The Guardians of the Seventh Temple
Prashanth Srivatsa
“Why can’t we steal the stones, Thendral?”
They sat behind the temple’s walls, perched on a rock ledge jutting out into the sea, feet dipped in water, gaze fixed on the vermilion strokes dimming along the horizon.
Malar couldn’t evade the question anymore. It had nagged her for far too long. In a week, it would be two years since she had first paddled her way underwater to the seabed and retrieved the gemstones from the hidden shrines.
Two years since she had first bled.
Only a flick of the calendar, Thendral would say. Her family had conducted the sacred tradition beneath the waters of Mahabalipuram for centuries. Two years were but a blink in the face of that tradition.
“Because it’s forbidden,” her sister replied. She lifted a leaf off Malar’s hair, inspected it for worms and blew it off her palm to watch it swing down into the water. “And because grandma says so.”
“I don’t trust the Shrineguard,” Malar scoffed. He was only a temple priest, but the name chilled her bones. If not for grandma, she wouldn’t trust the man with a cowrie. Presently, the discomfort between her thighs elicited a wince as she widened her legs to allow more room for the pad.
“Duty demands faith, not trust,” Thendral said. “Now, shut up, will you?”
Malar chuckled. Some duty! Despite all these years of transporting jewels in their girdles, they still lived in a cracked, sun-baked house on the corner of Mahabalipuram’s temple lane, with a dust-cloaked verandah, a half-blind grandmother and not enough money to treat a blocked ear canal. The words nearly careened off her tongue until the bells of the temple clanged to nip them in the bud.
When the gongs ended, the priests closed the doors to the shrine and marched away in a jingle of keys and hymns. The last of the pilgrims would crawl after them. Hidden beyond the walls, Malar watched Thendral fight her own discomfort, as a single tear streaked down her cheek and pain shot up to cramp her abdomen.
“Come on, let’s go,” she managed.
The silence in the temple was absolute, but for the lapping of low waves frolicking beneath them. They tied their hair into buns and then, like corpses tumbling off a cliff, Malar and Thendral pushed themselves off the ledge and submitted to the sea.
◆◆◆
The water clamped Malar’s sense of space. A terrifying feeling of being dragged down by an unseen force. When she opened her eyes, an ethereal green light entered her vision, flickered and limned from the bed and the stones. It sucked out the vestiges of moonlight spattered on the surface of the sea and offered Malar a clear vision of the world underwater.
By her side, Thendral flipped and swerved, rocketing through ranks of white carps and mrigals shimmering under bolts of moonlight penetrating the surface, weaving patterns around the kelp and brushing her hands over the fronds of algae scattered along the walls of the temple like touch-me-nots. Her eyes were pearl-white slits between ears stretched and fissured into gills.
Malar hated to admit it was breathing on land that required more effort for Thendral.
Far beneath them, the foundations of the six submerged temples blinked into view. Shimmering edifices branching out along the seabed in different directions like an underwater kingdom swathed in barnacles and kelps and broken shards of rock. Every now and then, explorers and archaeologists would dive with their bloated tubes and cylinders and other fancy equipment, and chisel away to surface with remnants of the ancient temple stone, or chunks of the seafloor.
But they never found what lay at the bottom of the six shrines.
Lord Indra permitted them the sight of only the stone scaffoldings and the intricately carved pillars jutting out of the floor wrapped in seagrass, deceiving them of discovery.
But Amma had shown Malar two years ago the way inside.
A labyrinth of walls, stairs and arches greeted them beyond the scaffold. Some upright, the others tilted, and scrabbled at the base with pebbles and shells on sand, their cracks bleeding seaweed. The water was colder, more testing. Vision sharper. In darkness and depth, their senses heightened.
Thendral and Malar weaved through a corbel arch between the walls of the shroud of the inner sanctum: an apsidal chamber whose pillars were sealed off at the dome. At the end stood a door, granite carved with ancient inscriptions, flanked by lion-mounted columns.
