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Articles: Literature | Chalam’s Maidanam
- Dr. Rajeshwar Mittapalli
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Rajeswari wakes up in the dead of the night to find Ameer stooping over her and Meera, a freshly sharpened knife in hand. Ameer grabs Meera by the hair and pulls him off her. Rajeswari is sure that he intends to kill Meera. She covers his body with hers and asks Ameer to kill her first and Meera next. But surprisingly, Ameer stabs himself. She immediately despatches Meera to fetch a doctor. After he is gone, Ameer tells her with great difficulty that he cannot tolerate the idea of sharing her love with Meera and that he has decided to kill himself because he thinks that she now loves Meera. Rajeswari tells him that she has always loved only him and loves him now too and when he dies she cries inconsolably.
The police come with Meera suspecting a murder. In the confusion following the arrival of Ameer on the scene in the night, Meera had not known that it was a suicide. So, thinking Rajeswari to have killed Ameer and fearing that she would be charged with murder, he takes the blame on himself. Rajeswari, perceiving that the police would not buy the suicide story and since she would not like Meera to go to the gallows, declares that she herself has killed Ameer.
It is unclear who is finally blamed for the “murder,” but there are a couple of references early in the novel that both Meera and Rajeswari have been sentenced to death. Thus Maidanam, like every other novel of Chalam, ends on a gloomy and tragic note. We are forced to conclude, although this may not have been the intention of Chalam, that those who defy society have to invariably pay with their lives because the dream world they seek to build for themselves bursts like a bubble when pierced by the shafts of reality.
Conclusion: Marriage vs. Free Love
Maidanam is thus basically the story of Rajeswari and her ‘honeymoon’ with free life, but most of the time she is still at the receiving end of one form of maltreatment or the other. For all his love for Rajeswari, Ameer turns out to be an aggressive and jealous person and a narrow-minded bigot at that. It is precisely because of these shortcomings of her husband that she has come away with him. But having come away with him, she becomes defensive and goes out of her way to justify Ameer’s every act including his boorishness and irresponsibility in deserting her when she needed his support the most. She is driven by a romantic notion of herself and the world in doing what she does so irrationally.
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