wutheringheights

The yoginis of Hirapur In Bhubaneswar, if you see your fellow passenger in the bus touching his forehead with his right hand, that means you are crossing a temple. People do it quite often, especially while travelling. Big or small, there is a temple in every corner of this city. One of them is the 64-yogini temple of Hirapur, about 19 km from the city. Built in the 9th century AD, the structure of the temple is hypaethral, having a circular stonewall which is about nine feet high. Sixty yoginis — in different forms, shapes and postures — are kept inside the circular wall. Carved from black chlorite, many yoginis here have animal faces. However, the saddest part is that most of them are in ruins, the legs missing or the faces gone. Among the four yoginis kept separately in the central pillar, the 61st one is missing. Nobody knows what happened to her. Even Surendranath, the ASI’s monument attendant of the temple, doesn’t know. But if you ask him about the names of the yoginis, he will

Kamala Surayya is wary of journalists. ‘‘Recently, a reporter came to see me. He wanted to know how many men I had slept with. I asked him to get out. Reporters always hurt me. I have stopped meeting them,’’ she says, sitting in an executive chair at her flat in Ernakulam. Her head is covered with a sky-blue scarf, secured by two hairpins. Years ago, when I first met her, Kamala Surayya was Madhavikutty; for her English readers, she was Kamala Das. She wore a sari and a bunch of keys hung from her waist. There was sindoor on her forehead. Today, at 72, there are new additions to her life—a name, a walker, a magnifying lens and a swelling on one of her eyes. ‘‘I had a stroke last year and was not able to talk. The right chin had been badly affected. I was bedridden. I’ve done physiotherapy for months. I still haven’t fully recovered from it,’’ she says. ‘‘And writing?’’ I ask. ‘‘Yes, these days I mostly write poems. In India, we have only two magazines publishing English poems, Kavyabha

I was sitting with the Dhananjayans at Bharata Kalanjali, the couple’s dance school at Adyar in Chennai one October evening. You probably would think we were discussing dance and their 55 years of dancing together. But, no, it was not like that. One should remember that Bharatanatyam exponents V P Dhananjayan and Shantha are different. They are ordinary human beings. They don’t show off or blow their own trumpet. “Shantha makes good vendiya kuzhambu. And you know her rasam is very popular,” says Dhananjayan. Shantha tells me how to make it. And so we begin. “I do everything: mopping, sweeping, washing. I like to do that. And I am very particular in arranging things. You can’t take something from one place and keep it in another place. Everything has got a place. So you have to keep things according to that order,”says Shantha. Dhananjayan smiles in agreement. The couple have been dancing together for more than 50 years since they met at Kalakshetra. They have travelled all over the wor