A tale of mystical longing and enduring love

A long-dead sister's songs to Hindu god Krishna inspire a brother's quest to have her words put to music

NEW DELHI -- The loudspeakers on the riverside village temple broke the humid afternoon stillness with devotional Hindu songs written by my aunt, who died more than five decades ago.

It was at this temple, in Gunaseelam in southern India, that my father's sister, Madurai V. Kamakshi, died in 1953 of tuberculosis at the age of 23. Till the end, she wrote songs about the love of her life -- the blue-skinned, flirtatious, flute-playing Hindu God, Krishna.

Growing up in New Delhi, I heard countless family stories about my aunt. Each made her more enigmatic. Aunt Kamakshi is revered for her mystical qualities. She was a saintlike figure who yearned for union with Krishna throughout her short life. From the age of 7, she believed that Krishna was her lord, companion and playmate. She argued, played, danced and sang with him. She said she "saw" Krishna all the time. She never married because she said she was already wedded to Krishna.

My father's family was poor, living in a modest, one-room rented tenement in southern India. My father, V. Subramanian, did odd jobs after school to earn money. My aunt was pulled out of school after fifth grade. But she was a gifted poet and wrote hundreds of heart-rending songs about Krishna in Tamil language and drew his image everywhere.

During my teens in the 1980s, my views about her swung wildly between faith, Freud and feminism. I went to a progressive women's college in the capital, and I was heady with the books I read.

Did my aunt really go into a trance and see her god dancing in front of her? She was immersed in a world inhabited only by Krishna. Was she really a spiritually elevated soul? Being poor and female in India is not easy; she grew up at a time when girls were married in their early teens. Did she claim a Krishna husband just to ward off a child marriage?

A verse in one of her songs goes:

Give me your feet, Krishna

I weave jasmine and fragrant leaves for you

Come play the wedding game with me.

She watched her widowed mother -- shorn of her hair and having eschewed all jewelry and colorful clothes -- struggle with poverty. Was my aunt's otherworldly experience an escape from the brutality of being poor and a woman? Was she a woman trapped in a saintly halo?

But life's experiences cannot be distilled into one definitive, unequivocal truth.