Reflections in the receding waters - Part 2

Up until 2015, power cuts conjured up images of a heavy wooden oonjal (swing) in a century-old house buried deep in a town known more in association with a Robin Hood-esque sandalwood smuggler than any image that colours my memories. For the first few years, that oonjal hung against the backdrop of a blown-up picture from the era where every frame was planned, choreographed, and executed to perfection so as to not “waste the roll.” The girl stands on what looks like a bridge, clad in a red pattu-pavadai and blue blouse, forehead adorned with a pottu whose size betrays the wearer’s age – too young. The child’s hair is in the quintessential ‘fountain kudumi’, that rite of passage that every girl passes through in the growth from mushroom cut to the more social acceptable “long hair.” There were a few other pictures on that wall, all from eras bygone, the creams and peaches of their tones blending right in to the peeling, crumbling walls of the house itself.

On that oonjal sits a lady, her feet folded up (sometimes both, occasionally one), revealing a certain ease that hangs easily about her. She seems comfortable with where she is, what she is, who she is. Every few minutes, if the air got too still or the room too quiet, she’d drop a foot down and give the oonjal a little nudge to set the creaking chains in motion as they strained against the engraved wooden plank above. On either side of this woman sit two girls, each clad in appropriately demure clothing – pavadais, frocks, skirts that touch the knees, every passing summer marked by the increasing length of their identical double braids that frame their faces. They almost always lean into the older woman, either snaking an arm through hers or resting an elbow on her lap, or better yet, stretching out on either side, amicably splitting her lap right down the middle. Every once in a while, the woman’s place would be taken over by a much older man, comforting in a veshti (dhoti) softened by age and a sleeved banian greyed by wear. His lap was even better; thicker, broader, more present. With every power cut, the two girls crawled their way to habit. The same oonjal. The same positions. To listen to stories of ancestors and local kings, mythologies and the heroics of the Gods, and occasionally, folklore from farther away. In the security of the darkness, they played word games and stumbled through the labyrinth that is English vocabulary. They learnt music and poetry, and learnt to identify the stars and the stories that go with each one of them. They laughed till their stomachs hurt. All on an oonjal in a house without power.

Until 2015, power cuts conjured up images of a heavy wooden oonjal and two pigtailed girls. It told the stories of the summer of my childhood visiting my maternal grandparents, swatting away insects as my grandfather told us tales from the pages of history, our own and other.

Up until 2015, power cuts were the slightly painful relationship you could never entirely come to hate, the one-too-many-eth piece of chocolate cake on a non-cheat day of a diet. There was mystery to it, an in that mystery lay an aura, a charm. Up until 2015, power cuts were cozy.

And then it was 2015.

I still talk of it as “just now,” the evening when a friend of mine and I sat huddled in a third girl’s hostel room in complete darkness. We had lost power a couple of days ago and news was trickling in that the city had it bad, that the downpour was in no hurry to stop, and we may not be able to deal with its consequences. We heard that a radio station had swung into action, that they had stopped broadcasting entertainment in favour of playing messenger between Those Who Could and Those Who Couldn’t. I remember how time hung heavy and low in the room that day, how every second seemed pregnant with the exhausted roller-coaster between dread and relief as our minds scanned through a mental checklist of all the neighbourhoods we cared about. Safe. Safe. Safe. Not so much. Oh damn. Safe.

Our lives for the last couple of days had been something out of a dream that was not quite right. We would wake up whenever the sun intruded into our rooms and head out to eat whenever our stomachs grew louder than the voices in the corridor outside. We could yell out to each other without having to battle with blaring speakers and music that usually kept us company. We read physical books that weren’t course material, played board games, and sat and chatted about everything under the sun. And then, that one night, we huddled in a friend’s room and decided we’d use the precious little phone battery we had left amongst us to hear of the world outside.

In the year since, I have written about my flood experiences plenty, enough for me to not have to revisit it. Yet, despite it all, despite the rather privileged experience I had of the Chennai floods (my home and everyone in it were fine, to begin with), something happened these last two days that shook my very being. One year later, I live in Anaikatti, a village on the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, a small settlement where nothing much actually ever happens. As I stepped into my room after spending Diwali weekend at home with a phone that was already dead with all the travel usage, I thought I had a hot shower and a plug point waiting for me before I ran to answer the cries of ‘Yashasvini Akka vandhutaange’ ('Yashasvini Akka has come!') that greeted my arrival. I walked in, casually flicked on the switches…and nothing happened. I called out to a colleague in the kitchenette next door. Has it been gone long, I asked, expecting her to say perhaps a couple of hours. Yes, since 6 PM last evening, she replied. That was fourteen hours and counting. I told myself it would be fine, dunked a bucket of ice-cold water on me in the claims of a shower, and ran off to class.

At 10:30 AM, as we drank our morning coffee, there was no power.

At 12:45 PM, as we sat down to lunch, there was no power.

At 3:30 PM, as we drank our afternoon tea, there was no power.

At 6:00 PM, when Grade 10 wrapped up their extra class, there was no power.

And at 6:00 PM, just as Grade 10 traipsed out of the school, it started getting dark. And the discomfort, the restlessness, the nervousness that had threatened to rear up within me all day was getting too loud to ignore. An Akka from housekeeping walked up to me and said ‘idhu ungalukku,’ gesturing that she expected me to take something from her. In the semi-darkness, it took me a minute to realise what it was. She handed me two candles and a matchbox in an action that reminded me with an uncanny force of another Akka in another building who had done the same thing for me just about a year ago. Adhiseshamma with pink candles and Tiger matches. Pali Akka with white candles and Cats matches. Apart from the minor detail of human names and animal species, what really was the difference?

I hid my discomfort behind a mask of jest. This is just like the floods, I chuckled. We barely know what the outside world is upto. Yet inside me, that same sentence took on a different tone – one of anxiety, of uncertainty. It came with images that haven’t gotten blurred by Time - of the Paati who berated me for giving her only one biscuit packet because veetle rendu pasange irukkange ma (there are two boys at home, ma), of the Anna who ridiculed me for handing out a few millilitres of Dettol because idhu vechuttu veeteya kazhuva mudiyum (can I really clean out my house with this?), of the Akka who asked me surreptitiously for pads because en prachanai unakku thaan puriyum ma (only you will understand my problems, ma) and ippo indhe time le ezhundukave mudiyale (I can't even get up at this time). Of the army jawan who asked me to go ahead and distribute the measly dozen food packets I had, of the mob that appeared from I-don’t-know-where at the sight of a jute bag in my hand, of the crowd that decided they couldn’t be bothered with me once it ran out, of the hand that caught the small of my back when they pushed me backwards into oncoming traffic on a busy main road. Yesterday, as I sat in a sari, my head tucked into my knees on a granite bench at a school far away, I could almost see water marks on the walls in front of me.

Today, from this corner of my world, I hope that Anna and Akka and Paati are okay. I hope that Anna’s baby and wife survived having a snake to keep them company in the stagnant water of their home, that they got the Dettol they needed to wash away the stench of a disaster. I hope that Akka was able to afford a new set of utensils inside of rubbing them thin to rid them of the filth. I hope the Paati’s grandsons play in the rain today, setting paper boats made of newsprint down the muddy streams that are Chennai’s gullies. I hope they don’t think of rain and think of a Parle G biscuit packet split in two. And I hope their Paati watches them and thinks of childhood and innocence, not of a helpless young girl who just didn’t have enough to give.

One year later, amidst a different rain and a different power cut in a different place, this is what I know. Up until 2015, power cuts were cozy. Today, it is all just a little scary.