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.
