’The Solitude of a Shadow’ review: How to kill a powerful rapist

Three-quarters into The Solitude of a Shadow, a passerby asks the unnamed narrator-protagonist: “Is your name Karunakaran?” The question wrecks him despite how he wondered and confirmed, not too long before, that he “had become exactly like” Karunakaran. This singular, claustrophobic obsession with revenge against Karunakaran, a powerful loan shark of the Kavundar (Gounder) caste, who raped the narrator’s sister Sharada of the Nasuvan caste 30 years ago, is established even from the novel’s opening lines.

Originally published as Nizhalin Thanimai (2012) by Tamil writer Devibharathi, it is ably translated into English by N. Kalyan Raman as The Solitude of a Shadow. He retains Tamil terms of address, and nouns and names that evoke a sense of a place and its people. Not once does this compromise the stifling intensity of Devibharathi’s narrative.

The Solitude of a Shadow magnifies to delirious effect the idea that the things we tell ourselves to fashion our identities blur the lines between what we know of our past, present and future. This manifests in three forms. First, as the narrator’s self-reflection, with flashbacks showing caste biases seeping into the consciousness of children. Second, as his self-pity and victimhood—glimpses of the narrator’s boyhood days indicate the impact of sexual trauma, even if not his own. Third, as helplessness and inaction in the present.

A clerk at a government high school of which Karunakaran is a benefactor, the narrator is already at a disadvantage vis-à-vis his revenge plot. Later, as he gets close to Karunakaran to strike a cathartic blow of revenge, pangs of conscience push him further into himself. Briefly, he experiences love and intimacy with two women: Karunakaran’s daughter Sulochana and, later, a married neighbour Sugandhi. But Devibharathi doesn’t afford him clarity or purity of feelings. With Sulochana, his feelings are muddied by his need to avenge her father’s actions. When he meets Sugandhi, he is disgusted by his flagging morals.

However, the narrator’s unmet desire for revenge isn’t the only albatross around his neck. His sister Sharada, the victim of Karunakaran’s crime, keeps reminding the narrator of his failure to avenge her. “How are you going to kill him?” she asks. Why he should, despite being too young at the time of the incident to understand it, never comes up— a sharp focus on gendered expectations in the milieu Devibharathi writes about.

This quest for revenge to restore a woman’s “honour” changes everyone who comes in contact with it. Now a shadowy version of themselves, they are each pushed into a sultry and oppressive loneliness. In a novel that deals with the inconsistencies and inaccuracies of memory, this is Devibharathi’s powerful final blow.

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