The stories your parents never told you

When the Pandyan king of Madurai executed her husband on a false charge of theft, Kannagi walked into court holding the proof — an anklet — and after the king had died of shame, she set fire to the city with her own body. The Silappathikaram is the only ancient epic in the world whose central act is a woman's public anger.

Mahadevi was a 12th-century Kannada poet who married a king under one condition and broke the condition the moment he tried to enforce it. She walked out of his palace, removed her clothes, let her hair fall to her ankles, and walked into the forest singing vachanas to her real husband — Lord Chenna Mallikarjuna.

Thinnan was an illiterate forest hunter from the hills of Kalahasti. He worshipped Shiva by spitting water from his mouth onto the linga and offering wild boar meat as prasad. When the linga's eye began to bleed, he tore out his own eye to replace it — and reached for the second when the other eye began to bleed too.

Punithavathi was the most beautiful woman in Karaikal — wife of a wealthy merchant, perfumed, garlanded, the envy of the town. After the mango miracle, when her husband fled in fear of her, she asked Shiva for one boon: take away this body. Let me follow you as a skeleton.

When Sati walked uninvited into her father's yajna and burned herself in the sacred fire, Shiva carried her body across the sky for so long that the gods feared the world would end. The places her limbs fell are still pilgrimage sites today.

Before the great battle, the Pandava priests said victory required the sacrifice of a perfect prince. Iravan, Arjuna's forgotten son by a Naga princess, volunteered. He had only one condition: he could not die unmarried. Krishna himself solved the problem in a way the temple at Koovagam still remembers.

When the sage Galava needed eight hundred horses with one black ear each as guru-dakshina, his friend Yayati had no horses to give. He gave his daughter instead. Her name was Madhavi, and the epic remembers her quietly, the way it remembers all the wounds it could not openly mourn.

On the last night of the war, Ravana came to his queen Mandodari's chamber. She had not spoken to him in three weeks. That night, she did. The argument she made — quietly, without raising her voice once — was the closest thing to a final mercy the great king ever received.