The Shore Temple of Mahabalipuram

The mirtangist may never willingly hear may not want to hear the multaiyam announcing his cue nor the melodist aware of the flautist's right to the change in the raga the plucking of the yal strings to the goatskin drummed bleats and pleas of mindless fingers for out there on the receding promontary's rising granite mounds of three-tiered edifices held up by the Pallava's view of the Descent into the Ganges: rishis crosslegged contemplate yakshis or apsaras' unharnessed thighs attenuated waists commodious backs buxom breasts where mantra-chanting brahmins bathe drink and contort themselves through puzzling demeaning rites where Hanuman's emissary mounts guard where the wizened Ganesha with Buddhic lobes his tusks bent inward the noble crown and forehead higher than the top-heavy octogonal coupole The yal's graveness guiding the scorched chiselling hand through all the buffeting splash and spray the taste of briny sand in jasmin-scented rounds of hand-pressed rice till the sun roots out vision from botched corneas deaf jabs of moulting faltering hands on damp sand Thus would prideful devotees heedlessly later claim : This is a monument to Pallava vision Pallava faith Pallava fortitude See how the obedient ocean dutifully recedes from Pallava wrath and glory! Even the hardest rock wears with the winnowing wind Little by little a decade of centuries later To whose glory must this monument testify to the servile sudra mixer of sand and stone the poor flabbergasted feckless porter never knowing why the bother about effigies of mythic figures the spurned sculptor whose fingers now and then falter the endlessly silhouetted nubile lines of near-naked damsels balancing sandstone blocks on wicker-work troughs on lean but sturdy necks the overseer the mandore yelling through hoarse parched out throats so many curses to stem the rising tides to keep them from soiling the temple’s wicket-gate the carpenter called to mind the scaffolding hugging the walls with his spindly legs and trailing loin cloth and then the women-folk huddled in the windy hutless hinterland around myriad swishing swirling wood fires hoisting earthen pots of gruel and culled gourds of well water on thick matted hair their infants slithering on hips all who on pinching stomachs and broken backs graft their unwritten signatures in the howling cavernous dirges of the Coromandel ocean breath © T. Wignesan - Paris, 1992 - (from the sequence/collection: "Words for a Lost Sub-Continent", 1999.)