In the *Kuruntokai*, anthology number 25, a girl is asked why she has stopped eating. She does not answer. The poem itself, eight lines long, is the answer. Two thousand years later, in a WhatsApp message I receive from a friend in Coimbatore, the same answer is given, with the same eight-line discipline, using mostly the same nouns.
The Sangam poets did not write to be quoted. They wrote to be overheard.
The grammar of longing has barely changed. Only the alphabets have learnt new tricks.
Tinai, in five landscapes
The classical *tinais* — kurinji (mountain), mullai (forest), marudham (farmland), neithal (coast), and palai (wasteland) — were never just settings. Each landscape carried a feeling. To set a poem in the marudham was to say, before any verb, that this would be a story of separation amid plenty.
The diary keeps doing this. Anyone who has texted a friend "I'm at the beach" knows that the beach is doing some of the work the sentence pretends to avoid.