Mithra's stories are a different realm of experience altogether. She belongs to Kundapura and having been brought up in a conservative, joint family she has watched the women of the family very closely. In a simple and direct and yet subtle way she brings out what has remained unspoken for so long and will probably remain so. In the English translation, the Kundapur quality of her Kannada gets lost and yet, the simple descriptions and short, crisp dialogues manage to carry us to the inner world of a joint family. In one of the stories which she read during the session, Jalaja Chikkamma is a widow in a large joint family which has finally diminished to only Jalaja and her brother-in- law Appanna, who is a widower. The two of them live in the house and manage the household. This sets tongues wagging in the village and towards the end of his life Appanna is taken away by his son. Narmada, who as a child had enjoyed visiting them goes to see Appanna before her visit to her village. Appanna tells her that he has a message for Jalaja but leaves it unsaid. Narmada goes to see Jalaja Chikkamma and tells her about Appanna's health. Jalaja Chikkamma continues to stoke the fire complaining that wet firewood always creates more smoke and turns the other side to wipe her eyes. As Narmada leaves, Jalaja Chikkamma tucks a string of jasmine into Narmada's plait. When she is almost out of the gate Jalaja Chikkamma holds her hand and tells her:

"Tell Chikkappayya..."

But the rest of the words don't leave her mouth. After a while she lets go of her hand as if she has concluded a long conversation. Narmada now has to carry another wordless message back to Bangalore. But had she delivered the first message at all?

This story generated most amount of discussion. One of the participants felt that this unspoken love was beautiful. Silence expressing everything makes the relationship beautiful. But the point is why does all that inner suffering seem exotic and beautiful to us? Isn't there a difference between not needing words and not being able to voice certain words? The former contains the joy of silence and the latter only the pain of being silenced. Unspoken love is so much a part of our literature that it is easy to romanticise it and make it appear noble. What is noble here is, of course, sexless love. The one and only novel, which I wrote when I was young and didn't know any better, was all about platonic love. I had the heroine tell her man that she would rather offer him her atma, which was immortal, than her body which was perishable. When I read it a few years later, much to my embarrassment, it sounded like she was offering him some fresh brinjals instead of a rotten cabbage. What is even more embarrassing is that the novel won a prize many years ago and is still being probably sold somewhere for two rupees.

Small price for platonic love.

In the course of the workshop we went climbing up a slushy and muddy mountain road to see a whole part of the forest kept as a sacred grove where trees are not cut off. The narrow road was slippery, often strewn with small, sharp stones and ant hills built like a fort from which angry ants came out to taste our blood not to mention red spiders which suddenly climbed our legs. We watched the villagers go past us with great agility suppressing their laughter at our state. At the end of it we thought we needed refreshment and a friendly villager brought us a pot full of just extracted palm juice, which he said had not yet turned into toddy. All of us had a go at it except H.M. Kanaka, who declared that it stank to high heavens. Kanaka's poetry is so heady and intoxicating by itself that she probably did not need the aid of toddy. But I must say that some us were in a better state of mind to recall the poetry she had recited the previous day, especially the erotic one, with a little bit of help from that freshly extracted palm juice floating with flies and ants.

Kanaka is a well-known person in the field of poetry in Kannada. She writes with complicated metaphors and the rhythm in her poetry is such that if she writes of water you can feel the water in her poetry and when she writes about the hot sun you feel the heat piercing you. She also uses words sometimes for just their sounds and their lilt. The erotic poetry she recited had all these qualities and also the unusual happening of a lover who is not cloying or clinging or even possessive - he seemed to know how to disappear quietly with absolutely no demands made on the woman. The body and its mysteries have appeared in many of Kanaka's poems. In a poem entitled "Videhi", she asks:

...With body
hunger, sleep, copulation
With body
pain, death
With body
tiredness of victory, devotion
Above all
feelings
What use desiring
the bodyless...

The poem called "The Tattoo", which she recited celebrated the body and had so many images taken from classical poetry like pearl necklace, soft music and music from a wind instrument coursing through the veins and tell-tale marks on the body. The woman is constantly telling her lover to be careful with her delicate necklace as the pearls may spill. The man disappears and the woman with her body remains. In Kanaka's language, the classical idioms transformed themselves to convey a new experience of the here and now; of exultance in the body; of impermanence.

C. S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder- trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).