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31 December 2004
An ode to Madras
We are into day five of the tsunami tragedy. What started as a phone call from my mother on Christmas evening about tremors in Madras has transcended into what many have called a glimpse of the Apocalypse.Even though I spent nine years in Bangalore and six years in Madras I have come to think of Madras as the town I truly come from. Of course, this label automatically sticks to any Tamil Brahmin irrespective of where he comes from in India. The "Madrasi" as our lot is referred to, sometimes pejoratively, in the northern parts of the country has been typecast in many a Hindi movie starting with Mehmood in Padosan whose guttural self-inflicted affectation of the accent was perhaps one of the most effective caricatures imitated over and over again in a thousand-odd movies since that necessitated a counterbalance South Indian sidekick to the North Indian male protagonist. This has been so deeply embedded in the psyche that people in the north have simply refused to accept anything contradictory.
In my own case, this projection has been harder to justify given my schooling in a bilingual English and Hindi medium school that was opaque to regional influences. Consequently I have come to brand myself as a mish-mash of a secular, largely forgiving Hindi culture, a dull and sombre Kannada environment and a religious though predominantly tolerant Tamil heritage. I have felt equally disadvantaged and relieved at times because of my peculiar upbringing. In the first few months in Madras nearly ten years ago, it was hard to accept that there was a place so close to Bangalore that had none of its aura and languid eloquence -- the foliage, the immaculately mown golf courts whose rotating sprinklers never failed to excite me in anticipation of water pirouetting out in helical symmetry and the rainwater that anointed large BDA granite slabs on the sidewalk and ran parallel to sloping roads skipping across pebbles and grass toupees. In their place, Madras had petulant auto-drivers, 37 degrees Celsius in March, no rain during the Monsoons, celebrity worship and a beach that was as infamous for its sand as it was dubious for its trysts with two-bit couples and nocturnal improprieties.
After nine formative years in relative idyll, Madras was merely a nuisance. School in Bangalore was minutes away by bicycle; in Madras we had to change two buses. It was humiliating enough that my brother was given conditional admission upon his performance in mathematics and Sanskrit in the fifth standard but in addition we had to suffer an authoritarian regime of polished shoes, belts that better not have skipped loops, neatly pressed uniforms and notoriously long prayer sessions that included transcendental meditation. The bank quarters in Kilpauk were obtrusively large neighbouring a hotel that partied hard every night. Nobody was on speaking terms with us, as everybody else in the apartment complex stayed in sequestered short-lease apartments and was either Gujarati or Marvadi. It resembled a frightening lunatic asylum and its proximity to the Institute of Mental Health at Kilpauk did not do it any good.
We shifted from Kilpauk into T. Nagar and that made all the difference. Even though it was a substantial climb-down from the Kilpauk quarters for us to live in a two-bedroom apartment with the occasional use of a third, we were amidst familiar strangers once again. It was in Raman street that my love affair with Madras began in right earnest. The neighbours were an elderly Iyengar couple with no children; the wife wore her saree a full three inches above her ankle and never subsided from gossip and the husband was an accommodating and reserved cricket fanatic. Owing to my academic compulsions, there was an embargo on cable television at our place and so it was at his house that we had to watch Tendulkar's historic double act in Sharjah. Those two days of unbridled exhilaration was enough for his wife to think of me as family. School was once again within bicycling distance though I had learnt enough of it to realise how big a travesty its disciplinarianism was and took the occasional Friday off to skip those long hours of pins and needles during meditation.
T. Nagar symbolised the middle-class Tamil Brahmin. There were large doses of Iyers and Iyengars littered throughout its many little alleyways in flats that were almost always called Kala Co-operative Society. There was a one-stop temple behind the busy Pondy Bazaar road that housed every imaginable deity that needed worshipping by the Iyers. For the Iyengars, there was the TTD temple on Venkatnarayana Road whose deity idol was an acceptable verisimile of the one in Tirumala and whose large hoarding of Tulasi leaves I never failed to raid upon my visits there. Pondy Bazaar was itself a dream destination for the bored housewives who would leave the confines of their scorching homes once their wards had been packed off in multi-colour uniforms into the seat-rims and front rows of diesel autorickshaws. Thyagaraya Road had the fancy hosieries that stocked labcoats and lingerie, Ambika Appalam Depot's branch office that charged ransom for its reputation, Balaji Bhavan whose meals were both sumptuous and affordable, Ratna Stores whose barefeet ruffian boys and salesmen in sky-blue shirts and khaki pants marauded passers-by into visiting them and purchasing from them. At the confluence of Usman road, Venkatnarayana road and Thyagaraya road were the sultans of T. Nagar's business establishment -- the silk stores, Nalli's, Kumaran's, Pothy's, Jeyachandran's and the jewellers -- Prince, Banu and Fatima. They were what drew hundreds and thousands of bargain-hunters, leery husbands, dazzled wives and bored children. Nalli's stores maintained an upmarket clientele of the rich and opulent whose drivers would park cars on intersections or have them jut out into main roads obstructing traffic and run roughshod over the pedestrians and those deprived of their temporary elevation in rank.
Then began my stint at the other fashionable part of Madras -- Besantnagar and Adyar. The 633 acres of untrammelled space in IIT in Adyar would rate as the best real estate anytime in the entire country. In the four years that I spent there, I learnt not only to love it but also to guard it fiercely. The real estate also came with a new set of acquaintances in college, a new set of role models in professors and senior students and new ideals to aspire to. I cherished my associations with my friends, learnt and imbibed from them, made sport of them and was made sport of. We harboured great and lofty aspirations, low and dirty yearnings, mean-spirited diatribes and fawning adulations. I went through course-corrections, political awakenings, nationalist invective, globalist self-advancement but ultimately sought comfort to stay in the pack. And then I was re-introduced to music. With the music came the company of its preachers and artisans and with that was sealed my permanent affection for Madras -- its glorious and unswerving conviction in its roots, its celebration of history and culture of the highest and purest form, its addiction to nobility, its patronage of the virtuous and the virtuosos and its reaffirmation of the true moorings of Indian society. I have no doubt that my beliefs in this regard are largely fashioned by my own fortunate cultivation of the right minds and the right men but I nonetheless owe it to the spirit of Madras itself for cultivating them in her turn.
I felt this nostalgic throwback was necessary in light of how Sunday's tragedy may have permanently altered Madras as a city. It is certainly true that Madras may have suffered minimally in terms of human lives lost when one were to look at the scale of this horrific disaster but it is also undeniable that those waves have somehow changed forever how Madras shall be looked upon. It is unfortunate that I no longer have to suffer the ignominy of claiming to hail from a city a few hundred miles east of Bangalore but can rather shamelessly boast of coming from a city that was devastated by the Asian tsunamis. This tribute is for those that love this city as dearly or more so than I do, for those who lived in it, played in its hot sands, romanced under the early moonlight with inverted paper cones of groundnuts and sundal instead of serenades and love-letters, for those who sought to breath its air when it was least besmirched by the fumes from Cooum in the wee hours of the morn, for those who perished for their intransigence of setting huts and shacks by the shores as they had no place else to go to and for those who shall continue to live bravely in the lurking shadows of its coastline.
