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...

How can a journey become a Jaguar? Ask OCBC,” read an ad on the blue Toyota which overtook my cab soon after we get out of the Singapore Changi Airport. It’s about 7.30 in the morning and Jaffer, our driver, driving at 80 km per hour, has already made our journey a Jaguar (a luxury car). I look out of the window for glimpses of morning life. Jaffer negotiates a sharp turn and stops at the signal. A group of girls crosses the road. They are followed by an old man with a bagful of vegetables. The signal turns green and we move on. It’s just twenty minutes that I have been in Singapore but two things about it have already struck me: girls and cars. Both are beautiful. But there is a difference. The cars come in many varieties, but the girls look the same. More or less.My hotel, the Grand Copthorne Waterfront, is by the Singapore River. Small tourist boats pass by, leaving a trail of white on the black waters. You never get the feel of a city sitting in an air-conditioned hotel room, so I ...

We are still 30 km away from Munnar, travelling in a bus from Thiruvananthapuram, when my friend’s mobile phone rings. “It was from my college,” says the friend, the newly-appointed principal of a college in the tea country, “they say my house has been burgled.” I’m shocked, but he isn’t. “There was only an immersion rod, two blankets, a monkey cap and an air pillow,” he says. He is lucky: he was planning to shift the entire household stuff from his old house.The bus stops at Munnar and we hire an autorickshaw to the college. The theft still dominates our conversation. “In Munnar, if you are not home for two days, your house will definitely be burgled on the third day,” informs Selvan, the rickshaw driver who has obviously been eavesdropping. “Why so?” I ask him. “The border with Tamil Nadu is only a few steps away, and once they cross it, no one can catch them,” he says. It is tourist season in Munnar, as in the rest of Kerala, as is evident by the number of Qualis’ and Indicas that o...

The editor of The Little Magazine, a bimonthly which claims to be the platform which would carry important work in the world languages along with the best contemporary writing in the South Asian languages, recently made a well-known Tamil writer wait for more than one hour. The venue was Asian College of Journalism auditorium. The editor was Antara Dev Sen. Who was the Tamil writer, you might ask. Before I tell you who he was, let me tell you something about the event. A couple of weeks back, I received a e-mail from the Little Magazine group saying that, “You will be happy to know that some friends of TLM in Chennai have organised a literary evening with writers and translators on the 2nd of September. We hope to have an informal chat on “Accessing Indian literature through its languages” led by Asokamitran, Dilip Kumar and Mini Krishnan. Please do come, as a member of the TLM family, and join us for some tea and arattai.” (I didn’t understand the word arattai. I asked one of my coll...