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STENCH – AZAGIYA PERIYAVAN

SUMMARY

Born in 1968, in Peranambut, in Vellore district, Azagiya Periyavan (C. Aravindan) came from a family of

landless dalit family consisting of koothu artists. He has been a social worker and now devotes all his

time to writing and journalism. Being absorbed by many political discussions in their family, he

gradually took his interest in writing. His first poem was Aarumbu (1988). His other major works include

Theettu (1998 – short story collection), Nerikatti and so on. His short story Stench throws light on the

social background of a dalit’s life and its pitiable condition in the society.

The story highlights the life of Kakkasi, the tanner, a poor dalit man with bone-lined chest stinking

always with the mixture of beedi and alcohol and coughing severely, pushing out his cage like rib.

Though this stench represented the hard labour of Kakkasi to own his family, Pamandi, his only son was

always wormed by this stench of shit and rotting carcasses carried in by the breeze into his nostrils

tightened his lungs and contracted his muscles making him to puke.

Pamandi remembers his school days. He utterly hated the moments when shit smells had floated into

the classroom. He would screw up his face and act nauseated; and in a gesture of contempt, cursed

them as “Carcass-Eaters”. Pamandi would fear and vanish away from the scene if he passed through the

decaying carcass on his way from school to home. At times he had even prayed to God to transform him

into a man who never defecates. He was a child of cleanliness and even the stinking of camphor or the

blessings of his Grandmother (whom he considererd as a worthless being), or the advice of his mother

Sevanthamani caused him displeasure. Layers of sedimented stench memories floated through him as

he sat before his father who seemed to him like a decaying corpse.

It was sevanthamani only who forced Kakkasi to stop well-digging and start to work in a tannery

because she could not bear Kakkasi move his way deep into the entrails of the earth and emerging there

from everyday as if from the dead. In the tannery Kakkasi’s fate was with the skins that had been slipped

off dead animals. From within the paleness in which the death and stench were united, his life became

the task of breathing new life into skins and hides. One day when Kakkasi returned late night at home, it

made both Sevanthamani and Pamandi worry equally. Several thoughts in his mind occurred about his

father, but when Kakkasi returned and pressed some delicacies into Pamandi’s hands with pleasure and

said ‘Eat’, that was the day when Pamandi first caught a new odour of his father.

Pamandi had been living away from home, in hostels, feeling liberated from the stench world, entering

into a scented garden. Even the thought of going home made him feel shameful. He even contracted his

name as’ Ka Pa Mandi’. It was the need for money that had bought him home. Filled with pride, Kakkasi

held him close and rested on his son’s head, breathing in its fragrance. Hit by a rising whirlwind of stink,

Pamandi rushed out vomiting.

Kakkasi’s life had been the epitome of hardships.his body gave him no peace out of wheezing and

coughing. At times, he even cursed his wife of her mocking snoring during nights. Everyday in the

moonlight at 4 in the morning, he left his bed to work.

The cock crowned. Kakkasi dissolved into darkness and reached the tannery. He made himself ready,

making a ball of his shirt. He climbed into the tanks to turn over the hides and to transfer them. In the

midst of cold, he began twisting the hides around in the air, curved them up to drain and hung them out

to dry. In this world of chemicals, the rotting stench from the hides slowly turned his whole body into a

corpse.

Sevanthamani earlier reminded Kakkasi to provide the boy with his college fees. The expectation of his

son’s arrival and his owner’s response to his demand of money frustrated him further. Pamandi felt

assaulted on the arrival of his stinking father and yelled at his mother, “Hell! You think I will go there and

get the money? Go to that stinking tannery?” These blocked words of his son pierced through Kakkasi’s

heart.

Suddenly Pamandi’s mind sank when he made a pale glimpse of his father’s face. He could not say a

word to him. He realized that he himself became a stinking thing. Thus his conception of stench

withered and dropped.

Periyavan’s ‘Stench’ leaves a terrific condition of a dalits life onto the minds of the readers. The major

theme in this story is that the stinking stench is filled not in one’s body but one’s own mind. Though

tannery may be a stenching labour, but when it fills the bellies of a family, nothing is sweeter than this

stench. Other themes of this story include poverty, hardships, humiliations, darkness, difference

between dalit and modern culture, hunger, identity crisis and so on.

ATHULYA JOSE

M.A ENGLISH

ALPHONSA COLLEGE

PALA