Current Show

Sathi is a young soda-seller in a run-down cinema hall in a small town. Ill-paid and always weary, he finds relief from everyday tedium in marijuana and his friends-vulnerable, desperate young men who work around the movie hall. An intense and tender friendship with one of the men sustains Sathi, until a train of events casts the meagre certainties of his days and nights into disarray. Slick, visceral and startlingly inventive, Current Show unfolds in a manner that simulates rapid cinematic cuts. Murugan’s keen eye and crackling prose plumb the dark underbelly of small-town life, bringing Sathi’s world and entanglements thrillingly to life. ‘[Murugan’s] characters, dialogues and locales are unerringly drawn and intensely evocative . . . A superb writer’-Indian Express ‘The most accomplished of his generation of Tamil writers’-Caravan