Glossary and Detailed Explanation

Glossary

Detailed Explanation, Part 1: The Frame Story

The story opens with the narrator explaining that the account came to him suddenly, and that "elaboration can only impoverish" it - he tells it as it is.

The old man is the heart of the story. His native intelligence, his skill in farming, his understanding of workers and his newspaper-reading show he is no ordinary labourer. His arrival brings order and profit - but also changes the owner for the worse. This raises a question the wife cannot answer: was his arrival "for the better or for the worse"?

The walk of hundreds of miles matters: it suggests the old man has left his past behind completely, as Tammanna did - an early hint of the twist.

Why he tells the wife the story. He seems to know her plight - her husband's idleness, new friends and vices. The story of Tammanna and Basavaiah is an indirect way of explaining how success and rivalry can take over a man's life.

Detailed Explanation, Part 2: From Competition to Rivalry

The visible and the invisible. At first the rivals compete over land and friends - things that can be seen and counted. Tammanna moves the contest into the abstract world of art, where Basavaiah cannot follow. Finally Tammanna moves it into the most invisible realm of all - absence and death.

Why Tammanna values his rival. The rival gives his life purpose and energy. That is why the old man calls Basavaiah Tammanna's "most important possession".

"Sangoji … no, Basavaiah." The old man's slip shows he is fictionalising his own past. He remarks how "facts take on such varied guises when they are narrated as fiction" - a clue that the story is really about himself.

Detailed Explanation, Part 3: Human Nature and the Twist

On human nature. The old man says that man needs wealth, education and art, yet lives for "some kind of unbearable vengefulness". Without an enemy or a challenge, he loses his reason to live. The owner, too, will go on living for "some revenge or the other".

Losing one's name. "After a particular age, man loses his name. His age becomes important and his name vanishes into thin air." The old man is known only as "the old man" - which lets him hide that he is Tammanna.

Russia and America. The old man links his story to world events: when Russia told America "I am not your enemy", America must have felt "agony and boredom" at losing its enemy. This shows that rivalry works the same way between nations as between individuals - and that nations can survive losing an enemy, but a person may not. It gives the story a global dimension.

The twist. "My name is Tammanna." The storyteller is the hero of his own story. He left to "die" for his rival; Basavaiah, with no one to compete with, died. Then Tammanna, no longer needing his weapons, forgot his songs and became a nonentity - "Thus I avenged myself."

Multiple narratives. There are three layers: the narrator tells of the old man, who tells the wife about Tammanna, who is the old man himself. Each layer hides and then reveals a little more, showing how mysterious and complicated human relationships are.

Vocabulary (textbook exercise)

Antonyms of words used in the story

Expressions from the lesson