Ghost Town

In ten years, these roads will be walked by ghosts. Memories will hang from the once green trees and the voices of Aachi and Potte and Ayya will float in with the wind, boundless, undefined, united. There will be no hierarchy or stratification, no proper place and appropriate behaviour. There will only be History, the ghosts of a time gone by.

Today, there is a skeleton of a town that once was. Perhaps village is a better word for the one street that constitutes their world. We ask of other worlds and other peoples, and we are pointed in a vague direction. They are There and we are Here. The world goes on. Heads rest where they belong.

There is a temple huddled away somewhere, behind that wood there, to the right of those trees. Scooters make their way on a path once meant only for feet, unsandalled. Yet today, they speak of locks and gates and property names. The temple is quaint. The Sunshine plays hide and seek with trees unnamed, probably a few generations young. They sway with the barely-there wind, almost as if to say Welcome, this is Here, where you belong. Here looks like white dhotis and holy strings cast across shoulders. Here smells of nei-abhishegam and panchamritam. Here sounds like bells tolling too loud too near, ringing in the spirit of all things holy. It feels like the flame under your palm, the grains of ash that adorn the forehead, the cold gold on wrists and necks and deities ahead. It speaks the dialect of belonging, inviting no one, drawing boundaries in blood and righteousness. It is the way it is over Here, no questions asked.

Every once in a while, the gatekeepers of Here face a little trouble. There is a noise or a skirmish, something to remind them of There. Someone shows up, standing a little too close, trying a little too hard, acting a little too comfortable. Reminders are given, loud and clear. Lines are redrawn, thick and bold. And even if There comes Here, it is reminded that it does not belong. It should go back There. It has no place Here.

Thatha was from There. So were Aachi and Potte. They stood, heads bowed, clothes ragged, hands poised to receive. In their faces was etched Distance, Difference, Deference. They knew they were from There. They knew they had strayed Here. They knew these streets and these footsteps were not theirs to keep.

Aachi called out in a feeble voice, stick in hand, unable to walk. Are you well, she asked, her memory clear as the water she used to wash their doorsteps with. Do you have children? Where are you now? What took you so long to come by? Ayya, she called. When did you come? Why didn’t you come sooner? What took you so long to look me up? Amma, she said. Are you well? Do you remember? Do you remember?

Aachi stood just outside the door. In her hand was a stick, picked off the ground and smoothened till it didn’t hurt her roughened palms. On her shoulders, a towel, once-white now dotted with the brown of poverty. Her sari was closest to blue, if you had to pick a colour. Her hair was silver, her lips red from paan, her demeanour filled with gratitude. I’ve missed you, she seemed to say. If only she had the words. If only There could miss Here. If only the rules had spaces set aside for emotion, age, relationship.

When I heard the story of Aachi, they told me the story of Potte too. No one knew Potte’s real name, the storyteller chuckled. She was just Potte. She couldn’t see from one eye, you see, so it made the most sense. Just like Umacchi, they told me by clarification, calling upon another ghost of another village at another time. Not that that made it better. 

Potte slept at the foot of the door I had just walked through. Or perhaps it was the other door, or the one next to it. There was a chance it was the one on the other side though. After all, all of it was ours, I was told. It was all ours. She slept at the foot of a door, woke up when the clock struck 3, and worked her way through all the doorsteps. Sweep, sprinkle, cleanse, decorate. Perikki, thelichu, saani, kolam. Again and again and again. Till the street sparkled, the air had that peculiar smell of dung and cleanliness in equal measure, and the ants of the village had a feast awaiting them. Again and again and again. 

The storyteller smiled as she told me of Potte, her eyes glistening in the memory of the woman who used to count the chimes of the clock before waking up. She told me Potte would demand her way into the house at the strike of 5, peer closely at anything she needed to look at with her one seeing eye, and worked like “that”. You see, in the local tongue, working like “that” was the ultimate compliment. Apdi vellai panniva. The certificate had been given, the story had been passed on, the memory had been kept alive.

The last of all, there was Thatha. He didn’t belong, you see. Definitely not from Here, but apparently not from There either. He was from Outside, a place even farther away from There. He looked different, stood away, seemed nervous. He said he’d been cheated of his wealth by two men, his brothers maybe? They’d hurt his son, chopped off an arm, and beaten up another. He’d sought refuge in the powers that be, travelling from town to town, temple to temple, until he hit a thousand. Until he landed up here, in the quaint temple of a sleepy town where the sunshine played hide and seek and the wind whispered of memories gone by. He said he sought refuge, blessings, an end to this constant rollercoaster he had been on. He seemed to expect the brashness, the cruelty, the consequences of being from Outside.

