One Million Footsteps

Jeyamohan’s intriguing foray into detective fiction introduces Ousepachan, a maverick and jaded ex-police officer. Narrating his experiences with razor-sharp wit and a fondness for indecent jokes, Ousepachan turns his gaze inwards, dwelling less on the crime than on the minds that commit it. His investigations move through generational curses, torrid affairs, and moral decay, tracing each transgression back to a familiar set of human drives – love, desire, honour, ego and the hunger for power.

Rooted in the cultural worlds of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, this luminous translation of a legendary Tamil writer’s work approaches crime as a means of understanding society itself. Layered with history, myth, and philosophical reflection, the collection offers a meditation on human nature, asking the reader to look beyond appearances to the deeper truths beneath.

B. Jeyamohan (b. 1962), based in Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu, is a pre-eminent writer in modern Tamil literature. Apart from his other landmark novels such as Vishnupuram (1997) and Kotravai (2005), his body of work includes more than three hundred short stories, many volumes of literary criticism, biographies, travelogues, introductory texts to Indian and Western literature, as well as essays on heritage and philosophy.He won the Akilan Memorial Prize for his first novel, and the Katha Samman and the Sanskriti Samman awards.

V. Iswarya is a freelance translator and critic based in Bengaluru. She teaches English literature at the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. She has written essays on Tamil film culture for popular publications as part of her social media campaign ‘Calling Out Stalking’. She was a South Asia Speaks Fellow for Translation in the class of 2024, working under the mentorship of Arunava Sinha. Her translations of B. Jeyamohan’s essays have appeared in the Frontline magazine.