மஹ்திதாசன்

  A few years ago, in the wee stages of my “official” conversion to Islam (though I had been dabbling in and out of Islamic practice even as a Hindu in my years prior) I had a strange visitor in a dream: a radiant, angry village woman, teeth bared, with large nose studs and a pockmarked face, who said she had a message for my mother. As any Tamil could tell you, these visuals would instantly translate as a visitation from an Amman, an ancestral matriarch of Dravidian societies—and this was precisely the answer my mother gave me when I approached her in the morning and delivered the message meant for her (which contained a prediction that would, shockingly, come true…but that is a bizarre story for another day). Only there was one tiny problem: the woman I had seen was dressed in a pale blue hajj outfit and was not wearing pottu.  A Pakistani friend of mine with a Sufi background had a different reply for me, one that would puzzle me even more. “I’ve heard of this before,” ...