Ameer unveils Jegan Kaviraj's Eeram Kaayaatha Kathaigal

Eeram Kaayaatha Kathaigal, a collection of nine interlinked stories by the lyricist and actor Jegan Kaviraj, was launched in Chennai, with Ameer unveiling it and Jegan’s parents, Muthaiah and Lalitha, receiving the first copy on stage. The book’s title translates to something like stories the dampness never dried, and the choice of who handed it to whom was the point of the evening more than the book object itself.

The distance Jegan travelled to that stage is the part everyone kept returning to. He grew up in Poolaankulam, a village near Tirunelveli, in a family that ran a tea shop and farmed, stopped school after the sixth standard, and was sent off to Kanchipuram in his teens before relatives worried he was drifting. The years after that were manual work across the south: a vegetable stall in Kanchipuram, carrying earth on building sites in Kerala, selling steel vessels door to door in Trichy. The reading habit that eventually pulled him out of all that came from the second-hand book stalls where books were sold by weight, and it carried him to Chennai, into film offices, into lyrics, and now into print.

Director Subramaniya Siva made the sharpest case for the book, arguing it is not really short fiction at all but a record of real people Jegan has met, lives and experiences that would have vanished with them if no one wrote them down. Senthilkumar IRS, from Jegan’s own village, placed the writing in the line of Ki. Rajanarayanan and Thoppil Mohamed Meeran, the regional realists who wrote their own people from the inside without dressing them up or holding them at arm’s length. Kavitha Bharathi, who vouched for all nine stories, used the moment to mourn how far Tamil’s regional dialects have been pushed to the margins, and welcomed a writer choosing to work in his.

The composer Nivas K. Prasanna, who has worked with Jegan since My Dear Sister, told the story of their first collaboration: he phoned a tune through, hesitant about a new lyricist, and Jegan sent back a finished song in ten minutes. That ease ran through Thaaikizhavi and into Makkal Kaavalan, which they are working on now. Jegan, in his reply, said he simply cannot bring himself to write a villain into a story, a refusal he traced back to the people who raised him to keep his words kind.

Ameer’s reason for being there was the most personal thing said all evening. In twenty-five years in cinema, he said, no one had ever thrown him a success celebration with his own family in the room, no audio launch his parents came to, and so he makes a point of turning up when someone else gets that moment. A son’s illiterate parents standing on a Chennai stage to receive the book he wrote was, to him, about as high as a person can climb. Eeram Kaayaatha Kathaigal is out now.