In the Translator’s Note to Imayam’s I’m Alive…For Now, Prabha Sridevan has aptly remarked, ‘Perhaps a story like this has never been told. Translating this was not easy. Sometimes, I’d feel so crushed after doing just a page, that I would close the book. But the book “spoke” to me and asked me to translate, and I have done just that.’ Reading I’m Alive…For Now is similar to Sridevan’s experience of translating the novel. Written in the first person, the novel is about the narrator, a fifteen-year-old boy, Tamizharasan, suffering from kidney failure.
Tamizharasan documents his physical and emotional response to the disease and his observations about everything around—his parents’ conversations, relatives’ remarks, the doctors’ expressions, their thoughts on his medical condition, the wide chasm between city and village life. The novel’s realistic depiction of the gulf between the ordinary person’s vocabulary of disease and the complicated medical jargon will resonate with the challenges faced by many people. It is to be noted that the book has been published as an initiative of the Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation (TNTB & ESC), a reminder of how the state can contribute to the proliferation of literature in society.
May 2025, volume 49, No 5