Mixture and Confusion (kalattal, mayakkam)

Love, as defined and enacted by our family, brought about reversals of all kinds. The closest bonds were concealed by denial of bonds, tenderness was transformed into cruelty, humility could express pride, and servitude was a means toward mastery. All these reversals had their reasons, some of which were by no means culture-bound. Apparently reasonless reversals also took place. Nowhere could this activity of love be seen more clearly than in people's use of the word mother (amma), the one word in the Tamil language more imbued than any other with sentiments of love.

As a term of address, amma could be applied to the following people:

1. One's own mother, or someone in the category of mother, such as mother's sister. The children of the family called Anni "Annimma^[*]," and Padmini, "Pappimma."

2.Asuperior female. For such a person, amma was a term of respect and distance. Village adults wishing to show respect for me would call me amma, even when they were older than I was.

3. A female of approximately equal status to, or lower status than, the speaker. Often in this case the use of the term amma was part of hostile and sarcastic exchanges, as occurred between sisters-in-law or when a husband scolded his wife.

4. A male of equal or lower status than the speaker. When one addressed such a person as amma, one was showing affection for him. So Annan often called Ayya amma, and Anni addressed the male servants in her mother's home as amma, in both cases with obvious affection. But this usage of amma occurred all over Tamil Nadu. Conversely, father (appa) was used as a term of affection for a female of equal or lower status than the speaker.

When I searched for an explanation for these customs, family members said they did not know. Ayya suggested that the reason was, "Love does not know head or tail." This struck me as plausible, given other aspects of the ideology of love in Tamil culture that I had learned. To show affection for

someone, you demonstrated in a conventionalized way that you had forgotten what category they belonged to.

Love, then, mixed you up (mayakkum). A person who fell, as we would say, head-over-heels in love with another, was suffering, as it would be said in Tamil, from mayakkam, dizziness, confusion, intoxication, delusion. The same word was used to describe all these states. In all of them, one lost one's ability either to think clearly or even to think at all. Then one could not be blamed for acting strangely. And one could easily be misused by others. The intoxication of love was notoriously dangerous for just this reason. A servant in a Brahman household jokingly said that a Brahman girl learns to sing so that, when a potential suitor comes to visit and hears her voice in the other room, "he will become confused" (mayankuvan^[*]) and marry her.

Love, through mayakkam, could make a person see exactly the opposite of what was there. The story was told in our household of a Shaiva guru to whom an admirer, out of great love, offered a piece of raw meat. The guru saw only the love and ate the meat as though it were a ripe piece of fruit, much to his followers' disgust. In a play shown in our village, the goddess Adiparasakti was created to destroy a demon. This goddess was huge and green; she bit her bright red tongue angrily and stomped about the stage wielding a sharp trident. The demon in the play took one look at her and was smitten with desire. He went home to tell his sidekick of the beauty of his new heartthrob. The sidekick at first was baffled. Then sudden comprehension lit up his face, and he nodded and smiled like an eager puppy. "Aha, ampu, ampu!" he said, "Love, love!" (Ampu, the sidekick's dopey rendering of anpu, also means "arrow." In this play, the pun was certainly intentional).

Love, as understood by our family, not only reversed opposites but also erased distinctions completely. There will be nothing novel to Westerners in this idea; it is important only that we realize that, for the Tamil family also, mixture (kalattal) was a consciously recognized attribute of what for them also was the overarching ideal of love. This was what Anni meant by "we are all one," both here, "within these four walls," and now, "in these advanced times." People's presence with each other made them mix with each other, become used to each other, and become one.

It was impolite because unloving to treat oneself and one's own with more favor than one allowed others, at least within the four walls, in places where love should prevail. To discriminate was ora vañcakam (the deceitfulness of boundaries, that is, drawing lines). The politest, most loving pronoun was the first person plural inclusive nam, meaning "we (including you)." One used it, within the very innermost walls, when talking in one's mind to oneself. One used it when referring either to "my house" or to "your house"?; both were called, politely, "our house." Anni elevated me to the status of her equal by often referring to women of our age (nam vayacu) and laying out the rules that we both should follow. It caused members of our family distress

when I said "your children." All of them, including my own, were "our children," and, if I needed to distinguish between them, I should refer to them by name. In the extreme, this mixture of yours and mine into ours became reversal again—mine were called yours, and yours mine. So when I wrote to Ayya's sister Porutcelvi that my second child had been born, she wrote back, "I can't wait to see my new son."

This kind of total mixing—the sharing and trading of homes, of children, of selves—was necessary for the existence of love. So Ayya explained the Kannappan^[*] story, a story he returned to again and again, of a devotee so loving he tore out his eye to put as medicine on an image of Shiva when he saw that the eye of the image was bleeding. Then the second eye of the image started to bleed, and Kannappan reached for his own second eye to tear it out like the first, when Shiva stopped him. Ayya said, "This story proves that God has no love. Otherwise he would have recognized Kannappan's love from the first and saved both his eyes, not only one. It was only after Kannappan placed one of his eyes on the image that God, seeing through Kannappan's eye, understood Kannappan's pain.

"In order for you to understand my heart, you must see through my eyes. In order for me to understand your heart, I must see through yours."