Dewa puts the sweets away in the bag and zips it up. She closes her eyes. Thinks. Of Thanjavur. In the great Cholan temple the goddess Amman was being given an abishekam. Anointed with oil that was cool and rich and fragrant. The stone appeared to breathe through its pores as the statue was bathed with turmeric and coconut water, sandalwood, kumkumum, fruit juices. The body of the goddess glistened with oils. The act of cleansing and purification was symbolic. It was the purification of the stained and fatigued human flesh. The sacred light from Agni’s fires warmed the cold flesh, brought it to life and the Sanskrit slokas were the prayers that beseeched the goddess to heal the cripple boy who stood before her …. The abishekam wiped away, cleansed whatever each man considered his individual sin, crime, guilt. Threaded garlands wrapped round her body and a silk cloth of red with gold zari was draped on Amman’s body.

Sri had felt so much at peace in Thanjavur. ‘This is where I want to return and allow my soul to have repose,’ he had said.

A party of French tourists with their guide had passed through, going from shrine to shrine. A woman had stopped for a moment and raised her hands to Dewa in a gesture of namaskaram. She had smiled and passed as another of those fellow beings who were part of this new journey which had really emerged out of millennia of travelling from one life to another. That flash of recognition had told each of them that they had met before.

Dewa, Sri, Anna. They have encountered so many stages on this journey. Each stranger has been destined to meet them, to share the journey, to act as another pointer, one more landmark to the familiarity of that which is so ancient in their past and yet so immediate in their present. Some of them had stood at the entrance to their rooms and begun stories of their lives. The sources of rivers which journey through landscapes of time to destinations Dewa will never know of. Perumal, Skandakumar, Mani and so many others. Sometimes they needed to leave words like those indigo tattoos on the mind: ‘Skandakumar my name. My parents dead. No mother, father. I am sixteen years. I cannot read. I never went to school. My brother works in another hotel. When you finish I will eat.’

A Fistful of Wind