Song of the Sacred Grove

I first heard her voice on a wet evening when the sky over Kuttanad folded into rain. The paddy fields looked like sheets of water stitched with green thread. I had come to the village to photograph the monsoon for a magazine, thinking of reflections and clouds, not of people. But the sound that rose from the snake grove by the banyan tree changed my plans. It was an old song carried by a small wind, a voice with the warmth of lamp light.

A woman stood near the kolam, the sacred drawing made with powders of rice and leaf. Beside her sat a man with a pulluvaveena, its gourd body resting on his knee. The woman held a small frame drum and a stringed bow. She began with a call that felt both prayer and story.

Later I learned her name. Meera. She was a Pulluvan singer who travelled with her uncle to sing for families that kept the old serpent worship alive. They drew the kolam on floor or earth. They sang to invite protection for the fields and the people. They sang to heal, and to thank. The songs were part music and part memory.

I was no believer in rituals, but that first night I did not leave the grove. Rain gathered on the leaves and rolled off in pearls. The lamps flickered. Her voice moved like the path of the river when it meets reeds and turns. When she sang the refrain, her eyes found mine for the smallest moment, as if to check whether I understood. I did not, not with the head. But I felt something loosen in the chest, as if a door I had forgotten to open was opening now without a sound.

After the last lamp was put out, I helped carry the rolled mat to the verandah of the old house where they were staying. The uncle thanked me, polite and distant. Meera kept looking at the rain.

"You came with a camera," she said.

"Yes," I said. "But I left it in my bag during the songs."

"That is good," she said. "Sometimes songs do not like to be trapped in square frames."

We laughed softly. She offered a glass of hot black tea. We stood at the edge of the verandah and watched the lane turn to a thin stream. A frog sounded like a drum far away. I wanted to say more, but the uncle cleared his throat and Meera folded her eyes in a small nod that meant good night. I walked back to the homestay with wet sandals and a strange lightness in my step.

The rains deepened. Every evening I found my way to another grove or courtyard where Meera and her uncle were called to sing. People came with flowers, coconuts, and small stories of their lives. A child with fevers that came and went. A farmer whose paddy had taken on a disease. An old woman who wanted to sleep without dreams of loss. Meera listened to each one with the same attention as she tuned the bow or tightened the drum. During the song, I watched her face. No drama and no extra movement, only the steady glow of someone who knew her place in a larger circle.

കാവിലെ തണലായ് വരണേ നാഗരാജാ
കൈമേലൊരാസ്വാസ്യം തരണമേ നാഗായക്ഷി
നീരാഴിയിലെ നോവുകൾ അസ്തമിക്കട്ടെ
നീലവെയിലായ് കരുണ നനയട്ടെ

We began to talk in the gaps. Not long conversations, only a few lines at the edge of the night. She asked what I looked for when I lifted a camera. I said I looked for what time does to people. She asked me to explain. I stumbled and said "like how your voice holds years." She smiled and pressed the drum against her side like a book.

On a day when the rain softened and turned to mist, she invited me to the backwater bank where her cousin kept a small canoe. We drifted on the narrow canal between walls of coconut trees. The air smelled of damp earth and toddy. A white egret stood in the paddy like a quiet elder.

"What do your friends say when you say you sing Pulluvan songs," I asked.

"They say it is old and beautiful," she said. Then she paused. "Some think old means weak."

"What do you say to them," I asked.

"I sing," she said, with a small shrug. "When the song reaches the right ear, it answers for me."

The canoe slid against floating hyacinths. She trailed her fingers in the water and made small circles. I remember how the bangles on her wrist caught the light and returned it in tender sparks. I wanted to reach out and hold that moment still, as if it were a sleeping bird. Instead I said, "Will you teach me a line from your song."

She considered me. Then she sang a simple phrase, four notes, about calling the guardians of the grove. She made me repeat it. I could not place my breath correctly. She laughed, not unkindly, and touched the back of my hand to keep time. Soon the phrase came closer to the note. I will not claim I sang well, but I sang true.

"നാഗ ദേവാ കാവ് കാക്കണേ" 

That night the uncle asked me to photograph them for a family in a nearby village that wanted a print to frame. I took the camera out and tried to see without disturbing. The lamp smoke moved in soft curves. The kolam looked like a river drawn by a child God. Meera stood on the edge of the drawing, careful not to step where she should not. The song rose and fell. When I showed her the picture later, she said, "This one is honest." I felt as if I had been given a small temple bell to keep.

People began to talk. A stranger was walking too often with the Pulluvan girl. In the tea stall they measured my face and my shoes. In the market the fish seller asked Meera if the city man would carry her off. Meera told me this with a smile that did not reach her eyes.

"I am not here to carry anyone off," I said. "I am here because you sing like water remembers the first rain."

"Words," she said, now smiling with her eyes too. "You use them like thread."

"Then let them stitch us to this place for a while," I said.

But a while is not a measure that lasts forever. The magazine called. They wanted the monsoon cover story in Kochi with a deadline. My train ticket glowed on the phone screen. Meera had a calendar of her own. There were houses to visit in Alappuzha and Cherthala, and a temple event in a village whose name I could not pronounce without practice. We stood again at the verandah, where we had first spoken, with the same rain for company.

"Come to the temple event before you go," she said. "One night. Then you may do all your city things."

I went. The grove was older and deeper than the others, with a well at one end and a small stone platform in the centre. The old man who swept the place told me his grandfather had seen a king seek blessings here. He pointed to a black stone half covered in moss and said it was also old and also listening. The families gathered with lamps. Meera began the song, her uncle drawing the bow across the veena string. Her voice entered the grove the way a boat enters a lake. No hurry and no fear.

