Pori

Pori was born in the wet season in a hamlet on the forested slopes of the Western Ghats, above the plains where South Dravidian-speaking settlements had begun to cluster along rivers. Her people were hill-dwellers who governed themselves through councils of elders, trading honey and forest resins down to the lowlands for iron tools and salt. Her stepfather, Kurumban, spoke for the lineage in disputes and organized clearing parties when garden plots needed cutting from the scrub. Her mother, Puli, had come to him after her first husband, Kola’s father, died in a fall from a cliff while hunting—that was seventeen years before Pori’s birth. Puli kept the cooking fire, tended the garden millet, and gathered greens and fuelwood from the forest edge.

Kola, Puli’s son from her first marriage, was already a man of twenty-one, walking with hunting parties into the deeper forest and learning the trails his father had known. Puli had borne three more children with Kurumban. Tavi had died the previous year at age three, taken by a fever that left him shaking and then still. Veli, a girl, had died in her first days—her breath had come wrong and never steadied. When women gathered for births, they spoke those names quietly.

Pori’s birth was hard. Irattan, Puli’s mother, crouched beside her daughter and pressed hot cloth against her belly while Puli’s sister Cemmal held her shoulders from behind. When Pori came, her skin stayed bluish and her cries came thin. Puli tried to put her to breast again and again. Irattan rubbed warm oil on the baby’s chest and limbs. Kurumban sent his nephew Celiyan down the path to fetch Ayyan, the healer who lived two ridges over. Ayyan arrived with a leaf bundle and tied a black thread at Pori’s wrist. He poured millet beer onto a flat stone near the house post and set cooked rice and salt there for the hill-spirit and the household dead.

On the fourth day Pori stopped taking milk and lay still. Before dusk they wrapped her in cloth, carried her to a quiet spot under trees above the watercourse, and placed her in a shallow pit with a pinch of rice and a small smear of oil on the earth.