For more than three decades, Tamil writer Imayam has returned to the same landscape without ever repeating himself. His novels inhabit villages in northern Tamil Nadu, but their concerns are never provincial. They are about caste, labour, gender, grief, and power. More importantly, they are about people who rarely become the centre of literature.
“I write the stories of those who live with me in my family, my neighbourhood, my street, my village. I write my life; I write how I live,” he had told this writer in an interview after receiving the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2021.
That philosophy runs through Koveru Kazhuthaigal, Sellatha Panam, Aarumugam, and the many works that have followed. His characters are never fashioned into symbols or heroes. They are recognisable people whose lives expose the fault lines of society simply by trying to get through another day.
His novel, Uppu Vandikkaran (The Salt Vendor), extends that literary project into one of the most unsettling periods in recent history: the first COVID-19 lockdown. But calling Uppu Vandikkaran a novel on the pandemic is limiting. The virus is the catalyst but the novel speaks about larger issues – about what fear, bureaucracy, and social collapse do to ordinary people.
The story begins with the death of Chellamuthu, a farmer who falls ill during the lockdown. Hospital after hospital turns him away because he is not confirmed as a COVID patient. By the time he’s confirmed positive, Chellamuthu is dead. The positive report does not bring treatment. Instead, the state arrives in full form.
Officials descend on the village. His family is taken away. Everyone who attended the funeral is identified, questioned, and rounded up. The police slap those who resist. Ambulances become vehicles of public humiliation. Television cameras record the spectacle. Overnight, neighbours become suspects.
A man called Governor is at the centre of this story. Imayam’s characteristic irony is unmistakable. The man named Governor by his parents has no authority over his own life. He is a restless villager known more for wandering tea shops and village streets than staying at home. He is pulled into quarantine simply because he attended the funeral of the man who lived next door. Soon he, along with his ageing parents, tests positive despite showing no symptoms. From that moment, every decision about his body, his movements, and even his dignity belongs to someone else.
What follows is less the story of an illness than of confinement. Government hostels become quarantine centres. Patients are addressed through loud commands. Food is dropped at doors by workers who fear coming too close. A kidney patient who desperately needs dialysis is mistaken for a COVID case and abandoned inside the system. Another worries less about infection than about finding enough food for his family. The virus exposes an older disease: a public system incapable of seeing individuals once they become entries on a list.
Imayam has never been interested in dramatic villains. Here too, the violence is dispersed. It lies in forms, protocols, delays, announcements, barricades, and fear. Nobody intends cruelty as an individual virtue; together, institutions produce it anyway.
What makes Uppu Vandikkaran remarkable is that Imayam refuses to sentimentalise either suffering or resilience. Governor is not transformed by adversity into a wiser or nobler man. He remains impulsive and often selfish. He craves cigarettes more than the vitamin tablets given by the hospital staff. He quarrels over food packets. He lashes out at his wife Kala over the phone. Yet these imperfections are what make him believable. He continues to be this ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances. And Imayam, as always, insists that ordinary people deserve being in literature; without the need to present them as moral exemplars.
The novel is also acutely attentive to the pandemic’s invisible casualties. There is the kidney patient whose dialysis stops because the healthcare system has become singularly focused on COVID. There are farmers watching vegetables rot in their fields because transport has collapsed. Milk cannot be sold, debts cannot be collected, and markets have ceased to function. These details are not incidental. For countless families, the crisis unfolded beyond the onslaught of COVID. It came as interrupted livelihoods and the slow erosion of financial security.
The novel’s most devastating moments are actually those of estrangement. Governor watches his ageing parents stand in separate queues. He cannot comfort them. They barely speak to him. Food is placed at a distance because another human being has become an object of fear. Even a telephone call carries stigma as friends and political acquaintances gradually stop calling. Infection becomes a social identity before it is a medical condition.
Running beneath the narrative is another history. Governor belongs to a family of salt-cart drivers, a community whose occupation gives the novel its title. The title is a reminder that the pandemic did not arrive in a social vacuum. The people who entered lockdown had already been shaped by older inequalities, precarious work, and fragile access to public institutions. As Imayam himself observed while speaking about the novel before its publication, the virus made everyone an “untouchable” overnight. Obviously, by drawing the comparison, Imayam did not intend to erase the already existing fault lines but emphasised how fear reorganised human relationships.
That is also perhaps why the novel feels urgent. Even as public memory of the lockdown rapidly narrowed down to case counts and vaccination milestones, the novel seeks to restore those experiences to historical records.
In Uppu Vandikkaran, there are no grand references to state violence or administrative failure. There is only the relentless accumulation of lived experience: a slap from a police officer, a doctor who has no time, a meal left outside a door, a son unable to meet his father’s eye, a farmer discovering that the vegetables in his field are worth less than the labour needed to harvest them.
Six years after the first lockdown, much of India has chosen to move on. Imayam asks something more difficult. He asks us to remember—not just the virus, but what institutions demanded of ordinary citizens in the face of fear, and what it meant to lose one’s dignity long before one lost one’s health. In doing so, Uppu Vandikkaran becomes more than a novel about the pandemic. It becomes one of the most compelling literary records of how an extraordinary national crisis was lived by people whose stories rarely enter the official archive.
An English translation of Uppu Vandikkaran by Prabha Sridevan will soon be published by Ratna Books.
Kavitha Muralidharan is a senior journalist based out of Tamil Nadu.
Views expressed are the author’s own.