Translated from Tamil by Megana Kumar. Cover image: Painting by Calixto Robles, “The road to Ixtlan”, 2010.
Everyone has a lifelong wish. Mine is to work at least a day in Canada. When I say work, I don’t mean volunteering — I’ve done plenty of that. I mean work for pay. Any work is fine with me, gardening, pushing carts at the supermarket, washing dishes at a restaurant. Just as long as it’s not a job I have to use my brain for. My entire life, I have been using my brains to keep books for others.
I tried to get a job pushing carts at the supermarket. Customers use the carts to pick up groceries, push them to their cars, unload, and leave the carts. You must gather all the carts and return them to the supermarket. It’s the easiest job ever as no mental energy is expended. But I couldn’t even land that.
There are so many other jobs I tried out for, but they all ended in failure. It was one of those days when I lay tired by my defeat that the phone started to ring. It was only after a minute that I realized the guy on the other end was speaking English. He asked if I could act as a Tamil-to-English interpreter.
“When?” I asked.
“Today,” he said.
“What time?”
“In the morning, at 9 am.”
“Where?” As he continued to tell me, I noted the address down. It was far away, but before I’d even processed it, my mouth was already saying yes. This kind of work didn’t need any effort from you physically, and it certainly didn’t need your brains.
It was a minute before nine when I got there. I met a woman called Yemina. Her style, her gait, the way she talked, I liked it a lot. I could tell right away that she was kind. On behalf of an insurance company, she had to appraise the physical and mental state of a Tamil woman who met with a serious accident. Yemina told me that the insurance company would consider her personal injury claim only if the woman underwent the appraisal.
Yemina let me know that the woman’s name was Chinnanayagi. I’ve heard of Periyanayagi, but Chinnanayagi was new. While she and her family were on the way to a wedding, they got involved in a car accident. She spent three days unconscious at the hospital. There were injuries all over her body. She suffered a severe blow to her head as well. Everyone else in the car escaped with minor injuries. She had undergone treatment for one month. Now, at home, she was getting better little by little.
Chinnanayagi was small and round. Her face was twisted, as if she was about to sneeze. Before she immigrated to Canada, she worked as a Tamil teacher at Yazhpanam, Sri Lanka. She has a husband and a son. The patient and the interpreter couldn’t have their own conversation. But whenever there was a small sliver of space in the conversation, Chinnayagi told me her stories. She let me know that her son would come pick her up later.
I was ready. Yemina started asking the questions and I translated them.
“How are you feeling right now?”
“Just pain. There is not a minute where I do not feel pain.”
“Have you slept well?”
“I took the sleeping pills and lay down and slept for three hours. I woke up again and I took some more painkillers. I walked around for a bit. I heated some water and drank it. I couldn’t go back to sleep.”
“Are you following the exercises they told you to do?”
“If I try, it hurts even more. I do what I can.”
“Do you go out for weddings or birthday celebrations? I’ve been told it’d be good for you to attend social events. You’d start smiling again.”
“I go. My sister takes me.”
“Good, good, and your breathing…?”
Suddenly, Chinnanayagi stood up, jiggling her hands, as if shaking a thermometer. When Yemina asked her what was wrong, she said that she had forgotten her doctor’s note. After rummaging around in her bag she managed to pull out the note and give it to Yemina.
“The doctor has written about your breathing problems. What’s new about this?”
“Breathing is so difficult. I can only let out half-breaths. My lungs are never even full. As soon as I breathe, I get tired.” she sighed.
“You’ve said earlier that you’ve sung at social events before. Why don’t you sing a song now?”
Right at that moment, a change swept over Chinnanayagi. Something like a smile took over her face.
The air I breathe, the air I breathe,
What can I say? To express myself?
As love pushes me by its hands
My heart slid towards you
The air I breathe, the air I breathe,
There were some more lines in the song left to sing. It was as if she ran two miles, chest heaving. I watched in horror, turning to look at Yemina — should I translate this too? Yemina said no.
Chinnanayagi talked nonstop. “Pain comes in a flash. The red tablets don’t soothe it. The yellow tablets don’t help. It comes and leaves whenever it wishes.”
“Neck pain?”
“No, arm pain.”
“Even there in your arm? If the pain comes in the middle of the night, what do you do?”
“I stretch my arm out and open the hot water tap. A rush of cold water comes down first. It starts getting warmer, and eventually, hot water flows. I’ll switch between both temperatures. The pain doesn’t go away, but it calms down a bit.”
“Do you have to take care of your husband too?”
“Who else? Only I can to take care of him. His memory is worse than mine. He’ll stick his head into the fridge to hunt around for something to eat. But he’ll forget what he’s looking for. The door will slam right on his ass. He’ll freeze up, still as a rock.”
“Last time you came, you said your memory was slipping too.”
“That’s the worst thing. When I go to the store nearby, I forget what I came there for. Once, I forgot where I was even standing and didn’t remember my own address. A nine-year-old girl had to lead me back home.”
“Your name, address, and telephone number — you need to write them down on a card and hang it around your neck. I told you last time, didn’t I?”
“I forgot that too.”
“Okay, do you at least take your medicine regularly?”
“How can I remember? Who is there to remind me to take it? Some days I forget it completely.”
“If you ignore our advice, how can you get better?”
Suddenly, Chinnanayagi started reciting an old song.
I swiveled my head back and forth between them. I looked at Yemina, wondering if I should translate the song. She said yes.
“Whatever is supposed to happen will happen at the appointed time,” I said.
“How is your leg pain?”
Her face immediately brightened. “That was what I was waiting to tell you. I’ve forgotten all about it. That pain is something I can never describe. It starts out from inside my bones. A different feeling.”
“What do you mean, a different feeling?”
“Different means different. American money is money. Canadian money is money. But there is a difference between them, isn’t there?”
Yemina laughed. I did too.
Immediately, Chinnayagi bent down and removed her left shoe from her foot to show Yemina. A horrible smell filled the air. The smell of rotting flesh. It felt as if the air around us changed colors. I caught a glimpse of her feet before Yemina could: swollen, crisscrossed with red stripes sitting like a fat young rabbit. Something inside of it was clawing to come out. Her toes clung to each other like a duck’s feet.
“Cover it, cover it!” Yemina yelled. In the one hour we were there, that was the first time we heard her raise her voice.
She asked her to rate the pain she felt.
“Which pain?”
“Whatever is hurting most.”
Before I could translate, she said ‘ten’ in English.
Yemina wrote it down. Thus, the interview came to an end.
A few days later, I got my payment.
I was told that the woman got her insurance claim. I don’t know how much, it could be one hundred thousand dollars. It wouldn’t come as a surprise if it was one million dollars. My little contribution in the claim cannot be ignored.
In Yemina’s folder, there was a picture of Chinnanayagi taken before the accident. I saw it, upside down, from where I sat, a beautiful smiling face. The accident happened in an unexpected moment that changed her entire face. What a devastating accident it must have been. From now on, for her, that is the face. Not even a million dollars could change it.
Appadurai Muttulingam was born in Sri Lanka and has published numerous books in Tamil, including novels, short story collections, interviews, and essays. Stories translated into English have been published in three collections. They have also appeared in anthologies Many Roads Through Paradise (Penguin Books 2014) and Uprooting the Pumpkin (Oxford University Press 2016). Among his honors are Sahitya Academi award 1998 (Sri Lanka) and SRM University literary award 2013 (India). His short story was published in the Narrative Magazine (Nov 2021) and another selected as finalist in Armory Square Prize (2023). He lives with his wife in Toronto.
