Eight Cents of Peace

 — ✦ —

It was a house that I built by impulse, an emotion that has lasted a lifetime in me.

There is something to be said for impulse. Considered decisions carry the weight of their own deliberation — they arrive hedged, qualified, already half-regretted before the foundation is laid. An impulsive one arrives clean, unburdened by the what-ifs that crowd around more rational choices. A house built on impulse is, if one is honest about it, an act of autobiography written in the most permanent ink available. Every room a decision, every wall a statement, every threshold a declaration of how one intends to meet the world.

The house at Dharmarajapuram is mine in this complete sense. I designed it, I watched it rise from foundation to roof, I chose what went where and what faced which direction. I will not claim it is an architectural masterpiece — the Hillranger's talents, such as they are, have always run more to words than to blueprints — but it is, without question, entirely itself. And in being entirely itself, it is, I suppose, entirely me.

— ✦ —

The unlikely midwife of this house was the global financial crisis of 2008.

I was active in the stock markets then, as many of us were — caught up in that particular fever of numbers that grips a man until the morning he wakes up and finds that Lehmann Brothers has fallen and taken a substantial portion of his equanimity with it. The sub-prime catastrophe unspooled across the world's financial screens with the terrible elegance of a slow-motion disaster, and I watched it with the queasy recognition of a man who has been playing a game he now suspects he never fully understood. The markets, as markets do, reflected back our collective hubris with compound interest.

I decided to beat a retreat.

Not a permanent one — the Hillranger has never been entirely able to resist the city's gravitational pull — but a strategic withdrawal to somewhere the ticker symbols could not follow. I began looking for land. Not much land. Just enough to build a nest, grow a small garden, and wait out the madness at a dignified distance from its epicentre.

Dharmarajapuram offered itself with the quiet confidence of a place that has outlasted many such crazes and expects to outlast several more. An hour from the city by road — close enough for periodic forays back to civilization, far enough to remember what silence sounds like. Eight cents of land on Vinayak Temple Street, and half an acre of farmland nearby, both available. I bought both, called my contractor, and set about building my first mooring.

It was finished in six months. I had been particular about one thing: it should feel rural. Not rustic in the affected, city-person's-idea-of-rural way, but genuinely of the place — low-slung, practical, with the comforts tucked in unobtrusively rather than announced. The glossy white tiles I chose for the floors were perhaps the one concession to modernity — they caught the light and threw it back around the rooms so that even on overcast afternoons the house had a quiet luminosity, as if it generated its own modest glow from within. A living room, a bedroom, a guest room for the occasional visitor, a study upstairs where the mind could work at a proper elevation, and a small room on that same floor for storing grain from the farm. Straightforward, unpretentious, entirely functional.

Mine was the last house on Vinayak Temple Street. Beyond my boundary wall, the village simply stopped and the fields began — paddy fields that stretched away in three directions, east, north and south, towards a horizon that was always, in every season, doing something worth watching. To the west, the village houses lined themselves up with the orderly informality of long acquaintance.

The Vinayaka temple stood at the head of the street, as temples in Tamil villages tend to stand — less as a landmark than as a presiding fact, the fixed point around which the neighbourhood orients itself without necessarily thinking about it. I could see it from my windows. I can still see it from my windows. Some views, once acquired, become so habitual that they graduate from scenery into something closer to breathing.

— ✦ —

The uppermost terrace on the third floor is where the house fully reveals what it is.

I go up there at different hours and it is, each time, a different country. At dawn, the village assembles itself around me out of the half-light — the temple emerging first, then the tree lines, then the fields resolving from grey to green as the sun arrives with its daily punctuality. The paddy is always working; there is no fallow season for the eye up here, no empty quarter, no landscape holding its breath. The fields cycle through their colours with agricultural steadiness — the vivid, almost aggressive green of new growth, the deepening into something darker and more serious as the stalks fill out, the gold of the harvest, and then the brief naked interval of stubble before the green returns, as it always does, undiscouraged. Standing on that terrace in the early morning, with the city an hour away and entirely irrelevant, I have sometimes felt that this view is the closest I have come to understanding what the word abundance actually means.

The afternoons are different — longer, slower, the heat pressing the village into a temporary stillness that is not quite sleep. The fields shimmer at the edges. Kamakshi moves about downstairs with the unhurried efficiency of a person who has made her peace with every hour of the day. The house breathes around me.

And the evenings — the evenings at Dharmarajapuram are the reason a man builds a terrace on the third floor. The light comes apart in the west over the village rooftops with a generosity that the city, with its buildings and its hoardings and its permanent ambient glow, simply cannot replicate. It is a light that does not just illuminate but — there is no more precise word for it — releases. The day releases you, and you release the day, and for a few minutes everything is perfectly, quietly even.

At night, when the village has drawn its curtains and the highway behind the house carries only the occasional truck southward, the silence becomes total in the way that only rural silences can — not an absence of sound but a presence of something older than sound, something the city has forgotten exists.

— ✦ —

Kancha Bhatta arrived in my life about four years after the house was built.

I say arrived because that is how it felt — less a hiring than an arrival, as if he had been making his way to Dharmarajapuram for some time before either of us knew it. He and Kamakshi together became the household in the deepest sense of the word. They did not merely run it. They inhabited it, attended to it, gave it a continuity that persisted through my absences and welcomed me back through my returns. A house without people who care for it is merely a structure. Kamakshi and Kancha gave mine a pulse.

It was into this household that I eventually brought my mother.

She was ageing, and the city had become too large and too indifferent for her to navigate alone. Dharmarajapuram, with its single street and its familiar rhythms and its Kamakshi who could attend to her every need, seemed the right place for her last chapter. She settled into it with the uncomplaining adaptability of a person who has long since stopped making demands of life and has arrived instead at a kind of serene receptivity.

My mother was, by this point in her life, the simplest of souls. Her daily architecture was built from four pillars: a morning coffee, a midday lunch, an evening tea, and a cup of warm milk with fruit before bed. These were not requests — they were certainties, the reliable structure around which her days arranged themselves. She asked for nothing beyond them, and within them she was entirely, contentedly herself.

