by Vaishnavi Rajendran
There is a moment in every closet writer’s life, when the fingers tremble just a tiny bit because more often than not, the thing that has driven the person to write again is a subject close to the heart. So it is with me, a need driven by a mind and heart that are churning with longing for the familiar. To a mind as resistant to change as mine is, hyperboles come naturally when trying to connect with the (maybe existing) alter ego. That person inside who is capable of wry humour. That person (Exhibit A, shall we call her) has a capacity for self-efficacy and an almost preternatural knack of finding balance.
I, on the other hand, am driven to write at this godforsaken hour because of a reason as (dare I say it) plebeian and prosaic as homesickness. Thus hermits crawl out of their caves and furry woodland creatures, out of their winter’s slumber. Beside me, B is fast asleep, untrammelled by dreams; the house creaks as old houses do and my nose is cold. And even though Exhibit A makes a strong case against the foolishness of staying up on a school night, I refuse to listen. Indeed, I cannot; and so I will write about home.
Home. Madras or Chennai, (those two damnably interchangeable names) two halves of a whole that have nevertheless managed an unwieldy coexistence. And the incongruity of looking out at a London winter’s night and seeing nothing but a hard sun blazing on mud packed earth.
When I think of the intense umbrage I used to take at anyone who criticised my city, I cannot really smile at my younger self with impunity because I freely admit that it still rankles. In an opinionated world, we are a species that pontificates and cross-pontificates endlessly and because of that – or maybe even in spite of that, I would like to tell you just how incredibly special this old girl on the Eastern shore is to me: my Chennai who doesn’t quite know how to wear her cultural clichés even as she escapes attempts to typify her.
I have only one case to make for Chennai and that is this: it is home.
Madras for me is a grey and slate school and the incomparable childhood it gave me; it is a sprawling college on a rain-parched highway where I made a brother for life. It is my mother’s cotton sarees, the faint smell of lemons around the house and my father’s Bharatiyar books. It is pepper rasam during the flu season and it is chicken cutlets for Sunday lunch.
Madras is a childhood under the sun and fighting over who got the last strawberry Cornetto. It is the northeast monsoon and the amphibian chorus outside my window after a thunderstorm. It is a pink raincoat that was folded away the other ten months of the year.
Madras is the basement Landmark store and waiting with the morning light for the new Harry Potter book. Madras is the Nungambakkam Kulfi stall and the vague comfort of knowing that good biryani is never more than a half an hour away, in any direction. It is a child’s excitement at being allowed to run amok on the Marina. It is being able to tell my kids, “Yes, I watched Basha in the theatre way back when, and yes it was EPIC.” It is Satyam Cinemas’ J row and popcorn the likes of which I haven’t tasted anywhere else in the world. It is Mani Ratnam and Madras Talkies. It is RJ Balaji and the old Higginbothams on Mount Road. It is Ilayaraja and it is S. Muthaiah’s articles on MetroPlus. It is the Nuts ‘n’ Spices green tea bags and A.R. Rahman’s Mylapore Blues.
It is miles and miles of wild beaches and wilder rides along the East Coast Road. It is an endless summer with a sapphire sea. Goa can keep its beaches; Kerala can keep its waterways; we have our Vanga Kadal, the Bay of Bengal.
It is Bessie Beach and freshly fried fish and long walks in the Theosophical society gardens. It is the total quiet in the dead of the night on my rooftop. It is the fireworks stalls that spring up everywhere and a house overrun with friends and food on Diwali. It is the smell of cracker smoke and the sheen of new clothes. It is my beautiful Chepauk on a sunny day and the national rhetoric of “Sachin! Sachin!”
It is a green-roofed, glass-fronted house that was built upon childhood dreams of Nerolac paint advertisements. It is a cubbyhole consecrated by dreams and the painful process of growing up. It is my dogs; the ones I lost and the one I have.
It is that leap of the heart at that first look upon my sea and midnight drives along the beach. It is that hitch of breath every time I see my beloved skyline out of an airplane window. It is the immeasurable luxury of knowing that this is home; nowhere else will I belong more, no place else will ever hold my heart the way she does.
Madras is twenty-one years in a time capsule and friends who have long become family. It is a five-year old in a yellow frock and the two little girls who would become the sisters of her heart. I haven’t forgotten that yellow frock or the person I was in it. It is my best and my worst. It is my moment in the sun and my talisman against the dark. It is the incomparable joy of acquainting B with my city.
We are a people unabashedly in love with our home. We plod at our own place and dance to our own tunes and if we cannot live up to the breakneck speed of India’s other metros, we have nevertheless managed to be comfortable in our own skin. Today, she might be just a fraction of what she could be but she marches on; she has the grit of the Gods, my city. The average Chennaite doesn’t really care about the political fracas of the day. He could be full of bluster or he could be self-effacing but he has his own brand of bonhomie; he might not share a common language with you but he will attempt to have a conversation with you anyway. For whatever reason, he has decided to make this torrid, dirt-stained, beautiful city his home and it will hold his heart forevermore.
I am just one of many such; a girl who came to live in Madras when she was little more than a toddler and grew to love the Chennai that it has become. Home is the incessant tattoo that drums on my heart and it is the siren call that sings to my blood. Home is and forever will be…Chennai. Vandharai vazhavaikkum Chennai. If you go to her, she will never turn you back.
Pic from https://www.flickr.com/photos/prasenna/
Reading this piece, I can understand the hesitation a person may have to express all the intangible emotions that evoke at the mention of home. You should give yourself a pat on your back. Because I read this in one breath. And at times, I was blown away with the staggering amounts of moments that I am sure lay concealed behind each of these lines. Sometimes a city becomes so inexplicably intertwined with one’s growing up , that later, as one leaves it for other places, it keeps on haunting one with the memories. Lovely piece. 🙂