Andal’s Garland

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

I cooked sweet pudding for you

young paddy, pounded rice, sugarcane and jaggery

Nacciyar Tirumoli 1:7

Srivilliputtur was a town Marcus and I had never heard of before visiting our good friend the professor in Chennai. He had put a plan in place for us to meet him there, along with his entourage of pilgrims. Srivilliputtur was the closest train station to a village called Watrap in the foothills of the Western Ghats, and from there our ascent would begin.

‘Gods willing, I want to make one last pilgrimage to Chathuragiri mountain,’ the professor had said, cracking his knuckles and inching a stretch back into the cushions of his chair. ‘You please come with us. In one month we go.’

Marcus’s intrigue with everything alchemical and esoteric had led us to the professor’s door. Whenever we were in Chennai, we visited him. Despite the aches and pains of old age and an ailing heart, his mind sparked at the mention of a Vedic text, the Puranas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana. And if Marcus asked about any ancient yogic teachings, the professor effervesced with stories, caves and shrines to visit, and siddhars, whether living or dead, we simply must seek out.

I had owned my book of Tamil poetry less than two weeks and my mind could not settle anywhere in the conversation he and Marcus were having. Ascetic practices of holy men paled against the aesthetics of one girl poet and the verses I had been reading ever since that day in Delhi.

If we come with flowers for you, if we chant with devotion and meditate, our self-delusion, past, present, and future, will burn like cotton in fire.

Hoping for a pause in the conversation, I took the book from my bag and placed it on the table between us. The professor stopped mid-sentence.

‘Ah, the Azhwars. Have you been hearing their songs?’

I shook my head. The professor swivelled in his chair and pulled a leather-bound tome from a shelf. ‘Four thousand verses,’ he said. A whiff of moth, dust and the scent of yellowing paper filled the air as he opened it.

‘Iti iti,’ he read, stretching his arms out as if to hold the whole room. ‘Meaning is: this too, that too.’

‘Neti neti,’ he chuckled, returning to the page. ‘Not this, not that. Which one do you choose?’

He looked at Marcus. Long before I had discovered the downward dogs and shoulder stands of yoga, Marcus was walking his Marcus path, effortlessly folding his legs into lotus, eyes closed to the materiality of the world. His answer to the professor’s question was obvious. Neti neti.

The professor looked at me and I squirmed. I had no idea what my path was, or even if I had one. I had dabbled that was all. Meditating here, chanting there. I was curious but never curious enough, or desperate enough, to leave my life behind and forge into the unknown with anything that might resemble a singular purpose. Did the professor really expect an answer from me? Iti Iti. Neti neti. I traced my fingers over the girl dancing on For the Love of God’s cover.

India had been in my blood from the beginning but in a dreamy kind of way. As a child I spent hours poring over a photograph album belonging to my grandmother. She had wrapped it in a piece of velvet studded with mirrors and slipped it into my mother’s suitcase the day my father took leave from the navy to bring the two of us to Australia.

For Saisha, she had written in elegant loops and swirls of ink above the first photo, so my granddaughter never forgets her home is also here.

There she stood, a studio portrait, pressing her lips to my newborn forehead, one sepia mountain behind her. On the next page, my grandmother is kneeling, her head in the lap of a woman with kajal eyes, a diamante scarf covering her head.

‘Who is this?’ I asked my mother.

‘That is another French lady who was living in India. Your grandmother took a steamboat all the way there to visit her. She was called The Mother.’

‘And what does this say?’ I pointed to more of my grandmother’s handwriting on the opposite page.

‘When you are older, I will tell you.’

I did not forget. ‘Read to me, Mama,’ I demanded when I was taller.

‘It is something The Mother said to your grandmama. She has written it in Occitanian.’

My mother paused, as if remembering again the language of the life she had left behind, then slowly translated. ‘Running away from difficulties is never a way of overcoming them. If you flee from them you won’t be able to defeat them, and they have every chance of defeating you. That is why we are here in Pondicherry and not on some Himalayan peak. Although I admit being on a Himalayan peak would be delightful—but perhaps not so effective.’

‘Where is cherry?’

I remember my mother’s laughter. ‘Pondicherry, sweet pea. A town by the ocean in South India, a very long way from Grandmama’s house in the South of France.’ I turned the album’s page, to the stone cottage where I was born and behind it the mountain my mother often spoke about. On the opposite page, separated by a thin sheet of tissue paper, were sari-clad women, buffalo carts, and coconut palms. Two veiled lands shifting one to the other.

I felt Marcus nudge me under the table. Was the professor still waiting for an answer? His chin rested on his clasped hands, his eyes bouncing between the two of us.

Iti Iti. Neti neti. I wanted both, the pleasures of taste, touch, smell—but I wanted to be free from them too.

