She & I by Imayam (pen name of V. Annamalai)is a translation of the Tamil novel En Kathe (2015). Written entirely from the point of view of the anonymous male narrator, this novel is limited in scope and falls short of expectations, especially since Imayam won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2020 for Selladha Panam. The narrator’s perspective is predominant and there is no glimpse offered into the minds of the other characters, especially the female protagonist Kamala. For the most part the reader is kept on edge to wonder what Kamala is up to, like the whodunit formula of crime fiction.
En Kathe literally means ‘My Story’ but the short novel has been translated as She and I.The translation of the title as ‘She and I’draws attention to two characters, the narrator and Kamala, the woman he ‘loves’ obsessively. Where the plot remains centered on the two characters, the events are played out entirely from the narrator’s point of view, an intent declared at the beginning of the novel: ‘This is my story — a story spanning ten years. A story of my blood, my tears.’ Even though the narrator adds, ‘This is not my story alone.