Kaveri

Prior to the 11th Century, the Cholas had been one among the many squabbling powers that dotted the Kaveri floodplain, the great body of silt that flows through India's present-day state of Tamil Nadu.

In the Chola capital region on the Kaveri, corresponding to the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple-towns supported populations of tens of thousands, possibly outclassing most cities in Europe at the time.

A few things I’ve been reading this month: Should you be on the market for a new literary detective, you’d be hard pressed to find one more charming than Kaveri Murthy, the main character of Harini Nagendra’s mystery series set in 1920s India.

Kaveri, a young newlywed in the second volume, is an amateur sleuth with a love for Sherlock Holmes and an “inability to stop interrogating people when she felt things didn’t make sense.”

It’s a pleasure to enter Kaveri’s clever mind, and Nagendra wraps the story in a message of female empowerment.