Thendral spun in the water and stopped a few feet short of two doorkeepers, sculpted in white stone, faces withered and oppressed by underwater scum. Taking her place in between them, she suddenly plummeted down to the seafloor where, hidden beneath several layers of sand, was the broken entrance.
Malar dug her feet into the sand opposite her sister, crouched and lifted the other side of the stone slab. Together, they pulled it apart. The vacuum lifted, and the whirlpool underneath began to cede.
With a nod, Thendral slunk and disappeared through the narrow passage beneath the upper temple, sucked in by a jet of bubbles. Malar dutifully followed her sister, discomfort peaking between her thighs.
The passage opened to a circular atrium, blocked partially by a boulder. The roof, once a barrel-vaulted ceiling, was jammed in by the weight of the temple above. It terrified Malar every time to wait there for the gemstones.
Around them, inscribed into the walls were six doors. Malar’s green vision highlighted the glint along the edges. Rock-cut monoliths, borders carved and cut into the shape of miniature rock crowns.
Malar aimed for the slabs on the left, while Thendral swam towards the right.
Three knocks, one on each of the doors.
A deep, resounding grumble ensued. Suppressed by water, it sounded like someone being choked while they tried to speak. The rocks themselves seemed to glide and grumble against one another, opening and closing chasms as they scraped over ancient stone and seaweed.
The sisters waited.
Then from within the chambers, the singing began.
Ghostly, hypnotic verses stitched together in a watery choir. Malar never understood the words. A more ancient dialect of Tamil, Amma would say. The spirits of the six fallen temples are damsels of Lord Shiva in white sarees. They pray through their songs so that the seventh temple of Shiva continues to stand on land. And the gems? They are the price we pay Lord Indra.
Bubbles escaped her mouth as Malar sighed. She knew the legend of the seven temples. Indra, the Lord of Storms and Thunder, furious at the people of Mahabalipuram for worshipping Shiva instead of him, had shattered and sunk six of them. The seventh remained as a warning from Indra to keep him appeased.
Malar wondered why those appeasements had to be heavy and shiny.
The song gradually ceased and the grumble of the rocks trailed to a stirring silence. As the sound died away, three finger-sized shards of carnelian, opal and sapphire tumbled out from the foot of the three doors she was facing. Thendral’s doors, on the opposite side, yielded an onyx bead, a star-shaped ruby and an amethyst crystal. They floated to the shrine’s floor soundlessly.
The sisters somersaulted in the water to pick them up, before zipping back the way they came, girdles heavy and gleaming, towards flickering moonlight.
◆◆◆
Malar woke to the sound of screaming in her head. She sat upright, chest heaving, hair in disarray. Around her, the darkness was kept away by a single candle roosting on the sill. The bed next to hers was empty. Blanket neatly folded. Pillow cleared off for fallen hair.
“Where is Thendral?” Malar asked, a hint of panic creeping into her voice.
Grandma was sitting on the jute stool next to the cot. She frowned at Malar from over the rim of her glasses. “Gone to hand over the stones to the Shrineguard,” she said in her raspy voice before her frown deepened. “Are you well?”
Malar rolled her eyes. “Just the usual.” She pulled her sheets close, and hugged her knees. The second day of periods was more bearable. It gave her a chance to rest her limbs after all the swimming.
A flurry of questions rested on her lip, as they always did after each go-under. But seeing her fragile little grandma, those questions vapourized, leaving only coarse tendrils of memory to be ground up in a pestle.
The garlanded painting of Amma rested against the wall behind grandma. A scab of moonlight through the window etched on her cheeks. Malar averted her gaze and clenched her fist.
“You’re thinking about her again,” Grandma said.
Malar pouted. “So what if I am?”
Grandma lowered her eyes, loosening her frown. “She was my daughter before she became your mother. And I’m telling you this - you could not have saved her. Not without dooming many more.”
Ever the many more. The argument fizzled at that dead-end. A lifetime of gathering precious gemstones and none of that wealth had ultimately helped in saving Amma.
