One December evening I climbed up to the mottai-madi, the bare terrace atop my parents’ four-floor apartment building in Chennai and waited for darkness to descend. The sun still hung low—an orange-red orb in the distance. Overhead, rose-ringed parakeets zipped towards their nightly roosts, squawking loudly — their day was done. Lone Indian flying foxes, fruit-eating bats, largely silent, were just setting out for their inverted day. They would glide under the cover of darkness. Alone, I waited for the nightly sky-show to begin.

In the distance, a large skeletal structure loomed — an abandoned parking garage, its insides darkened by mildew. A theatre, owned by T.R. Rajakumari, actor and star of the early black-and-white film era, had once stood in that spot. As a child, I watched the film Chandralekha where Rajakumari played the village dancer who stole the hearts of both the crown prince, and his lustful brother. It aired on a Sunday evening on television. If you have watched the 1948 blockbuster – it was remade in Hindi as well, starting a trend – you will recall the beat of the spectacular drum dance near the end of the film. Maybe, you remember Ranjan, the swashbuckling villain, with his polished sneer and a menacing pair of Alsatians by his side. That lengthy swordfight between the brothers after the drum dance. The good brother, alas, was not memorable at all.

As I reminisced, celestial stars emerged on that clear night. Like the slightly mismatched eyes of a mischievous emoji, two stars winked at me from above. One was golden, the other a pale blue: Castor and Pollux, twins of the Gemini constellation, the Sky Guide app informed me.

Some of us know the twins from the logo of Gemini Studios—two bugle boys who heralded every film with the studio’s signature fanfare. Then, I remembered — Chandralekha, the hit movie, was produced by Gemini Studios of Madras. What were the odds? The twins in the sky, the former theater below, and memory threading through both. Cinema, constellation, and childhood—all aligned in one quiet Madras moment. I staggered home, a little drunk on wonder.

—
Growing up in Madras, I rarely looked towards the heavens. As an adult I could not recognize anything other than the moon in the night sky but thought nothing of it until I read a 2023 study in the journal Science, which said that with increasing electrification, light pollution has soared planet-wide in the last decade. Skyglow – artificial lighting that escapes into the sky causing it to glow – now prevents humans and animals from seeing anything except the brightest celestial objects. If this present trend continues, there may be precious little left for city dwellers to see in the sky. The stars, which we ignored all along, could practically vanish from our lives.

Our blue planet is awash in artificial illumination which impacts the biological rhythms of many life forms. Nearly all living things had one universal rule – light means day, darkness means night, but it is no longer true in the age of rampant artificial lighting. Misoriented by bright lights on the beach, sea turtle hatchlings head away from the sea, while moths swarm to streetlights and their eventual doom, among other tragedies. European bats have fallen in numbers with old churches lighting up belfries for effect. Entire ecosystems are being disrupted.

Amidst all this, it seems trivial to mention that artificial light obscures the average stargazer’s view of the night skies, but this too is no small loss. Nine years ago, scientists had reported that the iconic Milky Way — home to our solar system – was hidden from one third of humanity, while the more recent study highlights the fact that things are only getting worse from the astronomer’s perspective. Before light pollution, the breathtaking view of the Milky Way had inspired artists, songwriters, and story tellers for millennia.

In his luminous essay for the New York Times, Ask Yourself Which Books You Truly Love, author Salman Rushdie writes: “In that impossibly ancient time, my childhood, a time before light pollution made most of the stars invisible to city dwellers, a boy in a garden in Bombay could still look up at the night sky and hear the music of the spheres and see with humble joy the thick stripe of the galaxy there. I imagined it dripping with magic nectar. Maybe if I opened my mouth, a drop might fall in and then I would be immortal, too.”

