As avid readers and aspiring writers, we are accustomed to a kind of acclaimed writing: an exquisite turn of phrase here, an apt metaphor there; time, effort and words spent in laying out setting; characters that are fleshed out and three dimensional; and every line moving inexorably towards a decisive finish. 

Sandalwood Soap and Other Stories by Perumal Murugan, a collection of 15 stories, subverts many of these expectations, and maybe that’s what makes it a perplexing, disorienting and exhilarating experience, all at once. 

While the stories in this anthology cover themes similar to his other work - interpersonal relationships, gender, identity, caste - each of them carry separate, hard hitting messages, artfully woven into the fabric of the characters’ lives. 

In Sandalwood Soap, a boy is compelled to leave his village to look for work, so that he can make money to send home. He ends up making a living from knocking on toilet doors in a bus stand, urging the people inside to come out sooner. He tells the story’s narrator, “It is as if shit is stuck on my body.” 

None of the characters in this story have names. What are we, the author asks us, if not unnamed people defined by our jobs? 

Salman Rushdie said, “If the story feels truthful about human beings, then it speaks to us.”

In this world, no question or event is too absurd or simplistic, because it is true to its characters. 

In the story ‘Neelakka’, a stray, unkind comment about a woman’s looks morphs into an obsession that takes over her life.

In ‘The Last Anointing’, a naturally occurring, unadorned, uncarved block of stone becomes the centre of a man’s angst.

The meandering, earthy nature of the stories and the abrupt endings are an extension of the daily vagaries of their lives. 

Throughout the book, the stark, unvarnished prose may feel simple to read, but it highlights the necessary, and gives us, the reader, space to inhabit the story in our own way. 

Reading this anthology is like taking a bumpy bus ride down a dusty road out of the city, jostling up and down, side to side, leading into the unknown. Without the usual luxuries of the AC and the urban reliability of phone network, our senses get sharper, and our experiences, deeper.

It can be unsettling, like in the case of the protagonist of ‘Hail, Comrade PM!’ who bumbles around an unfamiliar village setting, grasping at the shreds of the ideology that brought him there in the first place.

In this story, Perumal Murugan uses external change to ask an internal question - how do we react when thrown into the unrecognised, the completely new? We imagine dire straits around every corner, and our self-loathing at our cluelessness with our new habitat projects itself on others as anger and entitlement. 

Kavitha Muralidharan, the translator, begins her introduction with, “There are worlds that you are guilty of not knowing. And then there are the worlds of Perumal Murguan’s stories.” 

Read this book to immerse yourself into a world of people who might seem very different from you on the outside, but inside, are driven by the same fears, desires and dreams as any one of us.

Read it also, to discover all the ways in which a story can be written.