kaaLeepatnam raamaaraavu, this years' winner of the
kEndra saahitya akaaDemee award for Telugu, was born in 1924
in pondooru, SreekaakuLam District. He worked as a teacher
in St. Anthony's High School in Vizag and retired in 1979.
He started writing early and first published a story in
'chitragupta'. Ironically, for a writer that would be
renowned later for his long stories, this story was a
ministory, written on the back of a post card. He wrote
several stories mainly about the relationships in the middle
class families. His stories were published in all the
leading magazines, including bhaarathi, the then stamp of
approval for an upcoming writer. He was not satisfied with
his writing and stopped writing about 1955.
Then, after a gap of about 8 years, he wrote 'teerpu'
in 1963. He was now more comfortable with what he was
writing. Teerpu, the story of a dispute among school-aged
brothers about who has the right to take the best among the
writing pads that they made together, is short, about 4 or 5
pages, in length, but the resolution is different from
everything he has written before and portrayed the kind of
writer he was going to be this second time around.
From this point on, he does not just tell a story
anymore. The stories take the reader close to the lives of
people he may not otherwise notice. These are not just
stories about an event or events in their lives. They also
seek to establish the reasons for why that particular event
has to take place and makes the readers to pause and think.
However, the stories are not about two-dimensional cardboard
characters. These are real people with flesh and blood.
These are real events that occur several times a day all
over our motherland.
teerpu was followed two years later by 'yaJnam', about
which we already talked about in recent posts.
In the next year came mahadaa_Seervachanam, a poignant
story of a struggling family, whose patriarch, after a life-
time of government service, is now retired and crippled.
1968 saw veeruDu - mahaaveeruDu, another short story.
On the surface it is a story, told with humor, of a street
fight in which the feisty ganjipETa rowdy is getting the
heck beaten out of him by a much stronger allipuram
vastaadu. Then, the kottapETa SanDO, known to be the
strongest in the town, happens by and tries to stop the
fight. What happens later is surprising initially, but not
so when you think more about it. When I read it first, I
thought of it is an interesting funny story. Then a friend
said it was an allegory about the then raging Vietnam war. I
read it again. Yes, it could be.
(to be continued...)
Regards. --- V. Chowdary Jampala