— ✦ —

The best moments of my life with her were not occasions or events. They were minutes.

Every morning, I would sit in the room adjoining the car portico — a room that caught the early light well, that had a table at which I could open my journal and set down whatever the previous day had left behind. My green tea. My pen. The particular silence of early morning in a village, which is not really silence at all but a layered quiet composed of birds and distant agricultural sounds and the house itself adjusting to the new day.

And across the table, in her chair, my mother with her coffee.

We did not speak during these sessions. Not from any awkwardness — simply from an understanding, arrived at without negotiation, that words were unnecessary. She watched me write with an expression of mild, benign interest, thinking that I was studying for some specialization in the field of medicine. I had since come to know from Kamakshi that mother is convinced that I am a doctor who cures patients, just as I administer meds to her from time to time. And I occasionally dispensed medicines and advice to the village folk who came to the gate, and these were apparently sufficient evidence for her diagnostic theory. She had lost touch with me for some years after my marriage, and during that time had built her own quiet version of who I was and what I did. She never revised it. I never corrected it.

Those mornings were, I now understand, among the purest experiences of my adult life. Two people at a table. No words. No agenda. The green tea cooling, the coffee steaming, the journal filling, the light coming slowly through the windows and moving across the glossy white tiles in long golden rectangles. My mother, the eternal innocent, watching her son the imaginary doctor with quiet satisfaction. Her presence asking nothing of me but presence in return.

I gave her that. Imperfectly and intermittently, as I give most things — but I gave her that.

— ✦ —

She declined slowly, as the old sometimes do — not a sudden departure but a long, gradual dimming, like a lamp that loses its brightness so incrementally that you almost cannot name the moment the room began to feel darker. Kamakshi tended to her with a devotion I have not the words to adequately honour. Kancha kept the household steady. I was there through the final weeks, sitting with her in the mornings as I always had, the journal and the green tea in their customary places even when she was no longer quite well enough to walk up to her designated chair.

She went peacefully, in her room, in the house I had built. I was with her.

There is a particular quality of grief that arrives not as devastation but as the slow settling of something that has been long understood. My mother had had her life, her simple and complete life, and it had been held well at the end. The house had done what I had built it to do. I sat with that knowledge in the days that followed, in the room with the morning light and the table and the chair where she used to sit, and I found that what I felt, underneath the loss, was something that I can only describe as gratitude.

— ✦ —

Her room is still her room.

I do not use it for anything else. Kamakshi keeps it clean and aired, as she keeps everything. Sometimes, passing the door in the early morning on my way to the journal table, I am aware of a quality of stillness in that room that is different from the stillness of the other rooms — quieter, more settled, as if it too has arrived somewhere and stopped travelling.

I do not linger at the door. But I do not hurry past it either.

— ✦ —

The house stands where it always has, at the end of Vinayak Temple Street, no longer the last house — the village has grown around it over the years, as villages do, quietly and without announcement. The fields are still there, still lush, still cycling through their seasons with that unhurried agricultural faithfulness that city life makes one forget is possible. The temple still presides at the head of the street. From the third-floor terrace, the view is everything it always was — perhaps more, now that I know better how to look at it.

I come here and I belong. It is as simple as that, and as sufficient.

I have lived in several houses in my life.

But only one of them built me back.

When the markets crashed in 2008 and I came looking for peace in eight cents of village land, I did not know I was building a home in the fullest sense of the word. I thought I was buying time. I was, it turns out, buying something considerably more durable — a place where the morning light falls on white tiles, where the paddy fields work their unhurried seasons towards the horizon, where Kamakshi moves about with her permanent composure, where Kancha tends the grounds as if they were his own, and where a room at the end of the corridor still holds, in its particular silence, the memory of a woman who thought her son was a doctor and loved him anyway.

A man builds a house to have somewhere to return to. He does not always know, when he lays the foundation, what it is he will be returning from — or what shape he will be in when he arrives. The house at Dharmarajapuram has received me in many conditions over the years: elated, exhausted, grieving, restless, at peace. It has never commented on any of them. It simply stands at the end of Vinayak Temple Street, the Vinayaka temple at its head, the fields spreading green and patient to the horizon, and waits — with a fidelity that, I have come to understand, is the closest thing to unconditional that the material world can offer.

The impulse of 2008 has lasted, as I said, a lifetime.

Or perhaps it is more accurate to say — it has become one.

The Neem Tree at Viswanathapuram

There is an orchard at Viswanathapuram.

I know this because I built it. Or more precisely, Kancha Bhatta and I built it — which means Kancha did the harder thinking and I provided the enthusiasm and the saplings, in roughly equal measure. We planted the trees over several visits across a few seasons, arguing cheerfully about spacing and soil, and congratulating each other on every tree that survived. Most of them did. Trees, I have observed, are more resilient than the people who plant them.

The orchard surrounds a house. The house belongs to Abirami.

I should say at the outset that Abirami did not ask for an orchard. I built the house on the property that rightfully belonged to her, about twelve years ago, just before Skandan's marriage. The orchard, however, was nobody's plan but Kancha's and mine — an unsolicited addition that she accepted with the composure she brings to most things she did not ask for and cannot quite refuse.

---

I first saw Abirami the way one sees a sudden clearing in a forest — unexpectedly, and with the distinct sensation that one has stumbled into somewhere one was always meant to arrive. She was fair-featured, unhurried in the way certain people are who have no need to prove themselves, with eyes that held a quality I can only describe as alert repose. She was watching the world with complete attention and complete composure, the way a good doctor watches a patient — not coldly, but without being swept away.

I was, as the phrase goes, quite swept away.

We had five years that I shall not attempt to describe, because the right words for those years belong to a younger man and that younger man has been gone a while now. Suffice to say that when Skandan was born — our son, the axis around whom both our worlds now revolve at a respectful distance — we believed, as young parents do, that joy of this magnitude was permanent. We were not entirely wrong. The joy remained. It simply got buried, the way good soil gets buried under construction.

The construction, in our case, were, my career and a congenital tendency to seek solitude every time, I could afford it.

