Sri, Dewa and Anna propitiate the navagrahas and light the aalathi, watching the flame that bursts out of an oil-soaked wick like a glittering flower—the air shimmers with its light and then it burns out to a blackness. Butterballs exquisitely shaped like pearls spilling out of oyster shells, float on the surface of water vessels. Each pearl is flung onto the body of Durga. Durga, the ten armed goddess, each arm with a weapon. In one hand she holds the lance which pierces the heart of the conquered demon, the demon who has changed form often—first a buffalo, then an elephant and finally the giant with a thousand arms. Her right foot rests on a lion and her left is placed on the demon’s neck. They continue to hurl one butterball after another onto the body of Durga. The butterballs swirl past her, hurled through what appears to be a cosmic space, to disappear into annihilating darkness. Some of these white pearls splatter on Durga to bloom incandescently—a strange prehistoric moss that clings like mould to the stone. Dewa stands before Shiva. She feels the force of motion in the tandava dance. It is an act of cosmic creation. Shiva both destroys and creates, and from this act emerges the absolute. The air seems to quiver with a rush of movement as he raises his foot and sets in motion the cosmic functions of creation, the symbol of divine activity, the source of all movement in the universe.

It is an endless pilgrimage that seems to be taking place in the streets of Madurai, from one temple to another. The streets are alive with people moving, eating, cooking food. At an outdoor stall huge vessels are filled with different kinds of rice—tamarind-flavoured, plain white rice and saffron rice. People sit on benches at long trestle tables and eat off banana leaves relishing their hot food with sambara, curd, chutneys and ghee. Men sit before pans of sizzling oil in which fritters are frying; bananas in batter, crisp and golden brown, lie spread out before them. The metal ladles turn over the fritters in the frying oil. The crowds surge through the narrow streets and with them Sri, Dewa and Anna are drawn compulsively along with no destination in mind. A wooden cart is filled with pyramids of fried fish, a woman in a blue cotton saree with glittering mukukutthi stands behind it. Her little daughter assists her in selling the fish. She holds up a fried fish and dangles it like a mobile before their eyes. Customers carry parcels wrapped in leaves from her stall.

They go into a Muslim restaurant and eat hot samosas with fruit drinks and kaapi. Little saucers of lightly roasted cumins are placed on the table to aid digestion.