A Parable Of Vulnerability
Latha Anantharaman
Poonachi, Or The Story Of A Black Goat by Perumal Murugan Context, 2018, 179 pp., 499
June 2018, volume 42, No 6

Perumal Murugan, the Tamil writer who famously declared himself dead in 2014, came back to life a couple of years ago with a poignant fable for adults called Poonachi: The Story of a Black Goat. In using this two-part title, Murugan harks back to Tamil novels of the late 19th century, as he explains in his introduction. In using the fable genre, he appears to step back from historically specific fiction, the kind that an often over-sensitive public might react to with murderous threats, possibly without reading it at all. He takes her home and his wife can’t understand what they will do with an animal that looks more like a starved kitten than a promising piece of livestock. By nightfall she is won over, and she names the kid Poonachi after a beloved cat she once had.

Murugan’s heroine, then, is a black goat, last of a miraculous litter of seven, that is handed to an old man by a seeming giant. The old man is asked to swear that he will take care of this day-old kid and not sell it in the market. It is not an easy matter to find a nanny goat who will allow the motherless infant to suckle, or to find the means to feed her with gruel and oilcake, or to register her with the authorities, who must tag her with a unique identification number. Still, the old man and woman, bound by their promise and besotted with the kid, stint themselves to give her a good life.

Whether she will be a blessing to them or a curse remains to be told, but this story is not about nameless human farmers toiling in a drought-stricken land. Murugan has said on more than one occasion that he felt cows and pigs were not safe subjects, and among the remaining animals he felt he knew goats best. From his descriptions of their needs and their behaviour, and of their feelings, it is clear that goats also make for the best stories. The goats in his fable all have names. They are sentient beings, glorious, their heads held high, strategically silent when they must steal into the vegetation, and clamorous when they demand their rights.

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