your bridge home
Saints and Poets
Every other Alvar sang to Vishnu. Madhurakavi sang eleven verses to his teacher, and the tradition put them in its scripture.
Madhurakavi was a brahmin of Thirukkolur, learned, doing everything a serious man of his background was supposed to do. He went north on pilgrimage, to Ayodhya and the northern shrines, the long circuit.
He was somewhere in the north when he saw a light in the southern sky.
He took it for a fire and thought no more about it. It was there again the next night. It was there the night after that. It did not move the way a fire moves, and it was in the same quarter of the sky each time.
In the end Madhurakavi stopped trying to explain it, turned round, and walked towards it.
He walked the length of India.
The light brought him to the far south, to a town called Alwarthirunagari, and it stopped over a tamarind tree beside the temple.
In a hollow in that tree sat a young man of about sixteen, cross-legged, eyes shut. The people of the town had long since stopped finding him remarkable. They told Madhurakavi that the boy had been sitting there since he was an infant, and had never eaten, never moved and never spoken.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.