Rushdie’s garden in Bombay was under a different sky. In the 21st century, given the twin veils of light and air pollution, it could take nothing less than a complete blackout for most city dwellers to catch a glimpse of the Milky Way, but other celestial objects are still visible to the naked eye. I read his words and felt a pang—not just of envy, but of resolve. If the Milky Way now demands pilgrimage, I would begin with what’s still visible. The week I saw the Gemini twins, I spotted three bluish-white stars in a row—the hunter’s belt, unmistakably Orion from Greek mythology. Since ancient times, Orion has been one of the most conspicuous constellations in the night sky. To my delight, I also see Betelgeuse— the red giant, like the betel-stained mouths of older, rustic relatives — which marks the hunter’s shoulder; the blue supergiant Rigel marks his left foot.

Tracing constellations is less science than instinct—connect what dazzles, skip what dims. Like the puli kolam my mother coaxes from a lattice of dots (puli), tracing a constellation calls for selectivity—some stars you join, others you leave them be. Gradually, the desired pattern emerges. Far from city centers – in the absence of severe light pollution – there will be more dots to connect. Even in my little corner of the world, awash with halogen lights, a dozen stars blinked back — all is not lost yet.
—
This stargazing thing can be habit forming. As the auto rickshaw puttered to a stop outside our gate, before heading into the building, I paused to gaze towards the grey-orange sky. Almost immediately, my eyes fell upon a blue-white star – scintillating, like the nursery rhyme “diamond in the sky”. The app said I was looking at Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. It was also the perfect foil for what I would see next – an unwinking brownish-red dot. Mars – elders in the family would’ve called it chevvai, literally “red-mouth” in Tamil. It is a malevolent one, local astrologers say.

In the next decade, NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars on a three-year mission. They say the voyage to Mars will take astronauts six months, one way, but that evening Mars seemed to be parked right over our compound. I could not believe my luck. The oblivious teenagers lost in chatter walking down the street, the woman bent over the iron box in the blue cart across our building, the sleepy watchman sitting near the gate — I wanted to grab them all and show them the red planet, but a neo-convert’s zeal could be overwhelming, even off-putting.

After decades of ignoring the skies, my mind was aswirl with questions — what is the Indian sky we have forgotten to see? Who is the equivalent of Orion in Indian sky lore? Where is Arundhati, that steadfast star, the priest asks the bride and groom about during some marriage rituals down south? Like the fiction it is adapted from, the Tamil film Ponniyin Selvan set in the 10th century opened with an ominous comet that foreshadowed succession trouble for the Chola Empire. Comets that have portended momentous events down the ages –don’t our troubled times demand the appearance of a comet?

And the celestial commons humanity is losing sight of? The Milky Way too has an Indian story. Rushdie writes: “When I first heard the tale in the great epic Mahabharata about how the great god Indra churned the Milky Way, using the fabled Mount Mandara as his churning stick, to force the giant ocean of milk in the sky to give up its nectar, “amrita,” the nectar of immortality, I began to see the stars in a new way.”

The Milky Way may no longer spill across our city skies, but the night still offers what it can. From a mottai‑madi in Chennai, a handful of stars remain—bright enough to name, bright enough to claim. If the galaxy now lies beyond the reach of our terraces, then the work begins here: learning to read what light survives, before we go in search of the rest.

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Just at that turning between Market Road and the lane leading to the chemist’s shop he had his establishment. If anyone doesn’t like the word ‘establishment’, he is welcome to say so, because it was actually something of a vision spun out of air. At eight you would not see him, and again at ten you would see nothing, but between eight and ten he arrived, sold his goods and departed.

Those who saw him remarked thus, ‘Lucky fellow! He has hardly an hour’s work a day and he pockets ten rupees—what graduates are unable to earn! Three hundred rupees a month!’   He felt irritated when he heard such glib remarks and said, ‘What these folk do not see is that I sit before the oven practically all day frying all this stuff . . .’

He got up when the cock in the next house crowed; sometimes it had a habit of waking up at three in the morning and letting out a shriek. ‘Why has the cock lost its normal sleep?’ Rama wondered as he awoke, but it was a signal he could not miss. Whether it was three o’clock or four, it was all the same to him. He had to get up and start his day.

