One Part Woman vividly recreated the oppression that its protagonists felt, assailed at every turn by reminders and cruelty about their infertility. What may have followed continues in two newly-translated sequels, A Lonely Harvest – in which Kali takes his life, and the pregnant Ponna must balance grief, guilt and her pregnancy, and Trial By Silence – in which Kali’s suicide is prevented by his mother, who then has to take charge as her son descends into an alcoholic sulk and her daughter-in-law grapples with being rejected by her husband even as she expects a child. In that novel, we only saw Kali’s contemplation, drunk beneath the portia tree.

Perumal Murugan’s acclaimed and controversial One Part Woman opened and ended with that very tree: as the novel closed, Kali was considering whether to tie to a noose to it, feeling betrayed by how his wife Ponna had chosen to participate in a temple festival in which married women without offspring have sex with strangers over a single night, often returning home pregnant, blessed by the grace of the god Maachaami in the body of an anonymous man. Their most important concern is only how they can bring a baby into their otherwise fulfilling marriage.įor over a dozen years, they offer entreaties to the deities, suffering insults from those around them, even as the harvests they reap are abundant, the animals they raise thrive, and the portia tree that Kali plants spreads its branches across the sky. Somewhere on a grander stage, India inches towards independence from colonial rule, while in the interior of Tamil Nadu, a childless young couple have neither inkling of, nor interest in these developments.

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One part woman