I felt the song reach something in me that did not answer in words. When she sang the refrain we had practiced on the canoe, I heard my own breath give the answering note, not aloud, but inside. The night seemed to grow taller. When the last lamp was placed near the stone and the last verse folded into silence, the people stepped forward to touch the earth. I did not know what to do. Meera nodded at me and I bent with the others. My palm met the cool soil and I thought of the hands that had touched this ground before mine.

After the ritual, a woman came to Meera with a small girl. The girl had been ill for weeks. The woman asked if Meera would sing a blessing into a glass of water and give it to the child. Meera did so, soft and steady. The child drank and then smiled in a way that had nothing to do with cure and everything to do with being seen. The mother began to cry. I took a step back and then another. I felt clumsy and large in a room of delicate threads.

Outside the grove, Meera found me near the well. "Your train is tomorrow morning," she said.

"Yes," I said. "But I can return in two weeks."

"Return when you can," she said. "I will be here, or on the road, or at another grove. You will find me if you listen."

"Listen to what," I asked.

"The path the song makes through the air," she said. "It is not a straight line, but it arrives."

I wanted to ask for more. I wanted to say, come with me to Kochi for a week, we will walk along Marine Drive and eat ice cream and look at the ferries. I wanted to say, I will sit with your uncle and learn the names of the ragas. I wanted to say, let us promise something under this rain. But she placed her hand on the well wall and looked at the floating lamps on the water and said, "Do not force the song. Let it place us where we must stand."

I left at dawn with a bag heavier than before. In Kochi I wrote the article. The city had its own monsoon rhythm. The meetings felt like doors opening and closing in a long hallway. I sent the draft and the photographs. The editor called to say the cover was perfect. People in glass buildings nodded. But in the late hours when the rain thinned, I heard the refrain she had taught me and I felt the empty space beside me like a known absence.

Two weeks later I returned to the village with prints for the family and a small packet of tea leaves for Meera and her uncle. The bus dropped me at the junction. The grove road was slick with slush. When I reached the house, the verandah was empty. The neighbor said they had left in the morning for a cluster of houses near Kayamkulam. They would be back in two days if the roads did not flood. I stood by the banyan tree and listened. No song came, only the white noise of rain and a bird calling for its pair.

I stayed. I helped the neighbor move sacks of rice from the damp corner to a higher shelf. I waited out two long rains. On the third evening I heard a drum far away. I followed the sound as one follows a scent from a kitchen, curious and certain. It led me not to the grove but to a small courtyard lit with three lamps. There she was, hair tied back, a new garland at her throat, eyes closed against the rain, singing. The uncle saw me first and his face relaxed. Meera opened her eyes on the last word and saw me at the edge of the circle. Nothing dramatic passed between us. Only the clear sense that the path the song had promised was now leading me back.

When it ended we stood near the low wall that marked the border of the yard. The rain had become a gentle drizzle.

"You returned," she said.

"I listened," I said.

She folded her hands and then opened them. "Then let us try," she said. "No big vows. No loud announcements. Let us come to each other the way the monsoon comes to the fields. Again and again. Enough to keep them alive."

I nodded. I told her that in my city I could make space for these returns. I told her I could photograph her work with care and without theft. I told her I wanted to carry her instruments sometimes and wash the drum skin with warm water at night. I told her I wanted to learn when to be silent in a song and when to join.

She listened like a singer listens to a new companion on stage. Then she said, "I will not leave the songs behind."

"I never asked you to," I said.

"And we will not rush," she said.

"We will not," I said.

She smiled and tapped the drum with a fingertip, once. It sounded like a heartbeat heard through a wall.

We began with small rituals of our own. I carried the mat and the print package while she tuned the veena string. After each performance I brought hot tea and sat with her on the verandah. Sometimes we spoke of the people we had seen. Sometimes we sat in a good silence that asked for nothing. On Sundays we took the canoe out and practiced the refrain. I grew better at finding the breath. She began to trust that I would stay in time.

The village soon learned to accept our pair. The tea stall man began to call me by name. The fish seller kept a slice of pearl spot for us on days when the backwater was kind. The children followed us to the grove and asked me to show them how a camera works. Meera taught them to clap in rhythm while I clicked their wide eyes and muddy feet.

Months passed. We did not speak of marriage yet. We spoke of seasons. We spoke of where songs go when no one is listening. She said they sleep in the roots of trees. I said I would like to be a root. She laughed and told me to be a leaf as well, since someone must catch the rain.

On a bright morning at the end of the monsoon, the magazine printed the cover. The photo was of the kolam and a lamp, and a hand in mid phrase with a bow. I knew it was her hand by the faint scar near the thumb. I took the copy to her. She touched the page lightly.

"It is not my face," she said.

"It is your work," I said.

She looked at me a long moment. "Then let us keep going," she said. "We will sing. You will listen. You will show others how to listen. Between the two of us, we may help a little light travel."

That evening we walked to the grove. The rain held back as if in good manners. The old man who swept the place was resting near the stone. Meera bowed to him and then to the earth. I followed. When we rose, she handed me the drum. I shook my head. She smiled and said, "Only hold it for me while I tie my hair."

So I stood there with the drum in my hands, knowing how much I did not know and how much I had already received. She tied her hair and took the drum back. Then she began the song, and I joined on the refrain we had practiced. The grove listened. The lamps flickered. A frog sounded like a distant drum. And under the open sky of a village that smelled of wet earth and clean hope, I understood that some loves do not arrive like thunder. They arrive like rain that keeps its promise.