Our Man in Warsaw is the fourth novel of Carlos Tamilavan, a prominent Tamil academician, critic and author. The book under review is winner of the Tamil Literary Garden Award for fiction in 2008. The novel revolves around the life of Chandran, a middle-aged computer engineer who travels from India to Warsaw on a year-long assignment. The seemingly mundane premise is enlivened by two Polish women who seek him out for different reasons. In a chapter characteristic of spy thrillers, a young art student named Anna approaches Chandran for interviews to publish in a magazine. Another day, Lydia, a middle-aged woman he meets on the flight to Warsaw, tracks him down and establishes communication for an unusual reason. She gives him a detailed account of her dead elder brother who was known for his academic interest in Indian occult practices, and therefore her subsequent interest in Indians.
Added to this are flashbacks of a few more enigmatic women who have crossed paths with Chandran: his Burmese-origin mother who was rescued and adopted when she was a toddler by a Tamil man during World War II; his late wife Vijaya, a school teacher who endured the long-distance relationship with him gracefully before committing suicide when she was pregnant; Ashwini, a spirited young woman in love with Vijaya’s brother, who kills her own father when her rebellious boyfriend is murdered in a police operation; and Amala, a colleague of Vijaya’s who seems to know more than she divulges about the circumstances surrounding Vijaya’s death. The novel ultimately becomes a string of stories about various characters—stories that are typically elicited in interviews, dreams or memories.
The story of Sivanesam stands out among all the others. He is an illegal immigrant from Tamil Nadu who reaches Warsaw after a long and gruesome ordeal. He attains a divine status with the passage of time, earns ardent disciples in Poland, and nonchalantly performs miracles. His is also the only story that is not directly connected with Chandran’s life. Naturally, Sivanesam becomes an enigmatic character that remains in the margins of the narrative reality.
The narrative meanders back and forth in time, introducing new characters and reviving old ones arbitrarily, but with no attempt to tie up loose ends. This is obviously a conscious choice on the author’s part, who has consistently striven to break conventional notions of storytelling through inventive narrative games.
Written during the decades when Latin American magical realism influenced Tamil authors to experiment with the style and evolve a Tamil aesthetic for it, the novel banks on the Western notion of the East’s mysticism to construct its magical elements. However, it helps that a modern-day Indian narrator is placed amidst the Western romantics who seek a piece of the Orient in him: indifferent to such ideas and far removed from the India of their dreams, Chandran’s character constantly serves to clip their wings of fancy.
That said, almost all the Indian characters in the novel are given supernatural powers at some point in their narrative lives. Chandran’s mother is said to have possessed the power to detect fire accidents until she was twelve. Vijaya takes Chandran to a cave and performs an occult sexual ritual that helps her conceive a child. A Polish character Chandran dreams up in vivid detail gives him hitherto unknown information about Lydia’s brother. It is the casual indifference of these characters to all these incredible events that makes the novel truly magical realist. However, this otherworldliness of the characters of the East ends up ratifying the allure of the Orient that the protagonist himself rejects, leading to a contradiction. At times frustrating and at times amusing, this contradiction in the presentation of India’s mysticism can be found in most of the stories contained within the novel.
Taken literally, ‘Our Man in Warsaw’ could directly refer to Chandran, the protagonist, who links all the stories explored in the novel. A deeper reading also leads us to the other man, Sivanesam, who has been in Warsaw a lot longer than Chandran, with greater magical feats to his name. Although misleading, the play on the phrase ‘Our Man in…’, typically used in the titles of espionage narratives, sits well with the mystery that the novel evokes. However, one aspect the translated title misses out on is the gender neutrality of its Tamil counterpart.
The most troubling feature of the novel is the male gaze that pervades the entire narrative. From highly objectifying descriptions to erotic fantasies, Chandran’s gaze sweeps freely over every female character he comes across. In stark contrast, the physique of male characters does not find description beyond their facial features. For a novel that explores a variety of themes like the repercussions of migration, oppression of hill tribes in India, and history of Poland during the Second World War, persistence of this gaze dilutes the seriousness of the narrative and leaves the reader with an aftertaste of an erotic fiction.
Gita Rajan’s translation is fluent and accessible, carefully keeping the convolution of the content from seeping into the language. It is, however, disappointing that the book does not contain a Translator’s Note. Apart from throwing light on the specific intricacies in translating this novel, a note from the translator could also serve as a guide for future translations of works in this genre. The cover design, paper quality and typesetting of this edition are crucial elements that have made the novel an inviting and comfortable read.
Ramakrishnan V, Professor of English, has translated In Defiance: Our Stories (Vitasta, 2022), Help Me With This Tricky Case (Bloomsbury, 2023), Sacred Talons (Hachette, 2025), and An Ocean in a Well (Speaking Tiger Books, 2026).