The Goddess Who Rose From the Ground During an Epidemic

The sickness came, and it took people fast.

This is what a pox did to a village before there was any medicine for it. It did not take the old and the weak and leave the rest. It went through a settlement in days.

Nothing anybody knew how to do worked. No herb. No fumigation. No shutting the gates.

You watched, and you buried, and you waited to see who was left standing.

And in the middle of that, in the country that is now Telangana, tradition says the ground opened and a goddess came up out of it.

Not down from the sky. Not from a distant heaven. Out of the earth of the village itself, in the exact week she was needed, because her people were dying.

Her name is Pochamma, Poshamma, as it is often said in Telugu.

What she is for