They endured within these sunbaked walls, spared a bare allowance by the temple for their eternal contributions as the chosen family but - when it had mattered most - even a simple surgery was too expensive for Amma to afford.
Why go under at all, then?
◆◆◆
Thendral did not return until morning. She often spent the hours after the go-under at the beach, or strolling down the temple lane in the dark, feeding stray dogs or listening to the waves. When she walked in, Malar dragged her to the room, pinned her to the bed, and blew hair out of her eyes. “You’re not going to school today, either.”
Thendral attempted to wrestle her way out, before settling for a grin and a stuck-out tongue. “What do you want to do?”
“The beach,” Malar squealed.
Nothing like a sunny morning of badgering tourists to buy some fake gold earrings and low-grade cosmetics. Everything glinted and gleamed, and appeared precious. Once the sun climbed to its peak, Thendral and Malar waded into the shallows to float on the water like driftwood.
After a while, they retreated to the sands, buried their feet and watched the gulls circle high above the waters like winged planets.
“Don’t you ever dream of leaving Mahabalipuram?” Malar asked.
Thendral closed her eyes, almost meditative. Then she clicked her tongue in a wispy “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we have to remain here. And do our duty with the gemstones.”
It was easier for Thendral to be swayed by duty. To be proud of bridging the six submerged temples with the seventh standing one. Proud of keeping it afloat by bribing the Shrineguard and their deity with treasure. If Malar ever asked to stop, both Thendral and grandma would brandish her with canes.
Instead, she blurted, “You know, I was thinking. With all those gemstones, god must be pretty rich by now. Why can’t he go build himself another temple elsewhere?”
Thendral scoffed. “Don’t mock God. How many times do I have to tell you?”
After a moment, when the silence had begun to suffocate, Malar added, “Thendral, listen. I want to leave.”
“And go where?”
“Maybe college when it’s time?” Malar offered hopefully.
“College is for the rich. And you’re not some genius that they’ll grant you scholarships out of their generosity.”
Malar was not prepared to give up. “I heard there are other beaches. Cleaner ones. And the water is really blue. It sparkles and there are dolphins if you swim deep.”
“Water is water. It’s the sky that’s blue.”
“Whatever, but I want to go there. Or anywhere. I don’t want to stay in Mahabalipuram anymore, going under when we bleed. I think grandma is scamming usjust because Amma died and she thinks we owe it to Amma to keep doing this forever.”
“Well,” Thendral sat up now, brushing the hair off her eyes. “We do.”
“That’s not fair. Don’t you want to go to college? Study and get a job like Mumtaz and Shyam anna did? Look where they are. In big cities with cars and bikes.”
Thendral’s glare almost petrified Malar. A fire burned in them that had seemed to smother and crumble everything Malar spoke. It would have singed her had she not averted her gaze.
And just like that, the eyes fell. Thendral’s face softened.
“Everyone’s born with a purpose, Malar. Ours is the shrines and the gemstones. Our work under the water is what gives thousands of people their joy when they walk into the seventh temple and pour out their hearts to Shiva’s idol. The seventh temple must stand. It’s a thankless job, but there is a promise that awaits us at the end of it.”
“Like it awaited Amma?” Malar asked, aware that her elder sister was increasingly sounding like their mother.
“Amma is with the spirits in the shrine. She sings to us when we go under. You hear her voice. You just don’t want to admit it.”
Malar pondered her sister’s words for a moment before sticking her tongue out and laying down on the sands once again. “Still, it’s not fair.”
They lay in silence then, casting their invisible spells to drag the clouds left and right, to curl their fingers and hold it to one eye like a fleshy binocular, and catch gulls and crows as they flew over.
“I know,” Thendral said after. “Even Amma’s dying wasn’t fair. But it happened, didn’t it? So, like all things passed down generations, we carry even the unfairness with us.”
Malar scoffed, but ultimately did not reply. They tanned under the sun until Malar thought she saw a hint of gray in the sky, and heard the droning sound of moving clouds.
