Theft of a Tree

Not much is known about Nandi Timmanna, author of the 1,000-year-old epic Telugu poem Pārijātāpaharaṇamu (Theft of a Tree), newly translated into English, for the first time, by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Velcheru Narayana Rao. According to legend, one night, king Krishnadevaraya (c. 1509–1529) found his wife, Tirumaladevi, sleeping next to him, but with her feet in his face; upset by her lack of respect he stopped speaking to her. Timmanna, who is said to have been a marital gift from Tirumaladevi’s family, wrote Theft of a Tree on her behalf.

The poem is a mythical recounting of a lover’s tiff between Lord Krishna and one of his wives, Satyabama. In the poem, Satyabama is angry that lord Krishna has gifted a pārijāta (night jasmine) flower, from Indra’s heavenly garden, to a different wife. When Krishna tries to apologize, she kicks him.

He saw no way to appease the anger in her heart.
Nothing was working.
Krishna, master puppeteer who pulls the strings of
     the world,
bowed down to her feet,[…]

She kicked him with her left foot,
right on the head—
a head worthy of worship by Brahma and Indra,
the head of the father of the love god.
That’s how it is.

This poem is doing the lord’s work by sending the king Krishnadevaraya a message. If Krishna, a god, can forgive Satyabama’s kick, can the king not laugh away Tirumaladevi’s sleeping position? The poem tells the king to stop being a bore.

Lord Krishna knows better than to lug his gravitas into the bedroom, and his wife, Satyabama, knows better than to treat him as anything other than an idealised object of desire. Though a section of the book is about Krishna’s godliness, the most compelling sections view him through Satyabama’s eyes. To derive aesthetic pleasure from their drama and play is to understand something about allegory, that beauty is a far higher yield than morality.

Krishna, body dark as a raincloud,
came to cool this woman’s mind.
The edges of the veil rose
with her warm breaths,
as if a breeze, the friend of fire,
had come to rekindle her desire.