At about 8:15 in the evening he arrived with a load of stuff. He looked as if he had four arms, so many things he carried about him. His equipment was the big tray balanced on his head, with its assortment of edibles, a stool stuck in the crook of his arm, a lamp in another hand, a couple of portable legs for mounting his tray. He lit the lamp, a lantern which consumed six pies’ worth of kerosene every day, and kept it near at hand, since he did not like to depend only upon electricity, having to guard a lot of loose cash and a variety of miscellaneous articles.

When he set up his tray with the little lamp illuminating his display, even a confirmed dyspeptic could not pass by without throwing a look at it. A heap of bondas, which seemed puffed and big but melted in one’s mouth; dosais, white, round and limp, looking like layers of muslin; chappatis so thin that you could lift fifty of them on a little finger; duck’s eggs, hard-boiled, resembling a heap of ivory balls; and perpetually boiling coffee on a stove. He had a separate aluminium pot in which he kept chutney, which went gratis with almost every item.

He always arrived in time to catch the cinema crowd coming out after the evening show. A pretender to the throne, a young scraggy fellow, sat on his spot until he arrived and did business, but our friend did not let that bother him unduly. In fact, he felt generous enough to say, ‘Let the poor rat do his business when I am not there.’ This sentiment was amply respected, and the pretender moved off a minute before the arrival of the prince among caterers.

His customers liked him. They said in admiration, ‘Is there another place where you can get coffee for six pies and four chappatis for an anna?’ They sat around his tray, taking what they wanted. A dozen hands hovered about it every minute, because his customers were entitled to pick up, examine and accept their stuff after proper scrutiny.

Though so many hands were probing the lot, he knew exactly who was taking what: he knew by an extraordinary sense which of the jutka-drivers was picking up chappatis at a given moment ; he could even mention his licence number; he knew that the stained hand nervously coming up was that of the youngster who polished the shoes of passers-by; and he knew exactly at what hour he would see the wrestler’s arm searching for the perfect duck’s egg, which would be knocked against the tray corner before consumption.

His custom was drawn from the population swarming the pavement: the boot-polish boys, for instance, who wandered to and fro with brush and polish in a bag, endlessly soliciting, ‘Polish, sir, polish!’ Rama had a soft corner in his heart for the waifs. When he saw some fat customer haggling over the payment to one of these youngsters he felt like shouting, ‘Give the poor fellow a little more. Don’t grudge it. If you pay an anna more he can have a dosai and a chappati. As it is, the poor fellow is on half-rations and remains half-starved all day.’

It rent his heart to see their hungry, hollow eyes; it pained him to note the rags they wore; and it made him very unhappy to see the tremendous eagerness with which they came to him, laying aside their brown bags. But what could he do? He could not run a charity show; that was impossible. He measured out their half-glass of coffee correct to the fraction of an inch, but they could cling to the glass as long as they liked.

The blind beggar, who whined for alms all day in front of the big hotel, brought him part of his collection at the end of the day and demanded refreshment . . . and the grass-selling women. He disliked serving women; their shrill, loud voices got on his nerves. These came to him after disposing of head-loads of grass satisfactorily. And that sly fellow with a limp who bought a packet of mixed fare every evening and carried it to a prostitute-like creature standing under a tree on the pavement opposite.

All the coppers that men and women of this part of the universe earned through their miscellaneous jobs ultimately came to him at the end of the day. He put all this money into a little cloth bag dangling from his neck under his shirt, and carried it home, soon after the night show had started at the theatre.

He lived in the second lane behind the market. His wife opened the door, throwing into the night air the scent of burnt oil which perpetually hung about their home. She snatched from his hands all his encumbrances, put her hand under his shirt to pull out his cloth bag and counted the cash immediately. They gloated over it. ‘Five rupees invested in the morning has brought us another five . . .’ They ruminated on the exquisite mystery of this multiplication. She put back into his cloth bag the capital for further investment on the morrow, and carefully separated the gains and put them away in a little wooden box that she had brought from her parents’ house years before.

