what is your favourite myth from your culture that you would love to see in a retelling?

Okay, so I just came across a video dissecting the Met Gala look of Doechii, and the person in the video, a South Asian creator, brought up the story of Kannagi. And it honestly opened this floodgate of nostalgia for me, because I used to read Kannagi’s story all the time as a kid. It’s a mythological story from Tamil Nadu. And it made me start thinking about all the mythological stories from your home country that you absolutely love. Because I realised that when I think about the mythological stories from my country that stayed with me — barring the really famous epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — so many of them came from oral storytelling traditions or from these illustrated books like Amar Chitra Katha. And honestly, I think people in the South Asian diaspora, especially in the West, and people in South Asia too, have so much potential to work with these stories, to do modern retellings, to play with gender and sexuality, because these stories themselves often played with gender and sexuality.

So I’m gonna give a quick rundown of some of my favourite stories.

For context, Kannagi wasn’t exactly my favourite story, but basically, Kannagi is also known as the goddess of chastity and justice in Tamil Nadu. She was married to a man named Kovalan. Kovalan cheated on her, lost all his wealth, and one day decided to sell her anklet. The jeweller saw an opportunity because the anklet looked very similar to the queen’s missing anklet, so he accused Kovalan of stealing it. And the king — without even conducting a trial — ordered Kovalan to be executed. Kannagi was so enraged that she stormed into the court and broke open her anklet. Rubies fell out of it, while the queen’s anklet had pearls inside. And that’s how she proved Kovalan’s innocence. But she was still so furious that she cursed the entire Pandya kingdom to burn to the ground.

And it did. The whole city burned.

And honestly? We love a goddess. We love a woman who enacts revenge. There is no “being the bigger person” here.

Another set of stories I absolutely love are the stories of Mohini. Mohini is one of the avatars of Vishnu, and notably the only female avatar of Vishnu. One of the stories involves the demon Bhasmasura — whose name basically translates to “ash demon.” He worshipped Shiva, and Shiva is famously the kind of god who gets impressed if you worship him with enough sincerity and intensity. So Shiva grants him a boon: anyone Bhasmasura touches on the head will instantly turn to ash. Which, naturally, immediately backfires because Bhasmasura then tries to use the power on Shiva himself.

So Shiva asks Vishnu for help. Vishnu transforms into Mohini, who is impossibly beautiful, and Bhasmasura instantly falls in love with her. He asks her to marry him, and Mohini says she will — but only if he can perfectly imitate all her dance moves. So she starts dancing, and Bhasmasura mirrors every movement. And at one point, Mohini places her hand on top of her own head. Bhasmasura copies her. And immediately turns himself to ash. And what else could you expect from a man lowkey. The level of stupidity y'all.

Another Mohini story that I love comes from the Mahabharata. There’s this character named Aravan, who volunteers to become a human sacrifice to ensure victory in the war. But before he dies, he asks Krishna for three boons. I don’t remember the first two, but the third was that he wanted to be married before his death, because unmarried men were denied certain funeral rites and honours. But no woman wanted to marry someone doomed to die the next day. So Krishna transforms into Mohini, marries Aravan, and after Aravan is sacrificed, Mohini mourns him as a widow: crying, breaking her bangles, beating her chest; all that jazz before transforming back into Krishna. This form is sometimes referred to as Krishna-Mohini. And what’s fascinating is that this story became part of ritual tradition in Tamil Nadu. During a festival, transgender women and hijra communities reenact Mohini’s mourning for Aravan — mourning him as widows after a symbolic marriage ritual. And I just think stories like these are such rich material for reinterpretation. They’re already fluid. They already complicate gender, desire, devotion, embodiment, performance. So whenever people act like queerness or gender fluidity are somehow “Western concepts,” I’m always like… say what now???

But my favourite story is about Kali. Now, remember: all of these stories were orally told to me by my family, so this might not be the most textually accurate version. But this is the version I grew up with. Basically, there’s this demon named Raktabija. And if I’m translating it correctly, Raktabija roughly means “drop of blood.” So Durga — who I personally like to think of as a goddess of war — and her people are trying to kill him. But there’s a problem: every single time Raktabija is wounded and a drop of his blood falls to the ground, another version of him emerges from it. A duplicate. A doppelgänger. So the more they fight him, the more of him there are. And Durga becomes so enraged that she becomes Kali (y'all Kali literally means Black or Dark Skinned One with feminine pronouns and yet the colourism in my country y'all I swear). And Kali is literally the goddess of your nightmares. She’s described with blazing red eyes and this enormous tongue, stretched out to drink every drop of blood Raktabija spills before it can touch the ground and create another demon. She’s depicted wearing a tiger-skin cloak — which is interesting, because Durga rides a tiger, so you could almost interpret it as Kali wearing the skin of Durga’s own mount. And she’s adorned with severed heads of Raktabija’s while literally carrying another one of his heads from her hand. And she kills every version of Raktabija, drinks all the blood, and dances on their corpses.

