Chapter 3அதிகாரம் 3 ஆர்வம் Curiosity

Every hunger subsides with eating; the desire to know is a hunger that grows with eating.

A creeper’s tip reaches for its stake; take the stake away, and the creeper curls in upon itself.

kozhukombu: the stake or pole set in the ground for a climbing plant to wind around.

She opened a single flower, and the question inside it showed a hundred more to open.

piri, ‘separate’, means both picking one flower out from others and pulling a flower open.

A child stood swallowing the sky with its eyes; the elders packed those eyes with earth, to suit themselves.

mannadaithal, to stop up with earth, is also what is done in filling a grave.

Before anyone digs the ground, a sprout’s tip has already pierced it; before the need, the question.

To those whose hearts ask, the whole world is a book; to those who do not ask, the world is a wall.

One lay under the cover, smelling only his own breath; the other lay searching the air beyond it.

Under a sheet drawn over the head, every breath comes back: nothing reaches the covered one that did not come from himself.

When a hundred say ‘good’, who asks the hundred-and-first question? All hundred are deaf.

In Tamil one verb, kel, means both ‘to ask’ and ‘to hear’; kelvi, ‘question’, also means ‘hearing’.

‘We will know its depth,’ they said, and leapt into the surging sea; not one of them has known their own depth.

aazham, ‘depth’, is said of seas and of people alike.

The mind of those who do not ask is a locked house; the mind of those who ask, an opening.

vaai means an opening or doorway, and in everyday Tamil also ‘mouth’.