---

I will not dress this up. Work took me away — first for days, then for weeks, then in a manner so gradual and so total that the distance between us became less a physical fact and more a condition of our lives. I travelled. I built. I acquired. I returned home with the frequency of a migratory bird who has begun to question whether migration is entirely worth the trouble.

Abirami, through all of this, said nothing.

I mean this literally. When she disagreed, when she grieved, when she needed — she said nothing. Her protest was a silence of such completeness that it had texture and temperature. You could not ignore it. You could only misread it, which I, in those years, consistently did. I misread her silence as indifference. Then as reproach. Then as a kind of hostility. I was, I now understand, wrong on all three counts. Her silence was simply the form her dignity took. She had decided, somewhere early in her life, that she would not diminish herself by asking twice. If you did not understand the first time, that was your limitation, not hers. She was not going to explain herself.

You can imagine how this went down with a man of my particular temperament.

My ego, never a modest creature, took mortal offence. I retreated further into islands of solitude. She retreated further. We became, over the years, two very courteous strangers who shared a child and a property and a history that neither of us quite knew what to do with.

---

There came a time — this is the part of the story I find hardest to write without the benefit of irony — when I moved to Dharmarajapuram. My mother, hitherto, a fiercely independent lady, needed care, much against her wishes. The village offered a life at a pace she could manage. Kamakshi and Kancha Bhatta made the household what it was. I found, to my mild surprise, that I belonged there in a way I had not belonged anywhere else in some years.

My mother left her mortal world four years ago. She was tended well, she went peacefully, and Dharmarajapuram held its breath with me that day and then resumed, as villages do, with the unceremonious continuity of the living.

Skandan, meanwhile, had long settled into his own life. Married, employed, steady — the solid young man his mother raised, with perhaps a fraction of his father's restlessness tucked somewhere out of sight. The house at Viswanathapuram had already been built by then. She moved into it and made it hers with the quiet thoroughness she brings to everything. After Skandan's marriage, Abirami was in her village, in her own home, with her garden for company.

---

Viswanathapuram is Abirami's ancestral village. The land on which the house stands came to her in a manner that I find, looking back, rather typical of how things arranged themselves between us — her father had needed financial assistance at some point, and I had acquired the plot from him for Abirami, out of my resources, quietly and without ceremony. It was not a grand gesture. It was simply the right thing to do at the time, and the right things one does quietly tend to outlast the grand gestures one makes with announcement. The land passed to her. I had been thinking, in that way one does when distances have grown long and words have grown short, about what I actually owed this woman. Not legally. Not contractually. But in that older, harder accounting that keeps its own books.

I had kept her funded throughout — this I can say without self-congratulation because it was simply what one did and does, and she would not have permitted anything less. Abirami has her pride. It is, along with the garden and the silence, the most defining thing about her. She routed everything through Skandan — what she needed, she told him; what he could not provide, she went without. I was never approached directly. I was, in her management of our arrangement, a silent investor in a company whose operations she ran entirely herself.

Building the house on her land, twelve years ago, was my way of saying something I apparently could not say in any other register.

Kancha and I grew the trees. Mango and coconut and gooseberry and, of course, neem. The neem was Kancha's idea, and it was the right one. It is now the most vigorous tree in the orchard — dark-leaved, faintly bitter in the air around it, growing with a kind of opinionated energy that I find, upon reflection, entirely appropriate.

---

Abirami lives at Viswanathapuram now. She tends the garden with the focused affection she has always reserved for growing things. She knows every plant by temperament, the way a good teacher knows every student — not just the name and the grade, but the precise nature of the difficulty. She does not talk to the plants, as far as I can tell. She simply pays attention to them. This, I have come to believe, is her version of love.

I visit. Not as often as I should, and more often than is perhaps wise, which is the particular arithmetic of complicated relationships.

When I arrive, Abirami stands at the door — not rushing forward, not hanging back. Simply present, in that composed, watchful way of hers. A meal appears without consultation. She knows what I eat. She has always known. The meal is her first statement. It is also, usually, her most affectionate one.

And then, sometimes, the storm arrives.

I have never been able to fully predict it. Something is said, or not said, or the visit is too short, or the gap since the last visit was too long, or the accumulated weight of years and distance and silence chooses that afternoon to make itself known. She flares. It is not pretty and it is not quiet and it is, I have had to accept, entirely legitimate. She has earned the right to her storms the way a person earns anything — through long patience that was never adequately acknowledged. 

I listen for as long as I am able. Then, if the weather does not break, I retreat to Dharmarajapuram, carrying my guilt and my relief in roughly equal proportions, like a man who has just narrowly survived something he deserved. The long years of silence, is probably, taking its never-ending toll, which I have learnt to pay, acknowledge the recompense and then, if overwhelming, beat a hasty retreat.

And then — this is the part I cannot explain and have stopped trying to — she calls. Or Skandan mentions that she asked after me. Or I arrive on the next visit to find her standing at the door in exactly the same composed way, and the meal is on the table, and the storm has passed as completely as if it never came. She does not reference it. She does not apologize and she does not require an apology. We proceed.

I used to find this maddening. I now find it, cautiously, something closer to grace.

---

She wants me to live at Viswanathapuram. She has said this, in her way — not by asking, but by making the house so unmistakably ready for it. The orchard is tended. The rooms are kept. The kitchen is stocked with the knowledge of exactly what I will want at exactly what time of day.

I am, in the language of my own village, a man still making up his mind.

My work keeps me near the city. Dharmarajapuram keeps me sane. The distance is two hundred and fifty miles, which is not far in the scheme of distances this relationship has already survived. I would like to settle at Viswanathapuram eventually — this I know as well as I know anything. There is something clarifying about the idea of ending where one began, of finding in one's final chapter the things that the middle chapters crowded out.

But not yet. And Abirami, who has waited with more patience than I had any right to expect, continues to wait. She does not ask. She does not remind. She stands at the door when I arrive, places the meal without consultation, tends the neem tree in the orchard, and allows the storms when they come and the warmth when it comes, with an equanimity that I can only describe as one of the more remarkable things I have witnessed in a lifetime of witnessing.

