The Thinnai

by Ari Gautier

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

If there was anything our neighbours envied us, it was our thinnais.

The working-class district of Kurusukuppam is not the Pondicherry of tourist brochures. Here, residents are a bewildering mix of Creoles, colonial war veterans, proud communists and French citizens who have never left India's shores. It is a place of everyday tragedies, melodramatic occurrences and stubborn, absurd hope.

But life in Kurusukuppam is upturned by the arrival of a curious tramp, Gilbert Thaata, a wizened Frenchman who has clearly seen hard times. Settling down on the narrator's verandah, his thinnai, Gilbert Thaata begins to earn his keep by recounting the tale of the rise and fall of his family's fortunes as the custodians of a mysterious diamond, the Stone of Sita. The fanciful story that unfolds is one that stretches across centuries and encompasses the history of France's colonial legacy in India. As entranced as they are by the raconteur, his listeners cannot help but ask - just who is this old man and how did he fall on such misfortune?

Masterfully translated from the French original by Blake Smith, Ari Gautier's The Thinnai offers a panoramic view of Pondicherry's past, the whimsical eccentricities of its present and shines a light on the quirks of history that come to define us.

Release date: August 25, 2021

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 200

Sample

Praise for the book

‘Ari Gautier is among the greatest storytellers of our era, and his book opens up a world in which the symphony of cultures we discover will remain engraved in our collective memories.’ – Alain Mabanckou, author of Broken Glass and Memoirs of a Porcupine

‘This tour-de-force vividly evokes a Pondicherry of memorable characters, extraordinary travels, and linguistic nimbleness. On Ari Gautier’s thinnai we encounter people and stories connecting Pondicherry to places across the oceans as well as to intensely local politics of race, caste, identity and belonging. French, Tamil, MGR, De Gaulle, Vietnamese snacks, Creole cuisine, all come together in a mix headier than arrack, washed down with delicious nuggets of Pondicherry’s complex history. Savour Ari Gautier’s witty yet melancholic prose, adroitly translated by Blake Smith, that evokes loss and recovery in equal measure. It will transform the way you see postcolonial South Asia.’ – Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Infosys Prize Laureate 2017 and professor of English literature, King’s College London

‘Since nobody lives in the world in general, its unfolding can be observed from anywhere. Rarely will this be more rewarding than during time spent in the imaginary shade of a Pondicherry thinnai, in the company of Ari Gautier’s vibrant cast of scoundrels, dreamers, nobles and loafers in this sensually lush, moving and hilarious yarn from a place of many worlds.‘ – Thorgeir Kolshus, Head, Section for diversity studies, Oslo Metropolitan University

‘Never has there been a novel that treats French India from the perspective of the people who live there, making this novel a much-needed anti-colonial salve on an open wound. Gautier masterfully interweaves the lives of his characters, ranging from Franco-Tamilian soldiers to downtrodden white French elders to displaced Creole domestic servants, in order to bring out the complexities of the experiences of people who have been flattened by the historical record. Smart, illuminating, and often very funny, this is a must-read novel!’ – Jessica Namakkal, author of Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

BLAKE SMITH

My relationship with Ari Gautier and his Thinnai began with a complaint. It was the spring of 2018, and I had just published an essay for the Wire, titled ‘Indian Literature Speaks French’, about the relatively unknown history of Indian authors writing short stories, poems and novels in the French language. Since the late nineteenth century, multilingual writers like Toru Dutt and Manohar Rai Sardessai have used French to express themselves, contributing to a small but diverse body of francophone Indian literature. Some of this writing was collected several years ago by Professor Vijaya Rao in a French-language anthology, but much of Indian French literature is still unpublished and untranslated. Outside of specialists like Professor Rao and her colleagues, India’s contributions to the French language is hardly known in India, France or anywhere else.

Of course, no one knows everything, and most of us make do with knowing very little indeed. Scholars like myself often get very animated by the fact that something happens to be unknown – and we buckle down and try to make sense of it with the low, self-serving intent of being the first to write a little article about whatever unknown thing we have discovered, rarely asking ourselves if all the rest of humanity before us, which had decided such a thing was not worth knowing, might not have been right.