After dinner, he tucked a betel leaf and tobacco in his cheek and slept on the pyol of his house,and had dreams of traffic constables bullying him to move on and health inspectors saying that he was spreading all kinds of disease and depopulating the city. But fortunately, in actual life no one bothered him very seriously. He gave an occasional packet of his stuff to the traffic constable going off duty or to the health-department menial who might pass that way. The health officer no doubt came and said, ‘You must put all this under a glass lid, otherwise I shall destroy it all someday . . . Take care!’ But he was a kindly man who did not pursue any matter but wondered in private, ‘How his customers survive his food, I can’t understand! I suppose people build up a sort of immunity to such poisons, with all that dust blowing on it and the gutter behind . . .’ Rama no doubt violated all the well-accepted canons of cleanliness and sanitation, but still his customers not only survived his fare but seemed actually to flourish on it, having consumed it for years without showing signs of being any the worse for it.

Rama’s life could probably be considered a most satisfactory one, without agitation or heartburn of any kind. Why could it not go on forever, endlessly, till the universe itself cooled off and perished, when by any standard he could be proved to have led a life of pure effort? No one was hurt by his activity and money-making, and not many people could be said to have died of taking his stuff; there were no more casualties through his catering than, say, through the indifferent municipal administration.

But such security is unattainable in human existence. The gods grow jealous of too much contentment anywhere, and they show their displeasure all of a sudden.

One night, when he arrived as usual at his spot, he found a babbling crowd at the corner where he normally sat. He said authoritatively, ‘Leave way, please.’ But no one cared. It was the young shop-boy of the stationer’s that plucked his sleeve and said, ‘They have been fighting over something since the evening . . .’

‘Over what?’ asked Rama.

‘Over something . . .’ the boy said. ‘People say someone was stabbed near the Sales Tax Office when he was distributing notices about some votes or something. It may be a private quarrel. But who cares? Let them fight who want a fight.’

Someone said, ‘How dare you speak like that about us?’

Everyone turned to look at this man sourly. Someone in that crowd remarked, ‘Can’t a man speak . . . ?’

His neighbour slapped him for it. Rama stood there with his load about him, looking on helplessly. This one slap was enough to set off a fuse. Another man hit another man, and then another hit another, and someone started a cry, ‘Down with . . .’

‘Ah, it is as we suspected, preplanned and organized to crush us,’ another section cried. People shouted, soda-water bottles were used as missiles. Everyone hit everyone else. A set of persons suddenly entered all the shops and demanded that these be closed. ‘Why?’ asked the shop-men.

‘How can you have the heart to do business when . . . ?’

The restraints of civilized existence were suddenly abandoned. Everyone seemed to be angry with everyone else. Within an hour the whole scene looked like a battlefield. Of course the police came to the spot presently, but this made matters worse, since it provided another side to the fight. The police had a threefold task: of maintaining law and order and also maintaining themselves intact and protecting some party whom they believed to be injured. Shops that were not closed were looted.

The cinema house suddenly emptied itself of its crowd, which rushed out to enter the fray at various points. People with knives ran about, people with bloodstains groaned and shouted, ambulance vans moved here and there. The police used lathis and tear gas, and finally opened fire. Many people died. The public said that the casualties were three thousand, but the official communiqué maintained that only five were injured and four and a quarter killed in the police firing. At midnight Rama emerged from his hiding place under a culvert and went home.

The next day Rama told his wife, ‘I won’t take out the usual quantity. I doubt if there will be anyone there. God knows what devil has seized all those folk! They are ready to kill each otherfor some votes . . .’ His instinct was right. There were more policemen than public on Market Road and his corner was strongly guarded. He had to set up his shop on a farther spot indicated by a police officer.

Matters returned to normal in about ten days, when all the papers clamoured for a full public inquiry into this or that: whether the firing was justified and what precautions were taken by the police to prevent this flare-up and so on. Rama watched the unfolding of contemporary history through the shouts of newsboys, and in due course tried to return to his corner. The moment he set up his tray and took his seat, a couple of young men wearing badges came tohim and said, ‘You can’t have your shop here.’

‘Why not, sir?’ ‘This is a holy spot on which our leader fell that day. The police aimed their guns at his heart. We are erecting a monument here. This is our place; the Municipality have handed this corner to us.’