Drawing fingers through his white beard, the professor returned to the words in front of him. Flicking through page upon page of its swirling Tamil he said, ‘This is the Vaishnavite book of books, their magnum opus, the Nalayira Divya Prabandham. All twelve Azhwars are here. Nammalvar, Tirumangai, Andal—or Kodai, as she was called by her father when he found her—he was an Azhwar too. His name was Visnucitta.’

The professor stopped and tapped a verse, considering its translation. ‘I am like the flower emptied by the divine bee. It is one of Nammalvar’s songs. Some say he used to visit with Andal’s father.’ He sent a casual glance my way.

‘Now,’ he said, slapping the book shut, ‘to our pilgrimage. All the necessary arrangements have been made.’ He took a folder from a pile of papers and handed us an itinerary.

‘We will make ourselves comfortable in three-tiered wooden sleeper class for the overnight train journey south,’ he said. ‘Breakfast parcels will be there when we arrive in Srivilliputtur. A minibus will take us to the foot of Chathuragiri and then we begin the eight-hour trek to its peak. You youngsters can walk it! I will have to be carried.’ He gave a laugh as carefree as a child’s.

I looked at Marcus and could tell he too was daunted by the sound of a twenty-four-hour marathon.

‘Is it possible we can meet you in Srivilli …?’ I chanced.

‘Srivilliputtur!’ The professor chuckled at my attempt. ‘As you wish,’ he said, ‘but what will you be doing between now and then?’

He unfolded a map and proceeded to draw a plan of sacred sites and temples criss-crossing Tamil Nadu, and I wondered if one overnight train ride from Chennai to Srivilliputtur might not be an easier option. His pen moved south.

‘After three weeks you will arrive here,’ he said, circling the city of Madurai. We had visited its Meenakshi temple before and were happy to return—its labyrinth of halls and smoky shrines, its enormous resident elephant. ‘And then you go to Palani,’ the professor continued, marking the map with an asterisk. ‘From there you take a bus and get off here.’ He marked another asterisk. Ask for the siddhar called Mootai Swami, then you wait for a minibus to take you to a crossroads. From there it is walking distance only.’

We’ll see, I thought, conjuring up a few rest houses away from the mayhem, a balcony and a sling-back chair, birdsong and the sound of wind in the trees. One book in my lap.

The professor returned my Azhwar paperback and walked us to the street. He hailed an auto and negotiated a fare with the driver. ‘All of them rogues.’ He shook his head. ‘Even in heaven you will find them.’

As we waved goodbye, he said, as if an afterthought, ‘Oh, and if you reach Srivilliputtur before us make sure you visit its temple. Very beautiful.’

Marcus left me at a tea stall in Meenakshi temple’s marketplace, fortification for working my way through bolts of cottons before finding a tailor offering honest prices. After three weeks of travelling on passenger trains and antique buses, sleeping on ashram floors and scrambling over boulders in search of rumoured siddhars and their caves, I needed a fresh set of clothes. Marcus disappeared into the shadows of Meenakshi’s thousand columned pavilion.

When we met later, there was a spring to his step, and over lunch at our favourite hotel, as we crumbled papadams over rice and made our way through the twelve little bowls on our thali trays, he said, ‘I have found a place. I’ll take you there tonight.’

‘What, where?’ Knowing, as I asked, not to expect an answer. Marcus, a man of few words, aloof to the chatterings of the world—still a mystery after all our years together. Maybe that was it. Without the mystery the magic would go. Or the challenge. What were the words my grandmother had written, running away from difficulties …? I swallowed them with a mouthful of vegetable sambar. Love, I thought, how do you make sense of something that is not black and white? The dhal was salty and sour with tamarind, the rasaam, spicy. Fresh corn and beans simmered in a coconut gravy.

As we ambled through the maze of motorbike-choked streets, I glanced up to see a crescent moon hovering behind the southern temple tower. It looked as if it had been caught in the arms of one of the tower’s thousand sculpted gods, Hanuman, half-man, half-monkey. Police-frisked and bags checked, we strode over a high stone step into the domain of goddess Meenakshi. Marcus led the way through throngs of evening devotees to the steps of the temple’s teerthum where the moon was again, this time a reflection in the centre of its sacred water, released from Hanuman’s arms. Fountains sprang from the concrete lotus flowers at the teerthum’s edge, rippling the moon into slivers of bright light. Past the main shrine with a notice saying Non-Hindus-Not-Allowed, past Ganesha, his golden body freshly decorated with marigold and jasmine, and into a dimly lit corridor blessedly empty but for a few of the devout briskly walking, prayer beads slipping through their fingers.

Marcus brushed the back of my hand, guiding me toward a dark alcove where four men and two women sat silently meditating before a small black granite Shiva lingam.