So perhaps the fact that French literature from India is ‘unknown’ does not signify anything to its benefit, and risks inviting to its table the worst sort of bookworms – the ones who will eat anything as long as it is obscure. Let me insist, then, that besides being off the map, it is also well worth visiting and includes some of my favorite poems. As I write this note, for example, I cannot help but think of these lines of Sardessai’s poem, Farewell, Paris: ‘I’ve been searching for words/ to fill up pages/ to make a book/ for some others yet to come/ for some other imbeciles.’

I had hoped my essay would draw attention to Professor Rao’s work and excite greater interest in this literary field. More specifically and more self-interestedly, I also hoped it would generate some free publicity for To Die in Benares, my translation of a collection of short stories by the francophone Indian writer K. Madavane.

My previous efforts in this direction had been less than completely successful. An essay on Madavane that I had written for Scroll was given by the website’s editors the title, ‘This Indian author wrote his stories in French. Is that why we don’t remember him?’ This created the impression that Madavane, represented for the article in a rather funereal black-and-white portrait, was no longer among the living, and caused him to receive a number of anxious messages from friends and family. This time, I carefully ended the article with a mention of Madavane as a living author, and the hope for the survival of this minoritarian literary tradition.

But, in an effort to avoid making the same mistake twice, one can fall into a new form of error. An irate reader quickly noted in his comment beneath the article that I had failed to mention the new generation of francophone writers working today. The author of this comment – and, I soon learned, of two novels in French – was Ari Gautier.

As an academic and sometime journalist, I am used to making errors and having others point them out. Anyone who writes for a living is always getting things wrong! No great moral effort is required to be humble and magnanimous about my mistakes – they accumulate in such density around me that it would, in fact, be much more impressive if I were able, in a feat of willpower, to ignore their existence and maintain a superb self-image of my infallible intelligence. So I responded to Ari’s comment, asking him to get in touch with me and to send me what he had written. I received his two novels (more are on the way!): The Secret Diary of Lakshmi and The Thinnai.

Both are ‘Pondicherry novels’, that is, if I can give a name to a genre of literature that, for the moment, does not exist beyond these two books. The Secret Diary of Lakshmi, which at the time I write this is being translated by a scholar in the United Kingdom, is the ‘autobiography’ of the resident elephant of Pondicherry’s Arulmigu Manakula Vinayagar temple – and a critical fable about caste. Both charming and viciously satirical, the novel gives readers an elephant’s-eye view of Indian society today. Being a historian by training, however, I could not help but be drawn to The Thinnai, which is, in a sense, the story of how a thinnai (a shaded verandah) can be a time machine.

The Thinnai begins with a meditation on memory. The narrator has returned to his childhood home in one of Pondicherry’s northern suburbs, and notes with confusion and dismay everything that has changed (although some people have stayed irksomely the same) in his old neighbourhood. As he contemplates the thinnai of his childhood home, the novel takes us back in time to his youth, to a sleepy, village-like Pondicherry of ashramites, hippies and retired veterans of France’s colonial wars. Readers meet the neighbours, and the tale moves back to their individual pasts and then forward into their present squabbles, couplings, rivalries and schemes. Then begins the story of Gilbert Thaata, the haggard old straggler who finds refuge in the narrator’s thinnai and, night by night over many weeks, tells a family legend that is nothing less than the intertwined histories of the French empire and modern Pondicherry.

Everything is here: the rumors of rare gems that inspired peasant boys in Europe to take ship across the world to find their fortune, the difficulties and disasters of their journeys, the rise of colonial empires and the range of Indian responses, the families converting (with reservations) to Catholicism, the ones seeking a better life in other colonies as coolie laborers, the soldiers who fought for the empire, the Dravidian nationalists, the communists, the cynics. Four hundred years of history, crossed with journeys between continents, are held in a single picture by the frame of the thinnai.