Very soon this spot was cordoned off, with some congregation or the other always there. Money-boxes jingled for collections and people dropped coins. Rama knew better than anyone else how good the place was for attracting money. They collected enough to set up a memorial stone and, with an ornamental fencing and flowerpots, entirely transformed the spot.

Austere, serious-looking persons arrived there and spoke among themselves. Rama had to move nearly two hundred yards away, far into the lane. It meant that he went out of the range of vision of his customers. He fell on their blind spot. The cinema crowd emerging from the theatre poured away from him; the jutka-drivers who generally left their vehicles on the roadside for a moment while the traffic constable showed indulgence and snatched a mouthful found it inconvenient to come so far; the boot-boys patronized a fellow on the opposite footpath, the scraggy pretender, whose fortunes seemed to be rising.

Nowadays Rama prepared a limited quantity of snacks for sale, but even then he had to carry back remnants; he consumed some of it himself, and the rest, on his wife’s advice, he warmed up and brought out for sale again next day. One or two who tasted the stuff reacted badly and spread the rumour that Rama’s quality was not what it used to be. One night, when he went home with just two annas in his bag, he sat up on the pyol and announced to his wife, ‘I believe our business is finished. Let us not think of it any more.’

He put away his pans and trays and his lamp and prepared himself for a life of retirement. When all his savings were exhausted, he went to one Restaurant Kohinoor, from which loudspeakers shrieked all day, and queued up for a job. For twenty rupees a month he waited eight hours a day on the tables. People came and went, the radio music frayed his nerves, but he stuck on; he had to. **When some customer ordered him about too rudely, he said, ‘Gently, brother. I was once a hotel-owner myself.’ **

And with that piece of reminiscence he attained great satisfaction.

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The wealth of contemporary Tamil literature has always been just out of reach for readers like me who speak the mother tongue well enough but tend to stumble over the printed word.  But you don’t need Tamil roots to appreciate this new collection of translated stories. In fact, Dilip Kumar, the acclaimed author of the Tamil original is not a native speaker of the language. The Tamil literary culture is inclusive and has porous boundaries in who gets to make it and who partakes of it.

 In the title story “Cat in the Agraharam,” we meet Babli Patti. The devout old lady wants to get rid of a stray cat that has taken to raiding her flat to lap up milk, which she offers to Lord Krishna in prayer. Her son makes an appeal to their godless relative, Suri, “the one-man kangaroo court for all of the wrongdoing in the Agraharam.” This hooligan, who can swear fluently in both Gujarati and Tamil, breezily says, “Consider the job done!” Eventually, this humane layabout ends up saving the cat from the deadly clutches of his pious aunt.

Unlike R.K. Narayan’s creation Malgudi, Ekambareshvarar Agraharam is a real place on the map.  This Agraharam is a set of three-story buildings around the 350-year-old temple of the same name, in Sowcarpet, an old neighborhood of North Chennai. The translator or “second writer” is Martha Ann Selby, an American scholar of Tamil and Sanskrit, at the University of Texas in Austin. In her introduction, she provides context, so we can better appreciate the stories. The Gujaratis of Sowcarpet come alive for us, in English, via Tamil. And to understand why this neighborhood matters so much to the stories, it helps to look briefly at how Sowcarpet itself came to be

Sowcarpet has been a stronghold of North Indian immigrants in Chennai. When the capital began burgeoning into a center of commerce in the 17^th century, some of the Gujarati weavers, who had settled in and around Madurai, took up residence near the Ekambareshvarar temple. Then came the Gujarati merchants or “sowcars,” from Gujarat, who gave the neighborhood its name, followed by traders from Rajasthan. In local parlance, these relatively affluent immigrants are known as saits. In Tamil films, the stereotypical sait, is often a money lender, and speaks broken Tamil interspersed with nonsense words like “nambal, nimbal.” Kumar’s stories push back against this caricature, grounding these communities in lived detail rather than stereotype.

