First read: Why Shiva turned to writing fiction in his ancient temple in Madras

Once all the clanging of bells had died down and Marundeeshwaran could hear himself think, he thought: being a god had its uses. You knew practically everybody, and what was more, everybody knew you. Opportunities knocked. And knocked and knocked. Marundeeshwaran had even been offered the role of Shiva in a Tamil mythological film once. He had refused, of course. It did not do for gods to be mixed up in showbiz.

But writing was altogether more respectable, and Marundeeshwaran was well aware of the honour Hemamalini had just done him.

Writers, even fairly well-established ones, fell over each other to write for her. Some chased her relentlessly for appointments, threatened to throw themselves off the city’s bridges into the stinking Cooum when she refused to meet them.

Though he had never let on to anybody, not even to Thirupu, Marundeeshwaran rather fancied himself a poet, a better one than Appar and Thirugnana Sambandar. He even wondered at times if he ought to have taken another road, become another sort of creator altogether.

Being a god was prestigious, no doubt, almost as prestigious as being in the civil services.

It had its advantages. But even gods had bad days at work. More bad days than good sometimes. Especially the ones in the medical line. Overworked creatures they were, given the number of sick folks in the world. Terminal cancer, amputations, head injuries ... the list went on and on. On its worst days, the temple resembled the city’s General Hospital, minus the stench, the unhappy-looking nurses and the murderous ward boys.

Doctors, at least, got paid real cash. But medicine gods like Marundeeshwaran? They got paid coconuts and bananas. From time to time, some overzealous or grateful devotee would have them bathed in milk and anointed with sandalwood paste. But Marundeeshwaran (and most other gods he knew) disliked this milk and sandalwood treatment. It made them feel uncomfortably sticky and the Madras weather didn’t help any.

There were many terrible things about being god. For one thing, there was no opting out of life. You were supposed to go on living, like it or not. A terrible thing, really. In his bleak moments, Marundeeshwaran wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off as a government servant. Government servants retired. They went on long leave. If you were a female government servant, you could even avail of maternity leave. And now there was child-care leave. How Thirupu would have loved that! If you were on the pension plan, you even had money coming in every month for doing nothing.

Marundeeshwaran, who had studied the pension rules closely, and considered himself quite a scholar in the field, was aware of one really curious rule: if a government servant, while still in service, was certified by a magistrate to be a lunatic, he would become eligible for early retirement and a pension would be paid to him. All this was in accordance with Section 95 (1) of the Indian Lunacy Act, 1912. Fancy that! But if you were god, you were stuck for life, lunatic or sane, pushing papers, petitions and prayers, enduring milk baths. There was no escape. It was simply godawful.

In the long hot afternoons, when the priests and the devotees cleared off and Thirupu skulked away for a snooze, Marundeeshwaran sat up writing English poems on the sly.

Why in English? He had no idea, except that the poems came to him in that foreign tongue. Over the years, Marundeeshwaran had honed his skills as a poet. He wrote because writing took away some of the tedium of being a god. He had done nothing with his poems. In fact, no one, not even Thirupu, knew of their existence. The notebooks themselves he hid in thin air, retrieving them as and when he pleased.

But even though Marundeeshwaran had penned over a thousand poems, he had never once written a story. This was to be his first. Perhaps he ought to seek inspiration for it outside the temple walls?

You couldn’t very well write a story about Madras sitting inside the dark shrine of an eleventh-century temple (or was it the seventh century?) For one thing, it wouldn’t be contemporary. And so on that particular hot summer afternoon, Marundeeshwaran, wannabe author, sat on the sands of the Thiruvalluvar Nagar beach, attempting to squeeze some prose out of his misbehaving ink pen. He had set out as soon as Thirupu’s snores reached his ears. At that time of day, the beach was deserted, save for a couple of unfocused-looking fishermen.

You would have thought that Marundeeshwaran, having descended from Mount Kailash, would find the searing heat of Madras on a summer afternoon unbearable. Thirupu, at any rate, hated it, and whined endlessly about it. But Marundeeshwaran loved the heat. He revelled in it. He had never really liked it up there – on Mount Kailash. Enduring the icy winds had been, as far as he was concerned, merely part of his job description. He had felt a certain kinship with the poor Indian army soldiers in Siachen. No. Marundeeshwaran was really a warm weather god.

The sands were clinging damply to his back and a few grains had lodged themselves in between his bejewelled fingers. Che! Bloody nonsense, this sand! He would like to meet the fool who had created...no, let that pass. Wiping the sweat off of his face, god settled into a Norman Vincent Peale-ish state and grunted a happy grunt. He opened his tiny pink notebook and wrote in it:

In Madras, the weather is lovely, So, too, the sea.
The sea, the sea.
The vast blue sea. 
A vast blue liquid lump of a cliché. In Madras, the weather is lovely And so, too, the sea.

Hmm...that wasn’t so bad, was it? Except...except it looked suspiciously like a poem. And he ought really to be writing a story. Okay, macchaan. Start all over.

In Madras, the weather is lovely. So, too, the sea. The sea, the sea. The vast blue sea. A vast blue liquid lump of a cliché. In Madras, the weather is lovely. And so, too, the sea.

How about that? No? What about a memoir, then?

It was a long, long, time ago. Thirupu and I were still newlyweds, very much in love with each other. We were transferred out of Mount Kailash, posted down in the plains, and charged with the task of creating a city. Being the Destroyer and so on, I had no idea about creation but I soon got the hang of it. The first thing we did was to create the Bay of Bengal and then, bang next to it, we placed a city, a town, actually. The city you now call Madras or Chennai. The Brits, of course, took all the credit for it. But it was really me – us – who did it. Practically set up the city, gave it its weather, created its characters...you get the picture. Thirupu was a huge help. Auto Shankar and Moore Market were her idea. Silk Smitha and the Anna Flyover were mine. 

You should have seen Thirupu when Moore Market burnt down. She was a sight! Threatened to kill herself. But when I pointed out that that would leave me free to romance Silk Smitha, she thought better of it. (I may be mixing up my dates a little here. Not too sure if Silk Smitha was around the time Moore Market burnt down. But, what the hell, this isn’t history.) 

I remember Thirupu and me in the early days, arguing endlessly about the sort of weather we would create for the city. Thirupu, who was yet to get over our Kailash honeymoon, was all for icy-cold weather. But I was adamant. I insisted on hot, sweaty weather. Who wants to feel like a soldier in Siachen, I said. Warm weather keeps you grounded. It does. Ever noticed how you almost never feel like a bum in warm weather? Always feel as if you’ve been working hard? It is the sweat that does it. Sweat is good for human beings. Sweat is...

And then Marundeeshwaran woke up...

Sadly, yes, it is one of those clichéd stories in which one of the characters does all the donkey work of dreaming things up and the idiot writer gets away almost entirely.

But that is beside the point.

So Marundeeshwaran woke up, and just as a priest was chanting a load of bull in his ears.

Thirupu was in her shrine, looking radiantly bored and routinely distracted. Discreetly adjusting his position, Marundeeshwaran went back to standing like a rock.

As for Hemamalini, she never came back. Editors are like that.

Excerpted with permission from “The Destoryer”, K Srilata, from the book Madras on My Mind: A City in Stories, edited by Chitra Viraraghavan and Krishna Shastri Devulapalli, HarperCollins.