Adam

S. HAREESH

adam

Translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Foreword

Adam

Death Notice

Murder at the Culvert

Magic Tail

Kavyamela

Alone

Lord of the Hunt

Maoist

Night Watch

Follow Penguin

Copyright

Advance Praise for the Book

‘S. Hareesh, in these astonishing stories, takes an honest joy in human villainy and reveals a painful and comical truth—exuberant violence, determined greed and pure spite are the stuff of our relations with each other, with animals and with the world at large’—Anjum Hasan, author

‘An inspired translation of a brilliant constellation of stories, rooted in language and landscape, within a narrative arc that is vast and universal. S. Hareesh’s imagination evades the limitations of Anthropocene consciousness to give us a master class in the craft of storytelling’—Namita Gokhale, author, and director, Jaipur Literature Festival

‘Hareesh’s writing carries, always, the unexpected, the uncanny. In this collection of short fiction, we encounter worlds within worlds, stories within stories—a gloriously tangled web of lives that intersect in hilariously unsavoury, yet always human, ways. From dogs and their “masters”, old lifelong enemies who can’t, quite literally, live without each other, a traveller who walks down a road on an endless night, men with magic tails, bulls that break free, we are borne away by a telling that’s informed by the wild, the oral, the unruly. Through this, Hareesh dissects for us, in scathing, often laugh-out-loud ways, the facades adopted by masculinity, civility, caste. In these stories, humans are human in such achingly real ways that what’s also conjured is the unbelievable, the farcical, the beasts’—Janice Pariat, author

Foreword

Readers of my work in English would only be familiar with Moustache. Before writing the novel, I published three collections of short stories in Malayalam. Adam is the second of those.

The collection has a special place in my heart for several reasons. After my first book came out, I had to stay away from writing for a number of years—years when I thought I might never write again. The stories in this collection helped me come out of that state of mind. They also mark a turning point for the writer that I am today in terms of my writing style, language and choice of subjects.

The nine stories in this collection reflect the language and lifestyle of the land where I was born and grew up. I am of the opinion that our writing is affected by the people we meet and the books we read. In that sense, this collection owes a debt of gratitude to those around me and the stories I have read so far.

I am very pleased that Jayasree Kalathil, my dear friend and the translator of Moustache, has translated these stories too. Jayasree’s excellence in her craft needs no reiteration from me. Readers of literature translated into English have ample evidence in front of them.