Selvam rushes in when he sees that Gandhirajan, my research assistant, and I have come to his house. ‘Please come in,’ he says, pleasantly surprised, and he rushes out again with the same speed. We settle on the floor of Selvam's living room, looking around for the changes in decoration since the last time we were here. The room is sparsely furnished with a plastic chair and a cupboard holding a television set. The walls on the contrary are elaborately decorated with posters and framed pictures. These walls immediately reveal that Selvam is a fan of Rajinikanth. Each time I visit Selvam, his walls are embellished with novel images of the star. After a few minutes Selvam arrives again, as usual with two fresh coconuts. ‘Here, please drink this.’

While drinking our coconut, we exchange queries about each other's well-being. Selvam finally asks the question which is always gripping him: ‘Have you met him?’ His voice has a curious tone when he asks me whether I have met Rajinikanth.

‘No, I haven’t,’ I reply, and Selvam, slightly disappointed but wasting no words on the lack of news, continues to look through his cupboard to pull out images of Rajinikanth that he has collected or made in the last days or months.

When I got to know Selvam, he was a coconut seller in his thirties living in a modest house in Thengai Thope, one of the coconut plantations on the outskirts of Puducherry. Selvam was living alone; his parents were not alive anymore, and he was not married yet. Selvam has been a fan of Rajinikanth since his early childhood. Each time I visited Selvam, the images he has collected and displayed on his walls served as leading thread to recount his stories about Rajinikanth, the images themselves, the fan club in Puducherry, and his own everyday life (Figure 3). Every image came with a story, such as the death of his mother, his marriage, and later the birth of his children and their birthdays.

This chapter is about these images. I make two interrelated arguments. My first argument relates to the way fandom is inflected in familial relationships as well as being informed by them.