Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #130: Art and Love: The Mural of Tillotoma

Choice is a conflict that propels many stories. In the Odyssey (which I am reading in Emily Wilson's marvelous translation) Odysseus turns down the immortality the goddess Calypso offers him and chooses to remain mortal (and eventually die) so that he can return to his wife, family, and people; in Pilgrim's Progress, written a thousand years later, Pilgrim turns his back on Vanity Fair and all the temptations he encounters in order to arrive at the Celestial City; in my favorite novel, John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Charles Smithson chooses the woman he loves over Victorian respectability. Choices always mean conflict, and conflict is the essence of storytelling.

In "The Mural of Tillotoma," the main character, Kairavi Nagaswami, has to choose between the opulent lifestyle her family would enlist her in and what she comes to value in love. 

Kairava's family is wealthy, lives in a mansion, and has everything they could want or need. She and her sisters fly to London to attend concerts and theatrical productions; to New York to shop; to Delhi and Tokyo to meet with friends and spend money. Of the three young women in her family, she is considered the least beautiful. On a trip to New York she meets an Indian girl who is studying to be an anthropologist and, in the summer, is going on an archaeological dig in Israel. When Kairavi asks her why she is going she simply says, "Because I want to." Kairavi's outlook on life begins to change. She tells her parents she does not want to marry right away. She would like to attend college.

Tel Aviv University

They are puzzled but, since she is the youngest and, in their opinion, the least marriable daughter, they grant her request, though they are surprised when she elects to attend not Cambridge or Harvard or the University of Delhi, which are prestige schools, but the university of Tel Aviv. The school, she tells them, has a top-rate archeological department and the location provides opportunities to go on digs that might yield significant artifacts.

She graduates, still not married (but with an Israeli boyfriend), embarks on a career, and finds, on her first dig in India, a perfectly preserved chamber with a completely intact set of murals depicting the story of Tillotoma.

Tillotoma was, in Indian legend, created by the craftsman of the gods to be the most beautiful women of all time. This turns out to be a problem because two very powerful gods, Shiva and Indra, both fall in love with her. To avert a war in heaven, Brahma, the chief god and creator, transforms her to a mortal woman of average looks and she marries a mortal man and is able to live a life without gods fighting over her.

The discovery propels Kairavi into an archeological celebrity. Her discovery is carried in National

Tillotomma

Geographic, Smithsonian, and Indian Archeology. The BBC, Indian Public Television, and PBS produce reports on her and her find. She receives offers for jobs at prestigious universities. Kairavi sees her choice as auspicious. She will be able to marry the man she loves and pursue the career she decided on. She reflects, ironically, that, like Tillotoma, she has gone from privilege to being an average woman.

A good decision, she is able to tell herself.

The story appeared in a now-defunct journal, Intellectual Refuge. Someday I might try to remarket it.

Read my latest novella, Sinfonia: A Painted Lady. A vampire girl who is a lute player and has been alive for hundreds of years finds out that someone painted a portrait of her back in the 1600s. And its existence is threatening her, her coven, and vampires everywhere.

Happy reading.