She's the epitome of female and feminine rage.

But in the version I grew up hearing, Kali becomes so consumed by rage that she loses awareness of everything around her. And that’s when Shiva, her husband, lies down at her feet. and she ends up stepping on him. And the shock of realising she has stepped on someone she loves suddenly pulls her back into herself. It snaps her back into awareness.

There’s just so much material there for modern retellings. Indian authors, South Asian writers, diaspora writers — there are literally centuries of mythology waiting to be reinterpreted. Please. Someone give me more weird, queer, angry, lush mythological retellings.

Thank you for reading this long ass info dump. But this is mainly to ask you: what is your favourite myth from your culture that you would love to see in a retelling?

Okay, so a few days ago, I learned that Robert Frost wrote The Road Not Taken as a joke. Basically it was not originally intended as a grand metaphor about taking risks or choosing an unconventional path. Instead, Frost was gently mocking his friend Edward Thomas, with whom he often went on long walks. Apparently, whenever they came to a fork in the road, Thomas would lament over which path they should take. And if the route they chose didn’t lead to anything especially beautiful or interesting, he would immediately regret the decision and insist that they should have taken the other path.

Frost found this quite amusing and wrote the poem as a playful satire of his friend’s tendency to second-guess every choice. The funniest part is that Thomas didn’t initially realize he was being teased. He believed Frost had written a profound and beautiful poem inspired by their walks together. But no. Robert Frost was being a LITERAL menace (pun intended). And I think this is such a wonderful reminder that literary interpretation is often far more complicated than we assume.

Sometimes the curtains aren't just blue because they're blue, sometimes the curtains are a joke.

What is most fascinating is how readers can shape the legacy of a poem. Once a work is released into the world, it no longer belongs solely to the author. It also belongs to the readers, who bring their own interpretations and meanings to the text. Those interpretations may differ from what the author originally intended, and in some cases they become far more influential than the intended meaning.

That realisation has really inspired me to go back to other classic poems and consider how our contemporary understanding may differ from what the authors initially meant. It also shows how we should approach books and poetry with nuance. Our interpretations are valid, but they are not necessarily definitive. The meaning we find in a work may be very different from what the author had in mind. This feels especially relevant to current literary controversies, including discussions around R. F. Kuang new book. I think it is important to remember that one reader’s interpretation—particularly of a small excerpt taken out of context—is only one interpretation especially when the book hasn't even been released yet. Other readers may understand the text very differently. I think, it is often better to wait until the full work is available before drawing firm conclusions especially when the author has made her authorial intentions quite clear in other books.

I went on a tangent there but I still think it is hilarious that a poem I cherished my entire life as a metaphor for courage and risk-taking turns out to have been a very sophisticated joke. And I love Robert Frost even more for that.

Do you have any bookish fun facts like this?

In the late afternoon today, I was sitting on my porch in the shade, reading a book. I had a glass of fresh made strawberry soda, my reading playlist on, and there was a lovely warm breeze as the sun started setting over the trees. I thought to myself, I feel so peaceful right now. and how idyllic this is.

So I thought I would share my little moment of peace, and ask you all, what is a moment of peace you've had recently that has brightened your day?

I am participating in the reading challenge set up by the Reading Glasses podcast, and one of the prompts this year is "Give an author a second chance". The idea is to not immediately write an author off if you did not like one of their books, but to try a different book by them, and maybe discover you like that author after all! So I was wondering: have any of you done this successfully :)? Which author did you try this for, and what were the books that made you think you didn't like the author vs. the ones that made you change your mind?

I am still looking for a book to complete this challenge myself. I am thinking I might be willing to give Sally Rooney another try. I didn't particularly like Normal People, the characters didn't grab me and I do not like the miscommunication trope. Did any of you dislike Normal People but love one of her other books?