This Eden is fragile, and the trees and bushes stand mute witness to the daily tragedies of the short lived and ultimately temporary liaisons, none of which can ever fill the void in a life empty of companionship. When we are introduced to Rupert,
From watching experts at work among snakes in the Agumbe Rainforest Research Centre, absorbing myths of the fearsome serpent Kaliya in Mathura-Vrindavan and witnessing the performance of an oracle propitiating Naga Devatha, to visiting sacred groves in various topographies
What is a reader to make of these stories set (innocently) side-by-side? Is the Vedic/Puranic Aditi, who birthed Indra and thirty-three other gods, like Trishala, the mother of the Jain Tirthankara Mahavira? Is Lal Dedh like Surdas? How do we think about Amir Khusro’s devotion to his human pir in comparison to these bhaktas and their obsession with God? Myths
The storytelling is expansive and both the parts of the trilogy are replete with stories, not just popular tales of Murugan’s birth, his leaving Kailash to Pazhani in anger after losing the competition for the Fruit of Wisdom, the war with Surapadman and his victory and his marriage to Theivanai, but stories of how everything emerged from a dark, endless Vast to begin with;
Hauser also provides fascinating accounts of the various remedial methods adopted by people across centuries: from devout prayers to throwing out of earthenware, inhalation of aromatics to wearing beak-shaped masks and more.
A head-on collision with injustice, oppression, inequity, discrimination, etc., do not a good poem make. The language may be rousing, the rhythm may be seducing, yet, in the ultimate analysis, whereas the poem may delineate an injustice of history, it may not be an imaginative tour de force like Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ or Mona Zote’s ‘What Poetry means to Ernestina in Peril’.