Lingams were everywhere—revered in temple shrines or the roots of a banyan tree on a street corner, worshipped beside holy rivers and in secret caves—these smooth oval rocks an ancient phallic symbol appearing miraculously out of the earth. I had found the whole concept bemusing at first, sacred stones so overtly s****l, openly worshipped by men, women, and children.

Marcus had a library of books at home about this elementary force—Shiva’s subtle body in perfect union with Shakti—underlying every pulse of life. Books about kundalini and the serpent sleeping at the base of a human spine; what happens when it wakes and begins uncoiling through each of the seven chakras. Books about Tantra and the path to enlightenment; how to move from a world anchored in base desires to a finer, more pure awareness. Stories of yogis and yoginis living free from s****l entanglement and earthly attachments. I would run my fingers over the books’ spines, curious on one hand, but reluctant to open their dense texts. How overwhelmingly far I was from understanding Marcus’s resolve.

Evening eased into night. Except for the few ghee lamps lit by meditators, the temple alcove where we sat was dark. The man to my left was in full lotus, his eyelids open but both pupils disappeared toward his third eye. It was a rare sight in a temple, these singular bodies engaged in the channelling of breath and recitations of silent mantras, no hands out asking for favours, no grasping and pushing. To my right sat Marcus, serene and still, at home at last, the world left behind. Given the chance, I thought with a half-smile, he’d stay there forever.

In temples our paths often separated, Marcus staying put in an alcove or shrine and me off searching its rooms for places where women gathered, smearing kumkuman powder on the pregnant belly of a statue, offering flowers at the stone feet of a boy god playfully playing his flute. So, it was on this night, a few days short of arriving in Srivilliputtur, I shook the pins and needles from my legs and walked toward the clouds of camphor and incense smoke filling Meenakshi temple’s great hall. A sea of pilgrims were prostrating at the sanctum sanctorum’s entrance. It was a sight as ancient as the temple itself and I stood mesmerised in the midst of their faith, the stones thrumming at my feet like some primaeval consciousness fighting its way into my body. Two decades. Was it really that long ago? I found myself questioning the renunciation of my sexuality, my body. What time had numbed rose up raw again.

If I was ever caught in the net of wanting more than Marcus was prepared to give, I attempted to think my way out of it. He was caught too, I rationalised, between one world and another, the wild lone eyes of Saivite ascetics who disappeared for years into remote caves only to appear in the world again needing nothing and no one. And yet Marcus lived the life of a householder with me.

‘Choosing celibacy as a path liberates mind and body,’ Marcus had said.

After meeting in India, we returned to Australia and began saving for our dream of an idyllic life in the country. Less than six years had gone by—it still felt like honeymoon days to me, wrapped in the mystery of him, beguiling as those clouds swirling Mt Warning’s peak. I was only twenty-seven. I sat there, looking at him.

‘Celibacy?’

‘You will have more life force inside you, more energy for meditation,’ he said, before folding his legs into a half lotus and closing his eyes.

‘But how can you love me and yet never make love with me?’

If my question was tinged with emotion he did not reply. He doesn’t do emotion. I grew used to the strings of that net, despair and desire. Sometimes whole weeks slipped by without a tangle. There was flour to grind, bread to bake, a garden to weed, my three days of work in town. But I had no map, no way of understanding the serpent beneath the surface, coiled at my sacrum like the picture on the cover of one of his books. Mine slept on like the weight of a stone. Occasionally it might wake—if the whim took Marcus. I glowed for days, taking pleasure in the roundness and softness of my hips and breasts, the musk smell of Marcus’s skin on mine, and I hankered for more. But more became less and less. Weeks turning into months, months into years.

There were nights I lay awake, my body burning to dissolve into his, the idea of a higher path to god distant as the Milky Way swirling outside our window—there for the sole purpose of mocking my attempts at his idea of love.

‘I can’t do this,’ I moaned into the dark, squeezing a pillow between my legs or curling into foetus position and rocking myself to sleep. I was desperate in those early days; I clung to him, pleaded for a response, knowing all the while how pathetic it must look. And if Marcus did caress me, it was never enough; it only made me crave more. My body learned ways of survival. It knew touch meant eventual pain so it retracted from his touch, and that was a relief for Marcus.

Celibacy was his decision, not mine, and yet I chose to stay.

Away from the prostrating pilgrims, a young bride in cerise silk, arm in arm with her mother and grandmother, circled the image of a woman sculpted on a column, her ancient arms wrapped around her belly, her naked body glistening with sesame oil. The bride placed a red hibiscus at her feet, then offered a leaf-bowl of sweet rice.

There was no solace for me in the asceticism of sadhus, sitting on their cushions of stone, eyes turned inward away from the life pulsing all around them.

There was too much beauty in the world. Too much to love.