The neem tree, I should mention, is doing exceptionally well.

It has grown faster than anything else in the orchard, taller than the mango we planted the same season, broader than the coconut, more assertive than all of it. It drops its leaves in the summer heat and grows them back with an energy that is almost argumentative. The village women take its leaves for their rituals, its bark for their remedies, its oil for everything else. It gives without being asked. It does not sweeten itself for anyone. It is, in every sense, indispensable.

Kancha, when I pointed this out on our last visit, scratched his chin and looked at me with the expression he reserves for observations he considers approximately but not entirely correct.

"The neem," he said, "does not know it is indispensable. That is why it grows so well."

I looked at the tree for a while. Then I looked at the house, where Abirami was moving about in the kitchen, doing something unhurried and purposeful with the late afternoon.

I thought about saying something. Then I did not.

Some understandings are better arrived at in silence.

---

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where the evenings are long and the questions are longer.

Visitors at my Door in Dharmarajapuram

 

There is a well-known saying among people who have chosen to live close to nature — you may own the land, but the land owns you back. I discovered the truth of this rather early after building my weekend home in Dharmarajapuram, a quiet village not far from the city, that I had chosen with some deliberation as a place to retreat to, to breathe, and perhaps someday, to grow old in gracefully.

I had expected solitude. I had expected birdsong, clean air and the unhurried rhythms of village life. What I had not quite bargained for was the parade of visitors — invited and otherwise — who would present themselves at my door, my window, my garden wall, and occasionally, my dining table, with a cheerful disregard for appointment or protocol.

Let me introduce them to you, one by one. I assure you, no two are alike.

---

Chirpy — The Window Philosopher

Before anyone else stirs in Dharmarajapuram, before the crows begin their morning announcements and before Kamakshi has lit the stove, there comes a small insistent tapping at my bedroom window. It is precisely 5.30 in the morning. It is, without fail, Chirpy.

Chirpy is a tiny bird with wings of the most arresting blue — a blue that seems improbable against the grey pre-dawn light, as though a small piece of the afternoon sky has got lost and ended up on my windowsill. He is, by any measure, a creature of great conviction and very little wisdom.

My bedroom window is fitted with reflective privacy glass. To anyone looking from outside, the glass presents a perfect mirror image of the world — the garden, the trees, the sky. Chirpy, bless his tiny heart, has concluded that what he sees in that glass is not a reflection, but a doorway. Another world. A world that looks exactly like this one, where another small blue bird of identical appearance waits on the other side, equally eager to make contact.

Every morning at 5.30, Chirpy arrives to breach that barrier. He taps. He pecks. He tilts his head and studies the problem. He tries again. The other bird — his reflection — taps back with equal determination, which only encourages him further. This has been going on for longer than I care to remember, and Chirpy has not once, in all that time, arrived at the conclusion that the mission is impossible. He is either the most dedicated philosopher in the village, or the most optimistic fool. Given that I cannot tell the difference with certainty, I leave the question open.

What I cannot leave open, of course, is my eyes. Chirpy has resolved that problem for me. He is my alarm clock, my morning call, my uninvited reminder that another day has begun and that at least one creature in Dharmarajapuram is already at work pursuing an impossible dream. There are worse ways to start a morning.

---

Gudu-Gudu Pandi — Yama's Postman

If Chirpy represents the philosophical wing of my visitor list, the Gudu-Gudu Pandi represents its eschatological division.

He arrives on some Saturday or Sunday mornings — never announced, never expected, always unmistakable. You hear him before you see him — the dry rattling cadence of the damaru, the pellet drum, sending its peculiar gudu-gudu sound ahead of him through the village lanes and his preamble lines, “Nalla Kaalam Porakkirathu, Nalla Kaalam Porakkirathu” ! (Good times are on the anvil) By the time he reaches my gate, the drum has already set the mood. This is not a social call. This is a cosmic one.

The Gudu-Gudu Pandi is a man of about forty-five, bare bodied and barefoot, his skin smeared with sacred ash and vermillion, clad in a saffron clothing, a garland of beads around his neck. He carries his damaru (a pellet drum) in one hand and, in a bag slung over his shoulder, the item that distinguishes him from all other itinerant holy men in the district — an old human skull, carried as matter-of-factly as another man might carry an umbrella, available for deployment should any householder require a tantric remedy on short notice. He comes, it is said, directly from the cremation ground, which lends his morning visits a certain atmosphere.

There is a Tamil saying that a corpse on a Saturday always has company. The Pandi's Saturday rounds would seem to confirm this. His is a world lived at the junction of the living and the dead, and he navigates it without theatre, without drama, and without any apparent burden. He makes his predictions in a matter-of-fact tone — the damaru speaks, he interprets, the damaru then twists to confirm. It is a closed loop of celestial consultation that leaves little room for appeal.

In 2011, he stopped at my gate and informed me, after a considered consultation with the drum, that my son would complete not just BA but also MA. This prediction was delivered with the gravity of a Vedic pronouncement. What it meant, in the vocabulary of a man whose academic taxonomy stops at postgraduation, was that my son would complete his PG studies — which he duly did. The cosmos had spoken. The drum had confirmed. The Pandi had delivered.

Kamakshi always finds a coin for him, quickly, because the alternative — being turned away without alms — carries the possibility of what the Pandi delicately terms an ominous alert. Kancha Bhatta used to shoo him away, in the confident manner of a man who does not believe in pellet drums or borrowed skulls. I once took the trouble of explaining to Kancha the precise nature and standing of the gentleman at our gate. The conversion was instantaneous. The next time the Pandi appeared, Kancha received him with folded palms and a request — delivered with great diplomatic courtesy — that the master was unfortunately not at home, and perhaps the next house might be more deserving of the Pandi's attentions.

---

 

Boom Boom Maadu — The Nodding Prophet

Not long after the Gudu-gudu Pandi's visits, on a different morning entirely — the two seem to maintain a courteous distance from each other in the village calendar — another sound announces another visitor. This time it is the wail of a nadaswaram, followed by the sharp crack of a whip slicing the morning air.

The Boom Boom Maadu man has arrived.