Dilip Kumar is, in fact, the very opposite of those movie saits. His ancestors moved from Kutch to Coimbatore and they belonged to a prosperous community. But following the early death of his father, a rich businessman, he had to drop out of school and take up a series of dead end jobs to support his family. Such circumstances gave him plenty of experiences to draw on later, as a writer. He spoke the local language well. His humanistic, hyper-realistic fiction, which touches upon a range of themes, tends to be laced with humor. Knowing this biography enriches our reading of the stories, because it reveals how closely Kumar’s empathy is tied to his own lived precarity.

Ekambareshvarar Agraharam teems with relatable characters. My favorite is Gangu Patti who makes “beautiful use of vast numbers of Gujarati swearwords, turning them into cubes of jaggery.” Young women seek her advice on everything, “including sex, religion, pickle-making, and the nature of time and god.” As Patti holds court in her flat, we get her tragic backstory through a series of conversational vignettes. The hardest part of translation, Prof. Selby says, is rendering dialogue correctly. These conversations sound pitch perfect. To my mind, the best of the 14 stories are set in Sowcarpet. It’s here that Selby’s translation and Kumar’s ear for speech meet most seamlessly.

Other stories have their own appeal. Some of them have autobiographical elements from the author’s life, Prof Selby points out. The young worker in “The Bamboo Shoots,” and the suicidal poet in “The Scent of a Woman,” the letter writer in “The Letter,” are versions of the author. (A recent Tamil drama-film, Nasir, which premiered, and won an award, at this year’s Rotterdam film festival was based the author’s “A Clerk’s Story,” not part of this collection.) “The Miracle That Refused to Happen,” is the Indianized version of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play “A Doll’s House.” These shifts in setting and style show the range of Kumar’s concerns, even as his voice remains unmistakably his own.

This book, in all likelihood, will whet your appetite for stories by other Tamil masters. In that case, pick up a copy of Dilip Kumar’s comprehensive anthology, The Tamil Short Story: Through the Times, through the Tides. The tome traces the evolution of short fiction in Tamil through 88 stories published in the twentieth century. It’s a natural next step for readers who find themselves newly curious about the tradition Kumar is writing within.

Or you may simply want to read more of Dilip Kumar’s well-crafted short stories. Prof Selby points out that the author, who taught himself Tamil by reading newspapers, writes in short, “almost telegraphic” phrases. This insight suggests that even an intermediate reader of Tamil, like me, can hope to read the contemporary master’s work in the original. It is an unexpected takeaway from this book of superbly translated stories. It is a quietly thrilling realization—one that turns this superb translation not just into a window onto Tamil literature, but into an invitation to step right inside it.

Read the “edited” version here. html.

sowcarpetchronicles

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Legend says that the Pandya king, the ruler of Madurai, rejoiced at the birth of his daughter. She had beautiful eyes, like a pair of chiral fish. So she became Meenakshi, which is Sanskrit for “fish-eye”. The royal child had another physical characteristic, which the king and his wife didn’t like at all. Their daughter had a third nipple in the middle of her chest. Not to worry, the wise men of the court told the parents. It would just fall away when she met her destined suitor.

I recoiled in horror when I first heard this story.  A three-breasted goddess?  Many-armed gods with a choice of weapons to slay evil-doers make sense. You are going for effect. Multi-headed gods who can see things in every direction. We’ll roll with that. But a whole extra breast? The mind boggles. Turns out, Hindus are not unique in this. Ancient Greeks too depicted Artemis, Goddess of The Hunt, with multiple breasts. Followers of her Phoenician counterpart too regarded extra breasts/nipples as indicators of fertility.

If it works for divinity, it shows up in modern fiction as well.  So, we have Eccentrica Gallumbits, the “The Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon Six,” from A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. More recently, Total Recall featured a three-breasted mutant hooker. Asked about the prosthetic, the actress would joke, “I had it removed. It is in a jar on my desk.” 