In one of his verses, the poet Ghalib – whose philosophical depth is matched only by his passionate intensity – compares his gaze to the cord that binds the pages of a manuscript, and to a path unrolling toward the far horizon. He means by this that the separate sheets of our diverse impressions are held together in their proper sequence by the intentionality of a consciousness that projects itself forward in time and space. The poet’s line of sight, transcribed in lines of verse, makes all things hang together in an intelligible world. In the sedentary universe of the thinnai, however, the wandering storyteller Gilbert Thaata only seems to play this part.

The thinnai is the real hero of the novel, Ari once told me. It is the part of the house that opens to the neighbourhood, the city, the world, the past, and is not just an empty space to be filled with whichever guests that may come along. The space is a plenitude, a living thing that draws history’s infinite, indeterminate details into the order of a story. The thinnai is not only where the speaker speaks, but it is what he is speaking and who is speaking through him – it, and not Gilbert Thaata, is the vision and voice that puts things in their proper place. The Thinnai is the thinnai’s story.

PROLOGUE

Once the house had appeared enormous. Now, beside the new grey buildings towering above it like unfriendly giants, it seemed a miserable shack. The old naga tree stretched its dry branches towards eternity, covering the roof with sickly yellow leaves. A funereal crow perched croaking on a wire. It flew away as I approached. Furtive shadows stared.

‘Now play Sappani!’ Emile Kozhukattai-Head’s voice struck my ear like the crack of a whip. It was addressed to Three-Balls Six-Faces, who seemed relieved to see me. The latter stopped just as he was about to assume the role of Kamal Hassan, the crippled hero of 16 Vayadinilai. He limped towards me. His smile flashed in and out of being as the broken lamp post flickered.

‘These youths have no respect for anyone. Look what I’m reduced to: playing Sappani! To think I was once the great MGR; now I have to play Sappani the cripple.’ Three-Balls Six-Faces began leaping joyously around me. He was grotesque. He hadn’t changed. In spite of his age, he still wore the same torn shorts. His shirt squeezed against his body. Long, dirty hair fell down his broad shoulders. His face had the same old stupid smile. Melancholy seized me. I hardly had time to turn and look at the house before Three-Balls Six-Faces began his litany. ‘Have you seen the house? Have you seen how things have changed in the neighbourhood? The ashramites are invading. It’s sad, everyone’s gone: Pascal Pig-Tail, Asamandi Baiyacaca Sonal’s family, Joseph One-and-a-Half-Eyes, Pattakka, Selvanadin’s family, Karika Bhai...everybody! I’m the only one who’s left from the old bunch. Since your father left us, your old house has become a ruin.’

Like a lone warrior on the field of battle, Three-Balls Six-Faces regarded the devastation of the families who had left while he stood gloriously unconquered, proud of having survived. I hardly listened as I looked across at the neighbourhood where I had grown up. An austere pale-coloured house stood where Pattakka’s hut had been, but the memory of her kavapu, poritchundai and bhaji drew me backward into the past. I closed my eyes and Pattakka’s smile flashed like a mirage. To my left, Karika Bhai’s shop had disappeared, along with the alleyway where the Killer Widow’s house had been. Further off, a sign blazoned with great communist leaders hung in front of Manickam Annan’s abandoned office. The playground near the coconut grove had been replaced by a hideous municipal garage.

‘How you’ve changed! You’re white as a vellakaran! You smell nice – like France! How long have you been gone? Two years, three years? How long will you stay?’ Three-Balls Six-Faces loaded me with questions and paced around me, jealously patting my Ind-Suzuki. ‘Can I take a spin?’

What a question!

‘Do you know how to drive?’ I asked harshly. After all these years, he still knew how to get on my nerves.

‘No, but you’ll teach me.’

Time should have forgotten him. I had grown up, matured, travelled over mountains and oceans. I had imagined that when I returned I’d find the same old huts, the same poor people stalking the neighbourhood with their memories etched in their faces.

‘Who lives here?’ I asked, looking at my old house, the thinnai looming in front of me. I wasn’t interested, and I was afraid of a long, philosophical answer. Three-Balls Six-Faces pushed the motorcycle towards the house. He cast a disparaging look at the group around Emile Kozhukattai-Head.

Hanging from the dilapidated roof of the thinnai, by a strand of coconut fibre, an old petrol . . .