The Girl in the Millet Field

On a hill in the Tamil country the hunters found a baby girl lying under a creeper, and took her to their chief, Nambi. He had sons but no daughter, and he kept her, and named her Valli, after the creeper.

She grew up a girl of the hills: quick, brown from the sun, afraid of nothing. When she was old enough, her father gave her the work the girls of the hunters did. The tribe had cleared a field and sown it with thinai, foxtail millet, and as it ripened, Valli sat on a platform in the middle of it with a sling and stones and a rattle, and drove off the parrots and the sparrows.

Far away, the sage Narada told Murugan about her.

Murugan came down to the hill dressed as a hunter, with a bow in his hand, as if he had been chasing a deer and lost his way. He walked into the millet field.

"Whose field is this?" he asked her. "And whose daughter are you?"

"My father's," said Valli. "And this is not a road. Go back the way you came."

He did not go. He talked to her, and the more he talked the less she liked it. Then they heard the drums of her father's hunting party coming up the hill, with Nambi bringing honey and fruit for his daughter. In an instant the hunter was gone. Where he had stood was a tree, a vengai tree, that had not been there before. Nambi's men looked at it and wondered, and some of them wanted to cut it down, and Nambi said leave it.

When they had gone, the tree was a hunter again, and he told her he loved her.

"I will marry no one," said Valli, "but Murugan."

He laughed and went away. And the next time he came, he was an old man, bent over a stick, white-haired and shaking. Nambi met him on the path, felt sorry for him, and asked him to stay with Valli and keep her company.

The old man was hungry. Valli gave him what she had, millet flour mixed with honey. It was dry, and he was thirsty, and she took him to a spring in the rocks and he drank. Then he looked at her.

"You have taken away my hunger," he said, "and my thirst. There is one more thing you could take away."

Valli turned and walked off in a fury.

The old man called on his brother. And out of the trees came a wild elephant, crashing and trumpeting, straight at Valli. It was Ganesha. She ran, screaming, and the only person to run to was the old man. She threw her arms round him.

"Save me," she said, "and I will do whatever you ask."

"Marry me," he said.

"Yes," she said. "Yes. Anything."

The elephant stopped, and turned, and went away into the forest. The old man straightened up, and grew young, and had six faces and twelve arms and the Vel in his hand. Valli saw that it was Murugan, the one she had sworn she would marry.

Later he came back for her, and she went away with him, and when Nambi found out he went after them with all his men and shot at the stranger who had taken his daughter. Not one arrow touched Murugan. Instead Nambi and his sons fell dead. Valli wept and begged Murugan to bring them back.

"You do it," he said.

She touched them, one by one, and they sat up. Then Nambi knew who his son-in-law was, and married them properly. The hill is called Vallimalai, Valli's hill, after her. And Murugan took her to his hill shrine at Tiruttani.

In Sri Lanka the same story is told, but the hill is in the island, in the forest country near Kataragama in the south, and Valli is a daughter of the Vedda, the forest people of Sri Lanka, who still live in that country.

The courtship goes much as it goes at Vallimalai, with the field of millet, the young hunter who will not leave, the tree, the hungry old man, and the elephant that drives the girl into his arms. The difference is at the end.

At Vallimalai, Murugan marries Valli and takes her away to his shrine, and then to the heaven of the gods, where she lives in peace with his first wife Deivanai.

At Kataragama he does not go. He likes the forest. He likes Valli's people. He stays.

Deivanai waits for him in heaven and he does not come back. At last she comes down to the forest herself to fetch him.

"Come home," she says. "You belong among the gods, with me."

"I am home," he says, and he will not move.

She cannot change his mind. And so, in the end, she does what he has done. She stays as well, and all three of them live together at Kataragama.

The temple there is one of the holiest places on the island, visited by Hindus and Buddhists alike, and by Muslims and the Vedda too. At its great festival, in the dry season, the god is said to go out at night to visit Valli.