Despite all these instances from popular culture, I relegated extra mammary glands to the realm of fantasy. A recent article in BBC Future set me straight. Apparently, real people (both men and women) can have extra nipples/entire breasts, or something in-between. Initially, it was thought of as evolutionary atavism — the reappearance of a trait or characteristic in an organism that was present in its distant ancestors.  Some mammals give birth to a litter of young ones and have a row of teats to suckle them all at one go. In humans, however, these extra nipples were not just along the “milk line.” Some have them in locations like the back of a thigh and in even less convenient places like inside an armpit. In women, the extra breast can lactate. This anatomical oddity can get cancerous too. People opt to have their protuberances surgically removed; others treat them like mere moles.

What was Meenakshi’s attitude towards her third breast?  The myth is silent. It offers no hint of shame, pride, or inconvenience. It didn’t give her special powers. It was just there as a test for her suitor, the three-eyed one. Meenakshi’s martial prowess is real, but her third breast falls upon seeing Shiva, signaling submission to cosmic order. Her sovereignty is folded into divine marriage.

But maybe it had something going for it. When friends asked the warrior princess, “Meen. How did you know he was THE one?” All she had to do was shrug and say in response was: “Well. He made my third breast go away….”

In the end, Meenakshi’s third breast was never a source of power or wisdom. It was simply a marker. What medicine calls an anomaly, myth reframed as fate. A biological quirk becomes a narrative hinge — proof that even the strangest features can be repurposed into destiny.

Here is a lovely poem on Meenakshi by Nancy Gandhi.

Meenakshi

I am a green goddess.
My name means Fish-eye:
like a fish-mother, whose eyes never close,
I’m always watching over my children.

Yes, fish eat their young – I do that too.
I protect the city, I destroy it.
Even I don’t know what I’m going to do next.
It’s safest to keep me confined.
My priests let me out once a year
for my wedding.

Each year I marry Shiva,
an invader from the north.
He smears himself with ashes,
wears snakes around his neck.
My parents find him disgusting,
which only increases my ardour.

Soon we’ll do battle, just like last year:
I’ll defeat him, emerge from my sanctum,
the people will celebrate our union.
Then they’ll lock me up again.

Sometimes I want to be plain Meen,
to swim away from husband and city,
from the heavy garlands that weigh on my neck,
from the chanting priests’ oil lamps and flowers,
from my worshippers’ fears and expectations,
to lose myself in the teeming ocean,
get a day job, cut my hair,
go shopping, sit in a bar alone,
and once a year, perhaps, remember.

Alli Arasani Nadakam, another warrior princess of Madurai, dramatizes resistance: Alli refuses male dominance, rules autonomously, and only yields after intense trickery. Arjuna’s masculinity is destabilized—he must become serpent, ascetic, even woman to approach her.

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The story features the filial Pundalik who gets married and then starts treating his parents badly. Wanting a respite, the parents propose to go on a pilgrimage to Kashi, but for whatever reason the son and DIL tag along too. The old people, who travel on foot, are expected to cook every day. Each night they have to groom the horses the son and DIL ride. And this sorry tale continues till they get to an ashram of a saint where they decide to take a break.

Pundalik is unable to sleep well. Around midnight, in the distance, he sees three beautiful women in soiled clothes enter the prayer room — do a variety of tasks — and emerge with clean clothes at the end of the session. This happens the next night too. Turns out, they are are forms of the rivers pilgrims bathe in to rid themselves of their sins. Ganga is already dreading the day Pundalik will reach Kashi for a dip! Was it a vision or just bad conscience telling him a few truths in the still of the night? In any case, Pundalik decides to treat his parents right from then on.

Later, when Krishna himself pays Pundalik a visit, he is so busy tending to his parents, he throws his visitor a brick and asks him to stand on it. This way, Krishna can at least keep his feet dry.  The streets are full of slush after the first rains. When Pundalik returns, Krishna is still waiting — on the brick. Pundalik apologizes but Krishna is actually happy that the man is so devoted to his parents now. He is willing to grant Pundalik a boon. Why don’t you stay on and grace us all with your presence? he asks.

The visitor, who is joined by his wife, turns to stone and so that’s how we have the Vittal Temple at Pandarpur.