He is, in surface appearance, not unlike the Gudu-Gudu Pandi — barebodied, saffron-veshti clad, a man of the road and the ritual economy of a Tamil Village. But where the Pandi has his damaru and his skull, the Boom Boom Maadu man has something altogether more impressive: a bull.

Not just any bull. This bull is an event. His horns are painted in vivid colours. Ornaments hang around his neck. A silky, embroidered shawl adorns his back. Bells are strung to his feet — so that he announces his arrival in music even before his master cracks the whip. He is, in the taxonomy of sacred animals, a representative of Nandi himself, Lord Shiva's vehicle, dressed for the occasion.

His role, however, is more specialised than Nandi's. His role is to nod. Whatever prediction the Boom Boom Maadu man delivers — whatever he says about your fortunes, your family, your future — the bull nods. Vigorously. Aggressively, even, as though the cosmos itself is emphatic on the subject. It is the most committed performance of agreement I have ever witnessed in any species. The bull has never, in my observation, declined to nod. The bull has never offered a second opinion. The bull nods, and the matter is settled.

In 2015, the Boom Boom Maadu man stopped at my gate and, after due consultation with his instrument of prophecy, announced that I would live a king's life — though without a retinue. The bull nodded with great conviction. I received this prediction in the spirit in which it was offered, choosing not to point out that Kamakshi and Kancha Bhatta were standing approximately six feet behind me at the time.

Kamakshi always receives the bull warmly, feeding him bananas and sweet porridge rice, which he accepts with dignity. On one memorable occasion, the bull — mid-nod, mid-prophecy — caught sight of Kamakshi emerging from the kitchen with a bowl of porridge. The nodding stopped. For one extraordinary moment, the cosmic confirmation mechanism was suspended. The bull had an opinion of his own, and it was entirely about the porridge.

Some things, it turns out, are more compelling than prophecy.

---

 Bhujanga Veera — The Silent Cobra

Most of my visitors announce themselves — with drums, nadaswarams, whip cracks, or the persistent tapping of a small determined beak. Bhujanga Veera announces himself with silence. It is the sparrows who do his announcing for him.

When a dozen sparrows in my garden suddenly abandon their ordinary morning chatter for something higher-pitched, more urgent and more collective — a sound that carries an unmistakable note of alarm — I know without looking that Bhujanga Veera has entered my gates. He is a large cobra, and he moves through the garden with the unhurried authority of a creature who has been on this earth considerably longer than the bungalow that now sits upon it.

The household response to Bhujanga's arrival follows a protocol so well established by now that it requires no direction. Kamakshi, on hearing the sparrow alarm, does not wait to verify. She is through the back door before the sound has fully registered. Kancha Bhatta proceeds to the balcony upstairs and takes up a position of dignified elevation from which he observes developments below. He will not come down until the situation is fully resolved — either by my intervention or by Bhujanga's own departure. These terms are non-negotiable.

I go downstairs.

Bhujanga Veera, upon seeing me, invariably does the same thing. He pauses, as if making a brief assessment. Then he turns and slithers back the way he came, in a manner that I have always felt carries the suggestion of mild apology — sorry, did not realise this particular residence was yours. I will see myself out. He disappears through the gate with the unhurried composure of a guest who has decided the party is not quite to his taste.

On the occasions when I am not at home, things unfold differently. Bhujanga, unimpeded, makes his way to the palm fronds — climbing upward with that boneless, liquid grace — while Kamakshi and Kancha watch in horror, from their respective positions of safety, transfixed by an ascent they are powerless to interrupt.

He comes perhaps once a quarter. The sparrows always know first. And until Bhujanga clears the premises, Kancha Bhatta remains on the balcony. I have never tried to negotiate this arrangement. Some things in Dharmarajapuram are simply the way they are.

---

Rikki and Raaki — The Coconut Tree Couple

Among all my visitors, Rikki and Raaki are the only ones I cannot really call visitors at all. They live here. They have simply chosen not to inform me.

They dwell in the coconut tree — a arrangement they appear to consider permanent and exclusive — and they spend the day in a state of continuous, acrobatic domestic negotiation. They chase each other through the fronds with the energy of creatures who have never once considered whether the enterprise is necessary. When Raaki disappears on some errand of her own, Rikki's response is immediate and operatic — a continuous, high-pitched screeching that fills the garden and a fair portion of the neighbourhood, announcing to all of Dharmarajapuram that he cannot account for his mate's whereabouts and finds this situation entirely unacceptable.

They descend to my portico and balcony occasionally, in search of grains or leftovers, with the casual entitlement of tenants who feel their landlord is behind on maintenance. Rikki, in particular, has a weakness for the flowers on my drumstick tree, which he inspects daily and confiscates with systematic thoroughness. I have made my peace with this arrangement. Some flowers survive his audit and grow into full drumsticks. I have come to regard these survivors with the particular affection one reserves for things that have beaten the odds.

When Bhujanga Veera arrives, Rikki and Raaki bolt to the very top of the coconut tree — the one elevation in my garden that the cobra has not, thus far, seen fit to visit. This is, for the squirrels, the non-negotiable sanctuary. I watch their ascent on cobra days with something close to relief. Good for them, I think each time. Good for the squirrels.

---

The Gang of Thieves — Organised Crime with an Alpha General

Bhujanga Veera is a visitor. The Boom Boom Maadu bull is a visitor. Even the Gudu-Gudu Pandi, for all his proximity to the other world, can be categorised as a visitor.

The monkeys are something else. The monkeys are an operational threat.

They arrive as a group — never fewer than a dozen — and they move through the village with the coordinated efficiency of a unit that has done this before and intends to do it again. Their business model is simple: identify a household, assess its defences, exploit any gap, and depart with whatever edible items can be secured in the available time. My household has been on their list from the beginning.

Kamakshi keeps all doors closed when the gang is known to be in the vicinity. This is her primary defence, developed through experience. Kancha Bhatta arms himself with a stick, which the monkeys regard with the polite indifference of seasoned professionals encountering an amateur deterrent. They do not leave because of the stick. They have never left because of the stick.

I step outside. They leave.

