The god who lives in He Is Honey, Salt and the Most Perfect Grammar is known by many names: as 'Guha' he is the one who homes in the heart-cave; as 'Subrahmanyan' he is easy with knowledge of the Absolute; as 'Singaravelan' he's the dandy whose weapon is the vel, and as Murugan, his most popular name, he is beautiful and valorous.

Murugan is son to Parvati and Shiva and brother to Ganesha, who plays a big role in his younger sibling's fate. Each of the names Murugan is known by resounds with notes from his adventure filled biography and devotees call upon him to bring to their lives the specific qualities that each one holds: austerity, valour, erotic playfulness and so on. In doing this, they are invoking an ancient way of speaking open a doorway between human and non-human through naming; the utterance of the name is one-third of a somewhat-shamanic unit of seeing-naming-becoming, a formula that poets have often used to arm themselves through the bewitched geographies of poetry.

The god also has other names - and these he makes up on the - spur of the moment, in response to being asked to name himself, to provide an answer to that most persistent human question: Who are you?' The curious thing is that the person asking this question is usually a poet, and, if you know Murugan, you'll know that he would have just tricked, shocked, unsettled or bested that poet in a duel by word. Only in retrospect will the poets recognize that these encounters were designed by the god to draft, revise and enliven their current work as well as their writing process. For the god, this naming is a game, a carefully wrought sleight-of-word that celebrates language and his delight in articulation.

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