In the absence of a photograph, it serves as his only memory of a father who died when Murugan was in his early 20s.

These poems from his diary now form part of the collection Songs Of A Coward, whose Tamil edition, published by Kalachuvadu Publications, is valuable to him since the cover features an image of the signature he had taught his father to use for his report cards. Unlike his fiction, which has consistently been a third-person narrative, with the author recreating a world and a people he has lived amongst, Murugan’s poetry is personal, an emotional outburst, of the moment (“if I skip that moment, I can’t write it again').

Defined immeasurably by “the day you were killed/in front of your eyes', he wrote in the poem Strange Beast on 22 February 2015: “Someone has painted over my head/a pair of horns everyone can see/Someone has turned me/into a strange beast.' In poems that he started filling a diary with, he turns to the metaphors of nature, with which he has had a deep connection since his childhood, to describe his condition: “like a rat' a snail in its “little calcium box' the sea that “has fallen silent'. I couldn’t read a book, write, attend literary meetings, and meet writers or readers.' He felt, he says, “like a dead man walking'. In Chennai, there was an incredible loneliness. It’s at least close to Kongu Nadu, a region-comprising Coimbatore, Erode, Salem, Namakkal, and some other western Tamil Nadu districts, besides sections of adjoining Kerala and Karnataka-that has a cultural unity, a particular landscape, and uses a dialect of Tamil that Murugan writes in. The week is spent at Attur, about 100km away, where Murugan is principal (in-charge) and head of the Tamil department at Arignar Anna Government Arts College, having sought a transfer after the high court ruling. They still return to Namakkal, but only on weekends. In Chennai, we felt trapped in the confinement of our apartment,' he says. Ezhilarasi, and he, both professors of Tamil literature at Namakkal’s Government Arts College at the time, had to abandon their home of 17 years and were transferred to colleges in Chennai. In 2015, the deep anguish that followed weeks of threats and violent protests by caste groups against his novel had led Murugan to declare his death as a writer.

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