’re cooking. You’ll need milk daily or every other day, apologies to the vegans. This will require you to do things unprecedented thus far in your life: having to find your own trusty usual repair people, your milk and water lady, your newspaper guy—if you’re advanced enough to have one—and so forth; soliciting services, overseeing them, ensuring quality control, negotiating payments. Assuming you have furnishing and cooking supplies taken care of, you'll need to stock up your groceries, try to have at least two fresh things in your fridge besides leftovers from home-delivered chicken wings, have and, more importantly, use cleaning supplies, and other such things. This is the point in life when you realize that your parents didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, much like their peers, or pretty much any other adult under the sun. And so, you too will wing it.
There are a few deeply unpleasant things about living alone. Paperwork—leases, income tax documents, et cetera. Rent, entirely incident upon you. Cleaning duty—also entirely incident upon you. Moving heavy things. And so on, the miscellany.
But finally and of much import, living by yourself also means living alone. Living alone has obvious shortcomings—no one to comfort you when you’re ill, no small talk or in-the-passing vent-y conversations, no events with roommates (planned or spontaneous). But above all is a more existential loneliness. You’ll wonder if there is beauty in yearning. I describe all this as existential because while you are not in the company of others, like never before, with an entire house with maybe a nice broad balcony and an espresso machine, you are all by yourself. And so, while not with anyone, you are profoundly in the company of your own self, as if you flirted with your subconscious and, after much struggle, won the date that you are on that day. For this section of this adulting guide, as countermeasures, I recommend a deep and excited—even frantic—commitment to life, a childish curiosity to uncovering what people are and want and how the world works, among other things you’ll hear on the Bill Gates Netflix special. For more actionable items, I recommend frequenting public spaces, particularly ones with a communal atmosphere. Tea shops, especially if you’re addicted to nicotine and/or caffeine (neither of which I recommend (I do recommend hypocrisy)), or a cafe where you can hash out your day’s work-from-home—are great picks. In befriending waiters and tea shop proprietors, in hearing the stories of strangers, in momentary acquaintance, there is an unseemly delight. Perhaps it was reading Ghachar Ghochar that did me so, where a boy in a family that finds sudden prosperity and wealth, haunted by a sort-of emptiness, frequents a nearby establishment daily, drinking lime soda after soda, being a big fan of the perceptive and almost saintly waiter, and remarkably observant of the life in the cafe.
The only piece of advice I’d leave you with is this: relax. Your bathroom will flood, and your toilet will vomit water. You will find yourself broke on the 26th every once in a while. You’ll get into trouble with errors in or in not doing paperwork. You’ll survive.
Oh I loved this. Will check out the movies you named, what a fascinating observation about the father-son ouroboros of Tamil cinema. "And so, while not with anyone, you are profoundly in the company of your own self, as if you flirted with your subconscious and, after much struggle, won the date that you are on that day." >>> this in particular and the whole of Part 3, very nice.
this is brilliant — looking forward to living with a pro soon