Here is Arun Kolatkar’s poem on the sthalapurana:
Vamangi by Arun Kolatkar

last time I visited the temple
Vitthal was nowhere to be seen
only a brick
lay next to Rakhumai

that’s okay, I thought
Rakhumai’s better than nothing
should rest my head
on someone’s feet

after genuflecting
lifted my head off her feet
to cover all bases
just in case

then, while leaving
asked Rahkumai
where’s Vitthoo?
can’t see him

Rakhumai replied
what d’you mean, where’s he gone?
isn’t he here beside me
to my right?

looked again
just to make sure
and said
there’s no one there

spent a lifetime, she said
looking beyond my nose
now it’s hard to see
peripherally

I have become stone
look how stiff my neck is
can’t twist myself
to my left or my right

when he comes, when he goes
where he goes, what he does
I really, really
don’t know at all

assuming always, that Vitthoo
would stay at my side
I remained complacent
silly me!

on Aashaadi-Kaartiki
so many come to visit
so how come
no one tells me anything

all at once, today
I feel accosted
by the loneliness
of twenty-eight eons…

– translated by Mustansir Dalvi
from Chirimiri, by Arun Kolatkar, Pras Prakashan, 2004

Note: Vamangi means the ‘left-sided one’, and refers to Rakhumai, who is always seen on the left of Vitthal, as in the temple of Pandharpur. They are worshiped and venerated together, as in this hymn:

 

Makarand

Take my shirt off

and go in there to do pooja?

No thanks.

Not me.

But you go right ahead

if that’s what you want to do.

Give me the matchbox

before you go will you?

I will be out in the courtyard

where no one will mind

if I smoke.

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English would help him get ahead in life. So yes, he bought Readers’ Digests. Perry Mason, the star attorney of courtroom novels, taught Dilip to “speak” English. There was his mother tongue Gujarati. In Tamil, which he already spoke well, he read popular magazines — Kumudham, Anandha Vikatan and Kalki.

Then, one day, chanced upon a short story by Jayakanthan. He realized right away that this writer was a class apart. Jayakanthan’s stories featured the working poor. “Why! The man actually writes about people like me, I thought” says Dilip, recalling his amazement. He too wanted to write about such marginalized people, drawing from his own life experiences. If visits to Sowcarpet in Madras gave him a memorable cast of characters to work with, his working life supplied him with experiences to write about once he acquired the language skills to craft stories. 

Dilip discovered the Russian Masters, “whose writing did not suffer for the indifferent translation into Tamil,” celebrated American novelists Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.  His reputation as a reader grew. When any acquaintance had books to discard, they thought of him. “For instance, my friend’s bother had left behind a set of books. It could have been James Hadley Chase, but it was J. Krishnamurthy’s works,” he says. From a syllabus, largely guided by chance, his world view widened. There was no mentor – only radiwallahs who kept him in mind because he had badgered them with his persistent demands for obscure books and journals. They helped him connect with other readers of serious literature and his network grew.

As part of his job as a clerk at a textile store, Dilip would pick up a piece of chalk and creatively advertise the owner’s brand of innerwear products. He used the titles of JK’s works to do this. (Take for example: andharangam punidamanadhu. Literally translates to “intimacy is sacred.” It could also mean “your intimate parts are sacred.”  Therefore, please wear our undergarments.)  Such literary references would escape the notice of most. One day, a well-read bank employee walked in and asked to meet the person behind the ads. He quizzed Dilip on what he had read thus far and suggested new authors including the books of the reclusive writer Chudamani Raghavan. (After her death, Dilip anthologized her work, a collection called “Cannon Ball Tree”.)

So it went, his self-guided literary education.

And then, it happened. He saw an issue of a little magazine edited by none other than star-writer JK. It was slimmer, more highly priced than the usual popular Tamil magazines at the tea kiosk. So, what if he had to forgo tea for a few extra afternoons and save up to buy this magazine? Dilip soon began to wade through the unfamiliar waters of contemporary writing in Tamil with JK as his guide. Decades later, when he spoke of this incident – a turning point in his life as it were to JK, the man said – why you could’ve watched a Tamil film instead.

So much for meeting your idol, that distant beacon, in person!

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