◆◆◆
A month later, when Malar surfaced from the water under moonlight, carrying a satchel of agate, emerald and jade, she spotted Thendral flailing a few feet away.
Her gills had reformed to human ears, and she was struggling to breathe. Her head craned towards the sky, water drooling out of her mouth. Malar swam to her and wrapped one arm around her shoulders. Her own thighs seared in pain, the cramps in her stomach promised to drag her down to the deepest trench. The blood threatened to burst through the pad and soak the ocean in a canvas of crimson.
Thendral’s flail kept her afloat. And for what seemed to take an eternity, she dragged her through the water to the stone slab jutting behind the temple walls.
Desperate, her own energy all but exhausted, she heaved Thendral on to the slab. When her sister collapsed on the ledge, hair in wet disarray, face pale and eyes closed, Malar began to panic. She breathed into Thendral’s mouth until, moments later, a jet of water squirted out, followed by a wheezing run of coughs that could have awakened half the town.
Malar pulled her sister into a hug, until, in the feeble moonlight, her eyes fell on Thendral’s swollen ankles.
◆◆◆
Once the local healers dismissed the condition as beyond their means, Malar and grandma took Thendral to the hospital in the city. It reminded her of the time Amma had been admitted. The smell of antiseptic, the acrid tang of stainless steel, of latex gloves and of blood.
And of helplessness.
She hated it.
The doctor who treated Thendral was different from the one who had pushed Amma into the emergency ward. A quiet, gruff-looking man with glasses and a stethoscope wrapped around his neck.
“We will need to monitor her overnight,” he said.
Grandma slunk into a chair and began her daily hymns and slogans, and prayed to the seventh temple. Malar paced the room back and forth until Thendral screamed at her for distracting from the television.
That night, Thendral’s chest began to flutter. Malar, who had dozed off in the chair next to the bed, was the first to wake. Her footsteps echoed violently across the quiet hospital wing as she ran to fetch the nurse.
Her own heart raced like a galloping horse while the nurse administered an injection and fed Thendral a cup of biting cold water, whispering to her to calm her breathing. By the time the flutter subsided, Thendral’s face was pale, bloated and fragile. Malar threw all her strength in pressing Thendral’s hand, recalling the tune of the spirits of the submerged temples, even if only for Thendral to hear.
The next morning, the doctor shook his head. “Thendral had, what you call, an atrial fibrillation. It’s when your heart beats much faster than usual. Normally, we could just treat it by giving her a blood thinner or a beta-blocker, but due to last night’s complications, we may have to admit her.”
“What are we talking about?” Grandma asked.
It annoyed Malar to see how calm grandma’s voice was. She might have as well been discussing the price of onions. The doctor pulled out the results. Malar stepped on her toes to get a glimpse of it. “It is a condition known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It’s a genetic disorder. Did either of her parents have a heart condition?”
“Her mother,” grandma whispered, before retreating and collapsing in the chair, hand slapping her forehead. Tears began to dribble out of her eyes.
Something stirred in Malar. She had never prayed to the seventh temple. Not even when Amma lay on this bed after her second attack. The one she did not recover from. The doctor continued, “We are considering all options, but because of the arrhythmia, what looks likely is that we will have to plant an ICD. It’s like a pacemaker.”
Silence in the ward. Malar wanted to storm at him, demand that he fit whatever he wanted to and force her to swallow as many tablets as necessary. As long as Thendral returned home to braid and oil Malar’s hair, to lounge along the beach tracing the gulls with her finger and watching the waves recede.
Even through the thick walls of the hospital, Malar heard the distant waves. Her mind swam slowly past buried arches and cloisters, to where the bubbles frothed along the sides of the trapdoor leading to the hidden chamber of doors.
“Will she be able to swim?”
Ah, there it was. Even now, grandma only wanted to secure their legacy.
The doctor uttered a nervous chuckle. “Yes, but… without the pacemaker, swimming shouldn’t be what you should be asking about.”
