Perumal Murugan Books in English: All 12, Ranked

A tall stranger gives an old farmer a black kid so small she fits in his palm, and the rest of the book is the work of keeping her alive: the milk she cannot get, the drought, the government office where every animal in the district has to be registered and stands in a queue to be counted. Murugan wrote it after his years of silence, and his own preface says he turned to animals because writing about human beings had become risky. For forty pages it reads like a folk tale you half remember. Then you notice what the queue is for.

Kali and Ponna have been married twelve years with no child, and in their village that is public property. Mothers, uncles, neighbours and priests keep arriving with vows, remedies, the offer of a second wife, one more temple to try. Murugan spends most of the novel inside the marriage itself, which is warm and teasing and physical, so every visit from a relative lands in it like a stone in a pot. The plot turns on the chariot festival at the hill temple, where by an old custom one night of the year loosens the rules. He sets the custom down plainly and lets you sit with it.

Kumaresan brings his new wife Saroja back to his mother's house, which sits by itself on a rock. He is sure the place will get used to her. The village has one question, asked over and over in slightly different words: whose daughter is she. Most of the novel is waiting. Heat on the rock, gossip moving house to house, a mother grieving at full volume for the benefit of the street, a young woman alone in a hut all day while her husband is out selling soda. Murugan holds the temperature just under boiling for a hundred and ninety pages.

Muthu is handed the worst share when his father divides the land among his sons, so he sets out with a guide to buy new ground far enough away to be his alone. Half the novel is the search: soil, water table, the price of a well, the character of a whole village judged from its bus stand and its tea shop. The other half is what the leaving does to his marriage, and to a man who has spent his life being the reasonable one. It moves at the speed of a bullock cart, and that turns out to be the correct speed.

Shorty herds his master's animals, eats what the household has finished with, and measures the day in goats, thorns, water and the distance to the next beating. Murugan writes him from the inside, so the book is full of things a child finds funny or interesting or edible, and the horror arrives in the gaps between them. Several children's days are braided together rather than told in a line, which takes some getting used to. Then the last stretch arrives and the book stops being a portrait of a childhood.

Both sequels begin at the same moment, the morning after the festival, and then take opposite roads. This is the branch where Ponna's life reorganises around her mother-in-law and her own family, and where the novel becomes a book about work: the farm, the goats, the money, who eats first, and what it does to a woman to know she is being discussed in every house on the street. It is quieter than One Part Woman and much better than a sequel has any right to be.

This branch keeps the marriage and puts the festival inside it. Kali will not speak about what happened, Ponna cannot make him, and both families arrive with prayers, advice and their own theories about who is to blame. Murugan is very good here on the mechanics of a sulk that has gone on so long it has become furniture in the house. It is a small, patient novel about whether two people can climb back over a thing neither of them will name out loud.

The stories come from the same western Tamil Nadu country as the novels, and most are short enough to finish between two stops on a train. Murugan works in compression here. A marriage, a village hierarchy, a small betrayal, all set up and knocked over in a few pages, and more than one of them ends a line before you are ready for it. The title story is the one people remember. If you want to test whether this writer is for you without committing to a novel, this is the cheapest experiment on the list.

Marimuthu has everything the arrangement is supposed to reward: land, a job, a family with standing in the area. He still cannot get a wife, and the novel follows him through viewing after viewing, broker after broker, tea after tea, while the arithmetic of dowry, complexion, caste and gossip is worked out loud in front of him. It is funny the way rishta season is funny, which is to say that everyone in the room is laughing except the person being measured. At three hundred pages it goes on, and the going on is the argument.

Sathi works the intervals in a touring cinema, hauling crates through a crowd that is watching something else. His world is the tent, the boys who work it beside him, the pecking order among them, and whatever they can put into their bodies to get the night over with. Murugan cuts the way a careless projectionist splices, scene to scene with no warning and no chapter to hold on to. It came early in his career and it is the least conventional book of his in English, closer to a fever than to a plot.

A boy watches his family's land turn into surveyed plots and then into a colony with new neighbours and new rules. The compensation arrives and is spent. The well turns bad, the father loses his standing, and a household that used to feed itself starts buying vegetables from a shop. Murugan wrote this in his twenties and you can feel it in the book: the anger is loose, the structure sprawls, scenes repeat themselves. What survives all of that is the subject, which is now happening on the edge of every Indian city you can name.

In January 2015 Murugan announced that the writer in him was dead and left the town where he taught, and these poems come out of that stretch of his life. The speaker calls himself a coward and then lists, quite calmly, what a coward is good at: keeping quiet, folding early, staying alive, letting the crowd go past. Some run two lines, others go on for a page. Aniruddhan Vasudevan, who translated the novels, translated these too, so the voice carries over. Next to One Part Woman they read like the only direct reply he made.