Flowers of life

In search of a goddess

Ahead of the publication of her new novel, Andal’s Garland, Northern Riversbased author Helen Burns reveals the fascinating background to a work with its roots in Tamil myth.

Southern India in all her paisley glory — it is a land where you can still find myths and traditions as alive as they were for a young girl a thousand years ago. My novel Andal’s Garland re-imagines this once-upon-atime life of a revered goddess, and the story of Saisha, a contemporary woman drawn to India for the allure of its temple towns. Finding a book of ecstatic love songs unearths memories she had thought were long ago buried. The seed for this book was planted one Sunday morning in the crowded streets of Old Delhi – veering motor bikes, an errant cow, carts laden with greasesmeared engine bits, woks of bright orange sweets simmering in oil. Second-hand books covered the pavements of Daryaganj. Among the hundred Mills and Boon on offer, Stephen Kings, Da Vinci Codes and Readers Digests, I spied a tattered paperback of Tamil verse written by twelve poet-saints. Eleven men and one woman. Her name was Andal. I flipped open the book and read, Where Coromandel flowers entwine celestial worlds / there the primeval One holds a fiery discus / bring me close to its glow – but do not scorch me. The chaos of Old Delhi faded to a blur. I turned the page, O kovai vine you torment me with your scarlet fruits / neither shame nor virtue are mine / I fear his coral lips... Who composed these songs? I wanted to know more. It took me three days and nights to reach the town where Andal was born. Stepping from the train onto solid ground felt like arriving in a different country. The banter of passengers and auto drivers was Tamil, a language of fast rolling consonants like chattering pebbles in a stream. In the distance was a temple tower. Its multi-coloured tiers rose above coconut palms and the tiled roofs of a place not mentioned in any Lonely Planet, but Srivilliputtur was firmly fixed in the minds of pilgrims. Thousands flocked there for the festivals celebrating Andal’s short life of sixteen years. ‘She is our mother,’ people would say to me as we waited in the cool of early morning for a glimpse of her golden eyes. A cow and her hungry calf were the first to enter her shrine, their hooves clip-clopping on the flagstones. Then Jaya Malika, the temple’s resident elephant, lumbered up the stairs and inside to bow at her feet. When it was time for us to go in it was always the same, an urgent push and squeeze of bodies through the bell-studded doors, scents of coconut oil and jasmine buds in the hair of the women and the pungent mint of the sacred basil garlands they had brought for her. Visits to Andal’s temple were akin to stepping into the pages of her story. ‘Andal lived here,’ the woman beside me whispered as we waited for the priests to complete her adornments before drawing the curtains separating us from her inner shrine. She gestured to the small square well behind us. ‘There is the water where she found her reflection.’ I had already peered down into its darkness but found only the glint of a few coins thrown by pilgrims. ‘She was a girl in love with a blue-skinned

god who flew on the back of an eagle and made his bed on the coils of a ten thousand-headed serpent.’ Drumbeats and the trumpeting of a nadeswaram, its reedy notes like the dawn calling of a swan, heralded the opening of a goddess’s eyes. A fresh parrot was perched on Andal’s shoulder, its wings fashioned from tapioca leaves, eyes from white shell and a pomegranate petal for a beak. Black cuckoo if you call the One who spanned three worlds / then you can take my parrot as your friend / she is plump with sweet rice and pretty too. A new garland of marigolds, roses and jasmine draped her silk-swathed body. We cupped our right palm and waited our turn for a spoonful of fresh milk from the cow. Offerings of fruit, sugar crystals and the sacred basil garlands were given to a priest who then offered them to Andal. Toward the end of this dawn ritual another priest quietly slipped out holding a cloth bundle on his head. Wrapped inside were the flowers Andal had worn for the past twenty-four hours. Weeks later, curious, I would follow him, this path of a garland tracing her life like some kind of mystic theatre. It took a year for the idea of a book to germinate. In those prelude months I haunted Indian libraries searching for translations of Andal’s verses as a way to better understand her. Each visit over the next seven years I was often approached by locals and pilgrims wanting to make sure I was knowing all of Andal’s stories. This included the many gods, avatars and incarnations she spoke about in her two bodies of work, the Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli. In the beginning I found it mind-bending. As for Saisha, my protagonist in Andal’s Garland, she took the myths and swallowed them whole. Was my path to the feet of a girl with a green parrot perched on her shoulder nothing more than serendipitous? It was as if I had been turned upside down, swung around in mid-air then dropped into a myth that was not, in the eyes of Andal’s devotees, a myth at all.

Andal’s Garland published by Odyssey Books, along with its visual companion A Garland of Love, a collaboration of Helen’s interpretive Tiruppavai translations with the photographic-art of Alison Taylor, will be available September 2021.