Andal’s Garland

Prologue

Prologue

On the first day in the month of early dew, Andal woke long before the sun. It was the hour of Brahma, when the gods were nearest, so close his breath might brush her cheek. Birds were still asleep in their nests, heads tucked into wings, eggs cosseted. Moon-flecked shadows of tree branches and tall houses laced the earthen streets outside her window. Andal lay for a moment in this quietest hour of all, sensing the imminence of something or someone quilting the air of her room, breathing into her, pounding her temples, beating at her ribs.

Stars still crowded the dark square of sky above the courtyard as she drew a pail from the well. The water was cold. She braced herself before splashing her face. She combed coconut oil through her raven curls and twirled them on top of her head, then tied a length of homespun cloth round her waist, pleating the end and tucking it in at the back. She laced her bodice and wrapped a shawl round her shoulders. She was twelve years old now, of a marriageable age, so she veiled her head before unlatching the gate of her father’s house.

The oil lamps had burned dry, leaving the streets in delicious darkness. Andal felt reprieved, for a little longer, before the buds of the moon lilies closed in her father’s garden, before the pleas of her mother, the neighbours’ gossip and, from the only one who mattered, his stubborn silence. Except for the occasional bell of a foraging water buffalo and the skip of her feet through the night jasmine air, nothing else was perceptible. In the company of so many stars Andal felt an uncomplicated joy, free from the familiar despair that pooled in her throat like a pinch of salt dropped into a tumbler of water. Like the circle of ripples only ever rumouring his reflection at the bottom of her well.

Skipping faster to leave the thought behind, she followed Villiputtur’s wide main street, past the entrances of its two-storey houses flanked by carvings of dragons rearing twice her height. Those giant elephant trunks hanging from their sculpted mouths—how she had shrieked with fear and delight hearing her father describe these guardians with their crocodile head and lion legs, their monkey eyes and peacock’s tail. She passed the scents of sacred basil and roses, pungent and sweet, infusing the air of her Appa’s temple garden and, on the other side of the wall, the gateway of a thousand gods leading to Lord Tirumal’s temple. Then, through a labyrinth of alleyways and thatched dwellings, she skipped to the edge of town.

Andal balanced across the bunds of two paddy fields. Here, she could see for miles in ten directions. She looked to the eastern horizon beyond which, people said, were the waves of a great sea. Hints of lilac turning to crimson washed the sky, dismantling all of its stars. But there was one bright light rising as if it, and not the sun, claimed that particular morning, Venus. Andal turned around to face the dark red-rimmed peaks of the Western Ghats. Hovering in the crevice of two mountains was another bright star, Jupiter. After watching its descent, Andal turned again to Venus but she too had disappeared.

Women were already gathered at the low stone temple on the banks of a sacred river. Its source was a spring bubbling up through the floor of a cave deep within the ylang ylang forests of the mountains. From Villiputtur it snaked a slow path across the plains to the sea. For the next thirty dawns in this early dew month of Margazhi, they would bathe in its chilly waters offering rituals to Katyayani, the goddess their ancestors had invoked since the beginning of time. But now their drumbeats and incantations summoned the presence of a god as well—a blue-skinned god who flew between worlds on the back of an eagle and made his bed on the coils of a snake.

It was he who swung the pendulum of stars that morning with four arms raised holding a discus, a lotus, his conch and mace. He watched Andal unable to contain her excitement, standing midpoint in this rare conjunction of Venus and Jupiter.