Colophon

When a scribe finished copying a Sanskrit manuscript, the closing note — naming the text, the copyist, the place, sometimes an apology for the errors — was called the puṣpikā, the little flower at the end. This page is this site's puṣpikā. Everything that is only hinted at elsewhere is confessed here, once, with a straight face where possible.

The name

yechuri.sh reads at least three ways, and I wanted all of them:

  1. A shell script. A small executable; a prompt waiting for input. This is the reading the browser gets.
  2. Y·S·H — my initials, which is why that little seal sits at the foot of every page. In a manuscript it would be a mudrā; in the footer, it is just the seal.
  3. The full name folded across the dot: Yechuri · Saahil Haranath. Surname as root, given names as extension — which is also, not coincidentally, how Telugu names are ordered.

There is a fourth reading, and it is the real one. Saha (సహ) is Sanskrit and Telugu for together — the root folded inside sahōdara, sibling. The apex of this domain is deliberately almost empty: it is a threshold held for my family, with exactly one door today and room for more, because a shell is a home you carry. This subdomain is only the first room to be furnished.

The light

The three swatches in the footer change the light, not the "theme." Their names come from what South Asian scribes actually wrote on:

  1. tālapatra — palm leaf: cream leaf, brown ink, and a red reserved for rubrication. The default, because most manuscripts were.
  2. nīla — indigo night: gold ink on a blue-black ground, after the tradition of dark-dyed leaves lettered in gold.
  3. śilā — stone: the austere grey of inscription, for reading in the register of epigraphy.

Your choice is kept in your browser's localStorage — the only thing this site remembers about you, and it never leaves your machine.

The marks

The drawing at the foot of every page is a muggu, generated anew on every visit the way a real one is laid fresh each morning. It has more mathematics in it than a footer ornament strictly requires; the full piece and its grammar are at /art/muggu. The ⚂ beside it (or the ? key, anywhere) opens a random note — the site's one concession to wandering. And the dotted underlines you have been hovering over are exactly what they appear to be: quiet footnotes for the kind of reader who checks.

The register

The rule this site is built under: you should be able to live in every room of it knowing no Sanskrit and no Telugu — and if you do know them, things you were never told should keep resolving into focus. The surface is English; the soul is Telugu. Nothing announces this. You are reading the one page allowed to say it out loud.

The making

Built with Astro; almost every page is plain static HTML, with a little vanilla JavaScript for the muggu, the light, the dice, and one other thing. Served by Cloudflare Pages. The type is whatever old-style serif your machine already owns — Iowan Old Style or Palatino, most likely — because shipping fonts to render mostly-English prose felt like carrying water to a river. There are no analytics, no cookies, no trackers; I will never know you were here, which is the point. Every wing has an RSS feed. Permalinks do not break.

One more door

This site keeps one room that appears on no map and in no menu. In the old stories a cave opens for the one who calls it by its name — and the Sanskrit for cave is four letters long. The site is always listening.