This asymmetry has puzzled and, I suspect, faintly irritated Kancha for years. The monkeys, who are unbothered by sticks, by shouting, by any conventional persuasion, are genuinely afraid of me. I have a .177 bore pellet gun — harmless, but effective as a statement of intent — and the monkeys have learned to read the situation accurately.

At the head of this operation is the Alpha Male — an old, large, and entirely unhurried individual who directs proceedings from whatever elevated surface offers the best view. He is the only monkey who does not panic on my appearance. He ambles when I shoo him. He requires the pellet gun to persuade him. Even generals, I have found, respect artillery.

His operational intelligence is considerable. On one occasion, Kancha was sent to Pazham'ni’appan's local fruit shop for apples. The Alpha, observing from his perch on a nearby rooftop, deployed his commanders along Kancha's return route. The ambush was clean, professional, and entirely successful. Two apples were extracted. Kancha arrived home with the remaining two, his dignity somewhat rearranged, and a grievance that he aired at some length.

The monkey who breached our dining table deserves a separate mention. On a day when I was absent and a door had been negligently left ajar — Kamakshi and Kancha have different accounts of whose negligence was responsible, and the inquiry remains open — a monkey walked in, located the bananas on the dining table, and departed. The whole operation was apparently conducted without fuss. Dharmarajapuram's criminal class does not require drama to be effective.

---

Kalia — The Punctual Ancestor

Every day, at one o'clock in the afternoon, with a regularity that puts most humans to shame, Kalia arrives.

He is a large-billed crow — unhurried, purposeful, and possessed of a dignity that I have come to associate with someone who knows exactly why he is here and exactly what is owed to him. He lands on the compound wall and waits, with the patience of the ancestral realm, for his meal.

We feed the crow before we eat. This is not superstition; it is theology. In our tradition, the crow is the emissary of our manes — the ancestors who have gone before us and who, we believe, continue to take some interest in our welfare. A handful of fresh rice and lentil placed on the wall before the household eats is an acknowledgement of that continuity, a daily act of gratitude to those who made our existence possible.

Kalia has absorbed this arrangement completely. He arrives at one o'clock. If the offering is on the wall, he eats, and departs. If Kamakshi is away and no offering has been made, Kalia caws. He caws with increasing insistence for approximately fifteen minutes — a formal, operatic expression of ancestral disappointment — before accepting the situation and leaving.

If the thieving primates show up before Kalia flies down, Kamakshi lands up in a predicament of sorts.

On the days when Kamakshi is absent and I am at home; I offer what is available. Murukku, as it happens, goes down very well. The ancestors have expressed no objection to festival snacks. The manes of this household, it appears, are pragmatic.

---

 

Krishna — The Philosopher King

And finally, last on this list but first in contentment, there is Krishna.

Krishna is a cat. He arrived one day and stayed, in the manner of cats who have assessed a situation and found it satisfactory. He has the bearing of a resident, the schedule of a professional, and the complete absence of obligation that is the defining characteristic of the species.

At six in the morning, he makes his entry through the back door — stealthy, unhurried, already knowing where he is going. He goes to Kamakshi, who knows what is required of her and produces a pale of milk without being asked. This transaction has never been renegotiated.

From six until noon, Krishna works. He hunts mice through the house and garden with the focused application of a craftsman who takes his occupation seriously. The house is, in consequence, a mouse-free establishment, and Kamakshi regards Krishna with the particular warmth reserved for those who solve problems without being asked twice.

By noon, Krishna has done what was required of him. He proceeds to the balcony — the same balcony where Kancha retreats on cobra days, now transformed into a very different kind of sanctuary — stretches himself to his full length, and dozes his way to glory. There is no other phrase for it. He lies there in the afternoon light with the complete horizontal satisfaction of a creature who has discharged his duties and earned his rest, and who has arranged his life so that the two are in perfect equilibrium.

At five in the evening, he rises, stretches, and disappears into the neighborhood for his evening rounds — food, company, and whatever social engagements a cat of his standing maintains. He does not explain his movements and is not asked to.

---

Dharmarajapuram is a quiet village. I chose it for its quietness, its distance from the city's noise, its mornings of clean air and unhurried time. I stand by that choice entirely.

But I have learned, over the years, that quietness does not mean emptiness. It means, rather, that the world fills itself differently — with a tapping at the window at 5.30am, with the rattle of a damaru on a Saturday morning, with the sparrows' alarm and the lazy authority of a cobra crossing your garden, with a bull nodding gravely to confirm your destiny, with an ancestral crow on the compound wall at one o'clock exactly.

I did not invite most of them. They came anyway. And Dharmarajapuram, I think, would be considerably less interesting without them.

---

Nambi's moment of reckoning.

 The Oracle of Dharmarajapuram

Every village has one. That one person to whom all roads lead when things go wrong — when a horoscope needs reading, a land deed needs interpreting, a school admission needs navigating, or a neighbour needs cursing in legally defensible language. In Dharmarajapuram, that person was Gopala Nambi.

Nambi was the village's only brahmin — a distinction that carried with it not merely caste identity, but an entire ecosystem of projected expertise. The villagers, for reasons best known to them, credited him with mastery over the Vedas and Shastras, fluency in finance and law, deep knowledge of astrology, and sound judgment in matters of pedagogy. He was, in every sense, a one-man Google — except he actually gave correct answers.

During the week, Nambi attended to his various callings in the city, returning to his village home every weekend, accompanied by his trusted lady cook Kamakshi and his ever-reliable errand boy, Kancha Bhatta. Together, this modest trinity kept the Nambi household running with quiet efficiency — Kamakshi in the kitchen, Kancha at the gate, and Nambi himself dispensing wisdom from the verandah to whoever cared to seek it.

His village home was a handsome bungalow, surrounded by trees he had planted with care over the years — neem, palm, ashoka and berry — standing like a green retinue around the home of their learned master.

Life was, on most weekends, agreeable.

Except in January.

