Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Castle rock and teak wood
One city has cobblestoned streets, and shops with window boxes of bright pink summer beauties beckon. The faint sound of the bagpipes being played at the Edinburgh Castle can be heard as I glance down at the cobblestoned streets, wondering about the trot of horses centuries ago along these very streets. Another has noisy city streets that lead to a temple adorned with red tile and teak wood.
Stepping into the temple across the metal detector, I step onto a stone pathway that skirts around the temple. Just beside this path, lies loose sand grainy to the touch of my feet, holding the impressions of devotees waiting to see the reclining Lord Padmanabha.
Nothing in its physical attributes links Edinburgh to Thiruvananthapuram. And yet, I link them in my mind because of the words written in these spaces years ago. At Edinburgh, a must-visit for any tourist is The Elephant House, a coffee shop where J.K. Rowling dreamed up the pages of the Harry Potter series. And, near the Thiruvananthapuram temple, it is in the Kuthiramalika Palace that Swati Tirunal composed song after song dedicated to Lord Padmanabha.
One has to just stand at the entrance to the most famous shop in Edinburgh and look up and down the street – words and characters seem to float in front of me. Gray-stoned castle walls grow in my imagination, wizards and magic spells literally dance on the street through long wintry days, and the pages inhabited by Harry Potter make sense in more ways than one.
Words and spaces
As I climb up the stairs to reach the room that Swati Tirunal used as a library and writing space, I can glance at the entrance to the Padmanabha temple. I imagine the temple sans metal detector and buildings to accommodate tourists. There must have been a sandy path that the King walked on every day to enter the precincts of the temple, standing in the presence of Lord Padmanabha, only to return to his reading room and library, ready to wangle the words floating in his mind onto the page in precisely timed lines of verse.
The impetus to create lines of verse and fiction that have become immortalized captures in large part the physical spaces and the experiences of the authors. Cobblestoned streets in Edinburgh with the glimpse of a castle’s wall, made me want to pick up a Harry Potter book to re-read it with renewed clarity.
The same feeling washed over me when I visited the well-maintained palace grounds of the Kuthiramalika Palace. I stood peering at the temple through the window in the reading room of Swati Tirunal. The composer’s melodies started a slow dance within that only I could hear – Sumasayaka in the beautiful raga of Karnataka Kapi and the strains of the raga Kurinji in the padham – Aliveni Enthu cheyvu. The Dhanashri tillana was drumming in my head as I walked down the stairs, oblivious now to the voice of the palace guide.
I had seen the place where songs that have made me dance with joy were created. In my mind, royal exploits in Thiruvananthapuram and Edinburgh paled in comparison to the impact the words written here have done over the years. Words that floated around in the minds of J.K. Rowling and Swati Tirunal eventually drifted onto the printed page, reflecting the spaces they lived in and experienced.
Worlds of imagination and beauty have emerged from these spaces, energizing countless minds within – a gift to be treasured, a gift that can be experienced with greater clarity when one visits these spaces, as I was fortunate enough to do.
