The Gypsy Goddess Read Free

gossip that was in circulation. This divinely preordained Danish coming involved the story of a shipwreck, an encounter with the king, and other recognizable features of Hollywood drama, but, for a brief while, there was difficulty in casting the sacrificial heroes. While merchants and sailors from Denmark travelled here for trade – and the Tamil women’s trusting eyes – no clergyman was man enough to take the Protestant missionary position in a strange, heathen land. Two Germans were dispatched instead, empty-handed, as the god and his son had asked them to go. With no recourse to evangelical funds, or medical insurance, Heinrich Plutschau stuck to the formula and proselytized without any fanfare and, after five years of puttering around,returned to Europe to defend the mission against critics.
    But his companion, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, began work zealously, rejecting both the Paulinian and Ottonian techniques of religious conversion, and formulating his own unique method for translating the word of God into heathen words. Not knowing the intricacies of what could be lost between slippery tongues, he learnt the local language by tracing the alphabet on a bed of sand, read all the 161 texts he could lay his hands on, sought a printing press (from the Danes, but the British supplied it), and placed orders for the Tamil typeface to be made in Halle. The type came, but it was too large and ate up all the paper, so he had the type cut out of lead covers of Cheshire cheese tins, and went to work. Thus, he kept forcing himself on Mother Tamil, who, in order to guard her honour, put up a stiff fight against this alien seeking entry. But he kept at it, tested by the testaments and taunted by Tamil, and had just finished rendering the New Testament into this ruffian, rape-resisting tongue when the contemptuous Copenhagen clergy decided to summon him home again.
    The German mangerman left for Madras – according to some reports, carried in a palanquin – in the hopes that he might eventually be able to board a ship to Europe, and the people of his tiny congregation took his disappearance as a manifestation of divine wrath. They decided against disbanding (should Ziegenbalg return) and, to curry favourwith their own briefly neglected pantheon, they resorted to the tried-and-tasted technique of sacrificing bellowing chickens and goats to their local, loudmouthed gods and goddesses.

    Some poets are utter losers: unreliable when it comes to facts and incapable when it comes to fiction. Living in a territory that specialized in the development and deployment of torture devices to disfigure breasts, a lotus-eating bard deflected the demand for the appointment of a Special Rapporteur to the United Nations on this issue by playing with the people’s imagination: he linked love to life and life to livelihood and livelihood to the land and the land to the local river, and then, with a smiling simile he likened the lazy, white river to a pearl necklace on the bosom of the earth, and in his picture-perfect poetry that sang of the River Cauvery, the bleeding, blinded breasts of slave labourers in this delta district were forgotten. I stand the risk of ridicule – it is true, the United Nations did not exist at that point in time, breasts are a beautiful metaphor any day, and one has to understand the importance of poetic licence. I am just spreading out the mattress on the riverside, setting up the landscape, inviting you, dear reader, to join me and look beyond the trauma, with the aid of such romantic imagery.
    Kilvenmani, the village into which the Old Woman married, is irrigated by two tributaries of the Cauvery: Korai Aaru and Kaduvai Aaru. Korai, after the grass used to weave mats; Kaduvai, after a Parai drum special to the region. Parai as in Paraiyar as in the English ‘pariah’. Rivers are to rice cultivation what lies are to poets: the lifeblood, some might say. Some life, some blood, I will hasten