---

The Annual Torment

Every winter, the village folk of Dharmarajapuram celebrated the Ayyappa Festival with great fervour at the local Vinayaka Temple — which stood, by some cruel geographical joke, directly opposite Gopala Nambi's home. The festival was a precursor to the long and arduous pilgrimage to Sabarimala in Kerala, and its centrepiece was the ritual firewalk — devotees crossing a bed of glowing red embers as an act of devotion and sacrifice.

For this purpose, the villagers collected vast quantities of dry firewood — neem branches, mahogany, peepal, and various other kinds — and deposited them in a large pile, across the road right opposite to Nambi's gate. The logs would be set ablaze early in the morning, burning through the day until they reduced to a perfect carpet of embers by evening, ready for the firewalkers.

It was a sacred tradition. It was a deeply moving spectacle of faith. And it was, for Gopala Nambi, an annual nightmare.

Every year, the heat from the bonfire singed his beloved trees — the neem, the ashoka, the berry — burnt in half like offerings nobody had asked them to make. Worse, the electrical supply wires that ran overhead from the temple to his home passed directly above the fire. The previous year, the insulation on the wires had partially melted from the heat. Nambi had watched this with the quiet horror of a man who understands both electrical resistance and the absence of common sense.

He had complained. He had reasoned. He had petitioned.

This year, he went one step further and filed a formal complaint at the Kavanoor police station, requesting either a cancellation of the event or — more reasonably — its relocation to the open ground near the paddy wetlands on the other side of the village road, safely away from his home and its overhead wiring.

The police heard him out with admirable patience and then told him, with equal admirable brevity, to let it go. It was once a year. These things happen. Move on.

Nambi returned home, outwardly composed, inwardly volcanic.

---

The Morning of the Reckoning

It was early January. The kind of January morning that Dharmarajapuram does particularly well — thick fog rolling in from the fields, swallowing the morning sun whole, leaving the neem trees and palm fronds as ghostly silhouettes in the mist. The village had woken up to the sounds of the temple mike making periodic announcements on the progress of the Ayyappa pooja, and the firewood outside Nambi's gate had been lit at dawn, beginning its slow, all-day transformation into the evening's sacred embers.

Nambi had arrived for the weekend with Kamakshi and Kancha, and had clearly arrived with a plan.

He bathed early that morning — the first bath. He skipped his morning meal entirely, which for a brahmin of Nambi's constitution and routine was itself a declaration of war. Around noon, he bathed again — the second bath, the ritual bath — and emerged dressed in his panchagajam, the traditional white cotton garment of ceremonial significance, his body smeared from forehead to forearm in sacred ash, vibhuti, applied with the thoroughness of a man who means business.

He walked into his pooja room, sat before his deities, and began.

First, the Sankalpam — the formal declaration of intent, addressed to the cosmos, specifying the date, the place, the purpose, and the name of the devotee. The cosmos was now on notice.

Then the morning anushtanam — the brahmin's ancient propitiation to the divine forces in all eight directions, accompanied by the Gayatri Mantra, recited with the precision of a man who has done this more than a thousand times and intends to do it a thousand more.

And then — the main event.

The Durga Sooktham.

Nambi began the recitation, his voice rising steadily in the small pooja room, the camphor smoke curling upward past the deity portraits, his words competing with the temple mike outside that was, at this very moment, probably announcing the progress of the very pooja Nambi was attempting to spiritually counter-programme.

He recited it once. Twice. Ten times. Twenty.

Forty-eight times.

Forty-eight recitations of the Durga Sooktham, each one a petition to the Goddess, each one a little louder, a little more urgent, a little more invested — until the crescendo, the 48th recitation, landed like a thunderclap in that small room, followed by the lighting of a great bundle of camphor that sent its fragrance billowing through every corner of the bungalow.

Kamakshi, presumably in the kitchen, was either deeply moved or deeply worried. Kancha Bhatta, presumably at the gate, was alarmed. He knew his master had embarked on something that could be dreaded.

---

The Two-Temple March

What happened next is the sort of thing that villages remember for generations.

Nambi emerged from his pooja room, walked through his home, and opened the large iron gate to the street. Outside, the bonfire burned steadily. The morning fog had thinned. The temple mike blared. The village went about its festival business.

And Gopala Nambi — barefoot, panchagajam-clad, Vibhuti-smeared, radiating the particular energy of a man who has recited the Durga Sooktham forty-eight times on an empty stomach — walked straight towards the burning embers.

He crouched by the fire and, with his right palm, scooped up a fistful of hot sand and ash from the ground near the embers. He then turned and walked directly into the Vinayaka Temple across the road — the very temple hosting the Ayyappa festival he had been opposing — performed a Sankalpam before the deity, and recited the Durga Sooktham one more time. The 49th.

He came out of the temple. Head high. Fist still clutching the hot sand and ash. Eyes carrying an expression that, by all accounts, no sane person in the village would have wished to look back into.

He then turned away from his home — away from the festival, away from the fire — and walked briskly down the village road in the opposite direction, towards Kavanoor, towards the state highway, and across it, to the Ramar Temple some 400 meters away.

The village watched.

At the Ramar Temple, the honorary caretaker, Mani was attending to some repair work on the pathway. He looked up, saw Gopala Nambi approaching in full ceremonial regalia, clutching something in his right fist, wearing the expression of a man carrying a divine warrant — and wisely chose to give way and say absolutely nothing.

Nambi entered the sanctum sanctorum and, in the loudest and most beseeching voice he could summon, recited the Durga Sooktham one final time. The 50th. This time, it sounded like an entreaty of a devotee in deep agony, trying to invoke the cosmic powers to manifest itself in the festival before dusk. His voice filling the small temple, the sound carrying out through the doorway, across the highway, perhaps all the way back to the bonfire.

He emerged from the Ramar Temple with the same splendour with which he had arrived.

He then did something that elevated the entire episode from memorable to legendary — he performed a complete circumambulation of the village periphery. The entire village. Walking its boundary like a priest consecrating sacred ground, like a brahmin who has decided that if the Goddess needs a GPS coordinate for where to send the divine intervention, he will personally mark the perimeter.

The village folk, spotting him coming from the Kavanoor direction, watched in collective silence. Nobody knew quite what to make of it. Nobody dared ask.

