She walked in from nowhere one morning. Clad in a coarse, white saree with head shaved and forehead smeared with a piece of ash, she could have surfaced from any small hamlet in Tamil Nadu. In truth, she had.
“From where are you coming?” asked my mother when this apparition knocked on the door. “Koothandakuppam very next to Kethandapatti” she answered, with a toothless smile.
Awed by the long-distance she had journeyed, mother invited her into the house with her customary hospitality and offered her coffee and other refreshments. She was delighted to have a visitor from this temple town that was the abode of the lord Aravamudhan himself. Her guest poured the hot coffee straight into her throat, and added: “But just now, I come from the Thulasi Thotam temple near Majestic.”
She took out a crumpled piece of paper knotted into her sari. It was a recommendation from the temple priest. She had no home.
Her luggage was a small bundle containing another white sari. She could cook and do sundry jobs in return for shelter and bus fare to visit her home town once a year. Mother almost wept with joy at this unexpected bonanza, and “Pati” became part of our household after that. We never got to know her real name.
In no time, she made herself indispensable. She would wake up at dawn when the household was asleep to collect fresh milk from a nearby cowshed where the milkman milked his cows. She would also bring a handful of fragrant sampige flowers tied into the edge of her sari. They were plucked from a neighbour’s garden when the owners were still asleep. If Mother scolded her for this theft, she would snap back “I took them for the gods, not for myself.”
Soon, Pati took over other chores like watering the plants in our backyard before collecting the parijatha flowers for Father’s morning puja.
Come 1965, there was a family wedding in Tirupathi. We booked cottages on the hilltop and carried our own provisions with Pati bravely volunteering to prepare the wedding feast. After the ceremonies in the temple, we returned to our cottage for the grand lunch - to be greeted by two ferocious cows slurping away at the rich payasam cascading down the steps.
Two more of these impressive animals were inside the cottage gobbling the hot chakkara pongal. Pati was the only composed onlooker that day. “These are not ordinary cows,” she declared. “They are Brahma, Siva, Vishnu and Mahalakshmi come to take our offerings.”,As always, Pati had the last word.