A flurry of thoughts entered Malar’s mind: a future of waking up alone with her thighs soaked, her stomach constricted like a cobra had wrapped itself around her waist, walking to the back of the temple alone, before diving into the depths, surrounded by the infinite expanse of tainted blue. The thought disintegrated into grains of sand when the doctor presented grandma with the bill.
Don’t go down there unless you’re bleeding.
◆◆◆
It was already raining by the time Malar dived. Twenty-five days before her expected cycle and, for the first time, disobeying grandma.
The water was cold - colder than usual - as though the moon had fallen and spattered into the sea, coddled by the waves. When she dived in, her body froze and her legs flapped more out of habit than from a desire to go below.
She aimed for the colony of forgotten stones, uneasy at being alone. Every few seconds, she looked to her side or behind, half expecting Thendral to appear in all her grim-faced seriousness, diving with a dolphin’s grace to leave Malar behind.
Malar’s back flinched and cursed, but she kept on until the walls materialized in that emerald-lit semi-darkness. The ruins sprawled in front of her, their toppled masonry and rock-work buried in the sea floor. She weaved down a broken staircase, through a seagrass-infested arch and into the old temple porch where the lion-mounted pillars shimmered.
Within minutes, she pushed herself off the pillar and towards the trapdoor. The sand gave way to the stone slab. Lifting it alone was no easy business, but urgency lent Malar strength. She slid the trapdoor over to the seafloor and plunged into the depths of the tunnel.
By the time she reached the secret chamber, her head was spinning. She collapsed next to one of the doors, each deep breath letting out dense bubbles, the water arresting her motion. Perhaps she could just sleep here awhile. Not that she would run out of air. They never did run out of air.
After a few minutes, she stood up, turned and hopped until she knocked on all six of the doors.
Seconds passed, then minutes.
Time slipped out of orbit, disorienting her. She was here out of turn. This was not part of their monthly cycle. The gemstones were not due, and yet here she was, believing they were. Belief, sometimes, was everything. Amma’s words. They had to hold true.
Like everything else underwater, even her belief shimmered like an illusion as time passed. Her frustration began to mount. She tried to scream, but only yielded more bubbles. She went and rapped her knuckles against the middle door, and then landed a kick at its base. The echo of a harsh grumble rose before subsiding.
Nothing in the end.
Neither the songs, nor the gemstones. What use was belief if it did not yield results?
There had been one rule; only one. Ever grandma had stressed upon it. Even as she had waited on the ledge behind the temple’s courtyard an hour ago, watching the clouds tear to release their first drizzles, the memory of those warnings hadn’t escaped her. In fact, she had woven them around like a thick cloak, pressing the edges to her skin, knitting them into her flesh and sewing them shut with a belief she never had, but suddenly possessed in desperation.
Come on, she attempted to yell underwater, her words compressed, out in malforms of liquid jetting towards the doors. Please, open up!
This was it. Her great plan smothered in watery ashes, and Thendral lying miles away on a hospital bed, surrounded by the smell of disinfectants.
When she finally turned her back to the doors and glided towards the tunnel, a gentle song began in response from the door closest to her. A familiar voice, and yet one twisted by age, swallowed by time.
A carnatic rhythm reached her ears, its syllables forming out of the water, in distant, barely comprehensible layers.
The doors rumbled, creaked and groaned. Before Malar could blink, the six thresholds shuddered and vomited out their tribute through the cavities - a spinel, a topaz bead, a pair of sapphire earrings, a zircon shard and a beryl in the shape of a seahorse.
She collected them in her satchel and, without a backward glance, swam up through the dark tunnel, between the ruins and up towards where moonlight spattered over the surface pierced by rain. The waves drove Malar violently towards the shore.
She recognized the sapphire earrings the central door had thrust out. The familiarity of it had eluded her in those moments when she could think of nobody but Thendral. Now, back on the slab of granite at the temple’s edge, it came rushing back to her, sinking in her heart as something heavier, boulder-like in its conviction of wanting to drag her down.
