Avvaiyar and the Wise Little Boy

Long ago in the Tamil country there lived a poet named Avvaiyar, old and wise and famous across the whole land. There was no riddle she could not answer, no verse she could not better. Everyone bowed to her great learning, and perhaps, just a little, she had come to feel there was nothing left for her to learn.

One hot afternoon, weary and hungry from a long road, Avvaiyar came to a naaval tree, the kind that drops sweet dark berries, and high in its branches sat a small village boy, happily eating. “Child,” she called up, “I am so tired and so hungry. Would you throw me down some fruit?”

The boy peered down at her with a cheeky little smile. “Of course, grandmother. But tell me first. Would you like hot fruit, or cold fruit?”

Avvaiyar blinked. Hot fruit? Cold fruit? She, who knew everything, had never heard of such a thing. Fruit was fruit. Still, she was curious. “Hot fruit, then,” she said.

So the boy gave the branch a shake, and a shower of ripe berries tumbled down and landed in the dust at her feet. Avvaiyar gathered them up and, before popping one in her mouth, lifted it and blew on it softly to puff away the dust.

And the boy burst out laughing. “There, grandmother! You blew on the fruit, just the way you blow on food that is too hot. So you see, the ones that fell to the dusty ground are the hot fruit, that need blowing on. The clean ones still up on the tree are the cold fruit. I did warn you to choose.”

Avvaiyar stood very still. This small boy, up a tree in a tiny village, had asked her a question she could not answer, and taught her something she did not know.

And then, the story says, the boy smiled, and just for a moment he was not a village child at all. A soft golden light shone all about him, and Avvaiyar understood, with a catch in her breath, that this was no ordinary boy. It was Lord Murugan himself, who had taken the shape of a cowherd child to teach the wisest poet in all the land one last, gentle lesson. Then the light faded, and he was simply a boy again, grinning down from his branch.

The greatest poet in the country bowed her head, to the child, and to the god within him. And she went on her way that day a great deal humbler, and a great deal wiser, than she had been that morning.