Fountain Head

The sea near the Ashtalakshmi temple doesn't hurry. It took my Ganesha the way it takes everything else, slowly, one wave at a time, until the clay went soft and the shape went back into the water. I stood there with wet feet and turmeric on my fingers, and I didn't pray for anything. A thought came to me instead, and it has stayed with me since. I walked home in a few minutes. My parents were waiting there. A decade ago, this same festival started an argument in our house. My parents did not believe in buying an idol, keeping it at home and then immersing it. That wasn't how things were done in our family, and in their view it didn't need to start. I thought it did. I pushed and I insisted, and that year Ganesha came home, and that year he went into the water. I've done it many times since, wherever life has placed me. I've immersed him on the east coast and on the west coast. In Hyderabad I've carried him to the Musi and to Tank Bund, where a whole cit...

  மதுரை · 11 September 2026 அன்பு தாய்மார்களே Prof. Solomon Pappaiah · சாலமன் பாப்பையா 1936–2026 Tamil scholar · teacher · நடுவர் of some twelve thousand pattimandrams திருக்குறள் 423 · அறிவுடைமை எப்பொருள் யார்யார்வாய்க் கேட்பினும் அப்பொருள் மெய்ப்பொருள் காண்ப தறிவு. eppoRuL yaaryaarvaayk kEtpinum appoRuL / meyppoRuL kaaNba thaRivu Whatever the matter, and from whosever mouth it is heard — to see in it the true thing: that is wisdom. பொங்கல் afternoon, the plates cleared, the television on for the one programme everyone in the house agrees about. Four speakers on two benches. A topic no professor would call literature — who builds a good family, the husband or the wife? And at the table between the benches, an old teacher in a white shirt, hands folded, waiting his turn. He waits a long time. He lets them finish. Then he stands, says அன்பு தாய்மார்களே , and the room goes quiet the way a classroom goes quiet. For four decades that was the sound of a Tamil holiday. On Friday, 11 Sep...

  Whichever Comes First My printer did not die of overwork. It died of rest — and the warranty only knew how to measure the other thing. Product Epson L3255 Fault Black blank Warranty Expired 25.01.2025 Replaced Head + ink system Paid ₹5,410 They gave me the parts back. That is the detail I keep returning to, because on the ride home I had already decided, silently and unfairly, that they would not. Two small dead things on my table. One is a printhead, roughly the size of a matchbox, a strip of gold-coloured plate held in a black plastic carriage. The other is a black-and-white assembly with a spring, a length of soft tubing and a little geared drum, and it took me a while to work out which way up it was meant to sit. Together they cost me five thousand four hundred and ten rupees, plus three hundred and forty on the slip, plus the carriage in and out, which I paid without asking because the machine is heavy and I am not. The complaint I walked in with was simple to the point of i...

  My archery guru is in the tenth standard, and he teaches on the sand at Besant Nagar. Extended Elliot's, opposite the Mahalakshmi temple. Fifty rupees, four arrows. There is no light on the target. This is not an oversight. The sun went down some while ago behind the flats, the sea has gone the colour of wet slate, and the boy who runs this archery stall has decided that this evening I will shoot at something I cannot see. He taps the bowstring twice, the way you would test a bell for tone. Feel it , he says. Not look. Feel. I miss. Of course I miss. He does not laugh, which is its own small courtesy, and hands me the second arrow without comment. By the fourth I have stopped trying to find the target with my eyes and started finding it with my shoulder, and the arrow goes somewhere close enough that he says ah , softly, and that ah is worth the fifty rupees on its own. The extended stretch of Elliot's — past the main crowd, opposite the Mahalakshmi temple — is a market that...

  Raksha Bandhan A myth, a morning in Calcutta in 1905, and one request made in the open. Draupadi tears a strip from the border of her sari. That is where it begins — not with a festival, but with an accident. Krishna's finger is bleeding. The sugarcane knife, or the chakra, depending on who is telling it. The room fills with remedies. She offers cloth, without ceremony, without a priest, without an auspicious hour, without a thread bought for the purpose. The epic as we have it is thrifty about this scene; the tradition around it is generous. But every telling keeps the same arithmetic. Years later, in the assembly hall at Hastinapura, when Dushasana pulls at her sari and every man who might have spoken looks instead at his own hands, the cloth does not end. It goes on and on until an arm gets tired. A hand's breadth of cloth, repaid as an endless bolt of it. That is not sentiment. That is a ledger. The rakhi was never a gift. It is a claim: small, bright, publicly worn , tha...

  Madurai · Field notes Cool Guts Jigarthanda is a drink, a cold chain, an argument about heat — and, eventually, a gangster film. It is also the one thing in Tamil Nadu you are forbidden to stir. Ice cream China grass Reduced milk Badam pisin Nannari syrup The tumbler comes back to you sweating. Not the glass—you. It is past nine in the evening on the street near Vilakkuthoon, the lamp-pillar in the middle of Madurai, the stone has been giving back the day's heat for three hours, and the man behind the counter has already begun pouring your second before you have set down the first. He did not ask. Nobody asks. In this city the second glass is a load-bearing assumption. What arrives is not really a drink. It is a cross-section. Hold it up before you ruin it and you can read the whole thing like a core sample: a dark seam of syrup lying at the floor of the glass, a stratum of chewy amber above it, then a body of milk cooked down so long it has gone the colour of wet sand, and on to...