---

The Fist of Fury

Nambi arrived back at the festival site. The bonfire crackled. The embers glowed. The afternoon had worn on, and the evening firewalk was still hours away.

He walked straight to the burning logs of wood and, with the full force of whatever combination of devotion, chemistry and righteous fury had been building since dawn — flung the fistful of hot sand and ash directly into the fire. One could imagine a Mohinder taking only a couple of steps to deliver a deadly medium pacer to the Dujons and Holdings during the summer of 1983.

What happened next surprised everyone present, including Nambi himself.

The sand dissolved into the fire as expected. But not before releasing a brownish-red ball of flame that leapt upward from the embers, blazed briefly in the air above the woodfire, and was consumed by the atmosphere — a small, spectacular, entirely unrepeatable chemical event witnessed by the entire village gathering.

A gasp went through the crowd.

Nambi stared at it.

And then — because Nambi, a financial strategist by profession, was, above all things, a man who believed his schooling always stood him in good stead— his mind immediately began running through his school-level chemistry, trying to recall what compounds in soil or ash might produce a brownish-red oxidizing flame. Potassium? Some iron oxide compound. Had there been anything unusual in the wood ash?

The Goddess Durga, one suspects, was watching this with some amusement.

---

The Gates of Conflict

Nambi turned, walked to his home, let himself in through the smaller paired iron wicket gate, and closed it behind him.

The village, which had just watched a sacred-ash-smeared brahmin perform a two-temple pilgrimage, circumambulate the entire village, and apparently cause a mysterious flame to erupt from a bonfire, arrived collectively at one conclusion: something had been done. Something had been invoked. And someone was going to pay.

The crowd surged towards Nambi's eight-foot red iron gates, pushing, threatening, demanding entry. The smell of camphor and ash still hung in the air. Panic had replaced awe.

Nambi, hearing the commotion, came back to the gate. Kamakshi and Kancha Bhatta rushed to his side, a cook and an errand boy forming a protective flank around their employer with the loyalty of people who understood exactly what kind of man they served.

Nambi, composure intact, offered a reasonable proposition: depute two representatives, come in civilly, and let us talk.

The mob sent in twenty!

In the ensuing chaos, a hooligan with a stick brought it down hard on Nambi's right shoulder. Another beat up Kancha Bhatta — who had done nothing more than open the wicket gate as instructed.

It was left to the village elders to intervene. And to their credit, they did — reminding the mob, with some urgency, that the man they were assaulting had donated generously to the very temples they celebrated, had personally established a trust that funded the Ramar Temple's renovation and consecration, and had made the children of these very families beneficiaries of educational support through that same trust.

The mob, confronted with this rather inconvenient curriculum vitae, began to disperse.

But not before the chief festival organizer — a tall, dark man who had been at loggerheads with Nambi on this matter for years — delivered his parting shot at the gate: "If anything happens to anyone during the fire walk this evening, you will not return to the city alive."

Nambi, slightly hurt on his right shoulder, deeply disturbed and profoundly hungry, went upstairs to his room. He changed out of his panchagajam. He declined the food Kamakshi brought him. He drank some water, lay down, and went to sleep — the sleep of a man who had done everything in his power and was now leaving the rest to forces beyond his comprehension or control.

---

The Anti-Climax That Wasn't

That evening, as the Ayyappa pooja concluded and the embers settled into their final glow, it was time for the fire walk.

Normally, the event drew around a hundred devotees willing to cross the embers — a joyous, chaotic, spiritually charged spectacle that wound on well past eleven at night.

This year, twelve people walked.

Twelve!

The rest, it emerged, were simply too frightened. The brahmin's morning ritual had lodged itself in the village imagination with a thoroughness that no amount of festival drumming could dislodge. What had he done? What had he invoked? What was in that sand? What was that brownish-red flame?

Nobody wanted to be the person who found out the hard way.

The organizers hurried through every remaining step of the ceremony as though the ground beneath them might open up at any moment. The appointed pujari rushed his rituals. The firewalk was completed in record time.

By seven in the evening, the festival was over. Four hours ahead of schedule. Extinguished — if not by rain or wind — then by the collective weight of superstitious caution!

Gopala Nambi, sleeping upstairs, missed the whole thing.

---

Many Weeks Later

Time passed. The fog lifted. January became February.

One afternoon, Nambi's close aide and associate Mr. Krishnan, who lived a couple of houses away — and who worked at a nearby Hindu religious mission and had a finger on the pulse of Dharmarajapuram's social weather — came to visit.

He sat with Nambi and spoke carefully.

The chief festival organiser, he said, had been suffering on multiple fronts. His school-going child and his college-going child had both been involved in an accident, when both had been riding pillion behind a two-wheeled rider. One had a fractured leg. The other, a bandaged arm. The hooligan who had beaten Kancha Bhatta had been picked up by the local police in an unrelated case, produced in court, and remanded to custody.

Krishnan had been watching all of this and had arrived at a firm conclusion: Gopala Nambi's invoked wrath had visited itself upon those who had brought harm to him.

Nambi listened to all of this.

And then — because Nambi was, above all things, a thoughtful man — he simply chose not to react.

Not a word. Not a nod. Not a smile. Nothing.

Perhaps he was weighing the probability of coincidence against the possibility of divine causation. Perhaps he was running another chemistry calculation. Perhaps he understood instinctively that in the economy of village reputation, silence was worth infinitely more than explanation.

Whatever the reason, the village of Dharmarajapuram drew its own conclusions.

And from that January onward, whenever the folk of Dharmarajapuram happened to see Gopala Nambi walking down the village road — in his regular clothes, no panchagajam, no sacred ash, no fistful of curses — they stepped aside with a deference that no police complaint, no legal petition, and no amount of encyclopedic wisdom had ever quite managed to produce.

He had sent them a message; he hadn't intended to.

But then — as any student of the Durga Sooktham will tell you — the Goddess works in her own ways, on her own timeline, and occasionally through the medium of a brahmin who, deep down, was mostly just worried about his trees!

---

Dharmarajapuram, January. A village, a bonfire, and one man's magnificent, accidental triumph.