In the 1990's, when the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) kidnapped an engineer of Power Grid Corporation of India Limited, P.A. Krishnan, Executive Director (Vigilance) in the public sector company, was tasked with negotiating the militants.
For the next nine months, Krishnan, a civil servant and a native of Nanguneri in Tirunelveli district, was on the job, shuttling between Delhi and Guwahati and travelling the length and breadth of Assam, before securing the release of the engineer.
Eighteen years after the high drama, the behind-the scene moves and the corruption in the public sector he stumbled upon during his journey have found expression in an English novel The Muddy River and its Tamil version Kalangiya Nadhi.
“Every Monday, I would take a flight from Delhi to Assam and return to the Capital on Thursday, only to prepare for my next journey on Monday,” Krishnan recalls.
A number of people helped him in the mission including Sarat Chandra Sinha, former Chief Minister of the State and a rare breed of Gandhian, who agreed to travel with Mr Krishnan with little comforts and without any security, eating at roadside hotels, mingling with the people as they went in search of the engineer.
The novel moves on two planes. While the protagonist Ramesh Chandran, the bureaucrat involved in the negotiations and an aspiring writer, develops the story into a novel, many events not known to Chandran are narrated by his wife Sukanya and others.
The objective of the novel, he says, is to expose the huge corruption that prevails in the public sector. “I ensured that over Rs six crore, due to the government, reached its coffers. But it is a very small amount,” says Krishnan, who took voluntary retirement in 2006. He believes that it is possible for officials to combat corruption, if they have the necessary commitment.
While maintaining that it is a work of fiction based on real-life events, Krishnan explains that the autobiographical elements have been accommodated in bare minimum detail.
“A work of fiction cannot be impersonal, even if it is a historical novel. The aspirations of the author find expression even in Kalki's Ponniyin Selvan,” argues Krishnan, whose first novel The Tiger Claw Tree, captured four generations of a family of a Thenkalai Vaishnavite sect and its ups and downs, beginning in the late 18th century and ending in the 1970s.
The author himself wrote the Tamil version of the novel Pulinaga Kondrai. Krishnan is one of the few authors writing with ease in both English and Tamil.
Krishnan, who began his career as a physics teacher at MDT Hindu College in Tirunelveli, says though he was equally comfortable in Tamil and English, writing in Tamil gives him a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction.
“After all it is my mother tongue and I learnt the Ramayanam from my father K. Pakshirajan, who brought out the Alwarthirunagari edition of Kamba Ramayanam. English came in handy in ‘The Muddy River', as I had to use many technical terms,” says Krishnan, who has also published two collections of essays.
He is now planning a novel set in the days of the Marudhu brothers, the rulers of Sivaganga, who were defeated and hanged by the British. Krishnan has already written a long, detailed essay on the Marudhu brothers.
