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Festivals
Before any god was credited with this day, there was simply a river swelling with the monsoon, and people old enough to know exactly what that meant for the year ahead.
Aadi Perukku takes its name from what happens to the rivers each year, in the month it falls in. Perukku means rising, or overflowing. It names the swell of water that fills the Kaveri and the other big rivers, once the monsoon rains have set in. The festival falls on the eighteenth day of Aadi, the fourth month of the Tamil calendar. That is when the rivers run at their fullest.
The day goes back to ancient Tamil farming life. The Kaveri and the other rivers were not seen as mere landscape. They were life-givers, and the whole farming world rested on them. Sangam-era writing and old records mention rites at the riverbank, thanking the water for filling up again after the long dry summer. That gives Aadi Perukku roots older than any Puranic story tied to it later.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.