She pushed the thought away, hugged the satchel of stones, and slowly made her way to her destination through the narrow streets of Mahabalipuram.
◆◆◆
The first visit to a pawnbroker is the stuff of nightmares. They weigh the gold with a weight stuck to the underside of the scale that no first-timer is aware of, and reduce everything that is brought to something worse than a pebble flicked off the beach. They perch on a throne of silk and deck their shops like an antique warehouse but condescend to install the latest cameras on the ledge to catch thieves. But when Malar walked in with the gemstones, the pawnbroker dropped his glasses, staggered forward to receive the stones, gave her what she wanted in return and more, and never laid eyes on gems such as those ever again.
◆◆◆
A month after, when Thendral and Malar bled and wept and hugged their knees in pain, grandma offered them an astringent kashayam to ease the cramps.
Grandma had not forgiven Malar for paying for the treatment by pawning the gemstones. She had whipped and caned her, and cursed her in the old tongue that was not too different from what the fallen spirits sang - only, this had been more acidic, and sharp, like pincers biting into skin. And then grandma had wept endlessly until she had run out of tears. It had left her a husk, leaving behind only the willingness to perform the base duties of feeding her grandchildren.
Thendral, on the other hand, did not deign to utter a word. She avoided confronting Malar altogether, and spent her time studying for school or walking down the beach alone.
That first evening of their bleeding, she walked a few paces behind Malar, the pacemaker adding to the discomfort and making her conscious.
When they dived, Malar was afraid Thendral would flail again. Or, worse, drown. Her sister, however, was as graceful as ever. She laughed and tore across the water and somersaulted in a release of pain. Bubbles escaped Malar’s mouth as she grinned. Her heart soared.
They sped down, past the corbel arches and the sunken stones to where the lion-mounted pillars rested.
Only, they were not resting anymore. The pillars had collapsed in a heap over the platform, releasing a spurt of seaweed and rubble. The floor - the roof to the hidden chamber beneath that had always spooked Malar - lay cracked and bent, one half of it sliding down to utterly crush the chamber of the submerged shrines. Malar’s breath caught in her throat as she spun and swam to where the roof had caved in.
There was no bottom to scour. The doors, once a bastion of impregnability, floated like dust. Nothing existed beyond them. No chamber of treasure. No fallen spirits. No song to soothe their ears. Her vision of emerald green dimmed, with only a flicker of light emerging from the cracks and the crevices, and from beneath the seaweed leaking out of the orifices.
Floating there, stricken by the sight of the collapse, a range of emotions plagued and smothered Malar. From a deep corner of her heart, relief flooded to occupy the rest of her body. It loosened her even as she drifted beneath the water, brushing past toppled stairs and through broken slits in the walls. Every now and then, she glanced at Thendral, who remained rooted above the trapdoor to the erstwhile chamber, eyes vacant at the ruin.
Malar was only glad her sister was with her.
They resurfaced moments later, and paddled to the ledge behind the temple. There, Thendral continued to remain silent.
“Say something,” Malar begged, tears streaming down her face. “Scream at me, will you?”
“I…” Thendral began, her eyes fluttering as her thoughts coalesced into coherence. “I wanted to say thank you. For what you did for me. Just… don’t say anything anymore to me right now.”
They sat on the ledge in silence until the clouds thickened and it began to rain. Thendral showed no intention to return home. Given her choice, she would wither the night away on that ledge. What could water do to them anyway?
As the moon disappeared and darkness descended on the town, the rain magnified and lashed out in a torrential downpour. Slowly, the waves began to torment the walls of the temple, crashing and spurting back in explosions of froth and jet.
And after what seemed like an eternity, the waves rose, wriggling through the crevices among the stones to trickle into the seventh temple.
Prashanth Srivatsa is a speculative fiction writer from Bengaluru, India. His short stories have appeared in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Dark Matter, Shoreline of Infinity and the Three Lobed Burning Eye.