Talking to Thatha, there was a woman, child in hand. Don’t stand here, she said. Go to the back, stay there, come at the end. Don’t touch anyone, don’t go near anything, just be. Do as you are told, don’t ask questions, be grateful for setting foot into Here. It wasn’t the first time Thatha had been told all this, it seemed, or maybe Outside was a harsher place with stricter rules and more rigid allowances. He listened, Thatha did. He stripped down to his underwear for a short while, a pair of maroon shorts that had seen too many wears. A few minutes later, a towel wrapped itself around his waist, decorated by a hole for each time he had been asked to stay in his place. When he did tell them parts of his Life written by his Fate or his God, they claimed it was Fiction, dictated by a scheming, plotting Human. Thatha waited his turn, sought holy blessings when the time was right, unmindful of human intervention and ire, and then he made his way back to the Outside, to wherever he came from, to wherever he was going. No one asked him where or how or why. They didn’t ask what happened to the one-armed son or the one lakh spent. They looked the other side and turned a blind eye. No one

wanted to know the way Outside.

Today, there is a skeleton of a town. It has a Here and a There. It has an Outside that no one wants to know. It has rules and boundaries and ways to be. There are things to wear and distances to keep and foods to eat. There are hymns to chant and songs to sing and prayers to murmur. There are people to meet, others to greet, and yet others to ignore. Today, there is a skeleton of a town. Its bones are made of diktats from an era gone by. It is held together by the threads of Tradition, the strings woven in the language of Ought and Should. It is oiled by Fear, fed by the need to Conform. Today, there is a skeleton of a town from an age gone by. 

Tomorrow, there will be none. It will be a Ghost Town, walked by the footsteps of Aachi and Potte and all the Ayyas that ever were. Maybe they will hold hands as they step across the slush to visit Ayyanar. Maybe they will banter merrily as they watch the Perumal abhishekam together. And maybe, just maybe, the ghosts of Ayyas and Ammas of many generations past will decide it is time; time to walk from Here to There; to see what lies beyond, to break a few rules, and to remind the ghosts of Aachi and Potte and Thatha that they are missed too. 

Fresh graduate-ing

In definitely more personal writing than I usually put up online, a piece as the ink on my newly minted degree certificate metaphorically dries.

If this was Instagram, #instigram, and for the first time, a college post tagged #throwback. :/

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Dear IITM,

I miss you.

It has barely been three days since you officially closed your doors behind me and yet, already, I miss you.

I miss that corner in 409 that was witness to so many conversations; heartbreak and euphoria in equal measure, that space where we could sit in our t-shirts or kurtis and forget about the social norms of appropriate dressing in favour of just being.

I miss the view from my hostel room floor, the right edge of the clothes line blocking the otherwise uninterrupted view of the Chennai evening sky with just a few windows to remind me of where I am. I miss the ability to look up from typing away at my thesis till my fingers are sore, and notice with every paragraph the changing hues as the sun set and slipped away late into the midnight sky.

I miss knowing that no matter where the sun was and what tattered state those paragraphs were in, Ramu would have the best double chai on campus and anywhere between two doors to two floors away, I would have company to propel me through those few hundred metres, all the while our vocabularies getting ready to comment at how Himalaya was such a gendered space, how the female body was still a spectacle and how the adrak-waali chai was gold.

I miss Sharav, the building that was home for four years, stage to the complaints against monkeys and men in equal measure. The walls that surrounded me for those years bore the scars of generations past me, each Room Mother/Sister leaving a bit of her behind in that dingy, ten by ten space, before moving on, never quite just as complete. For years, I looked at a door forever scarred by green marker reminding me to take some mechanics textbook (and medicines) and I often wondered if to-do lists and memos were meant to last quite that long. Just beneath the switchboard was the rather detailed sketch of the female anatomy, and so many of us have wondered what the conversation was that put that there.

I miss the stretch outside Sharav, the one always spotted with deer and couples, each having their own fun unmindful of the others. I miss walking on the “sidewalk” to mess, cribbing about just how many times we had to subject ourselves to being fingerprinted as IIT Madras tried to embrace the biometric bug. I miss hopping over to Sarayu, barely decently dressed in short shorts and an overlarge grey t-shirt, to drop off readings. “Saaptutu varom, Anna,” we used to say.

I miss the department, and how it taught every last one of us to identify Warli art. We may not know Gond from Madhubani from Chikankaari but DoHSS produced batch after batch of a motley set of students who went out into the world armed with the ability to identify traditionally white paint on earthen backgrounds.

I miss the corridors. The stretch outside DCF where you may trip over a Dead Poets’ Society meeting if you aren’t careful, or the one outside the office where we squatted for our first All Coordinators Meeting when I was Secretary, more preoccupied with whether the man in a kurta was a professor or not (and where was that kurta from, anyway?) Oh, and the professors’ corridor, and all the times we have been at our tippy-toed best, trying to sneak past those we didn’t want to catch, hiding amongst the shadows of the collective. Or the monkey corridor, starting at 356 and stretching all the way to (Prof) Suresh Babu’s room, the site of much yelping and screaming, and during thesis writing, pacing. Standing at the MML door looking at the other end at 5 PM, you would see a rather dark tunnel with evening light silhouetting the other end, and so many Instagram feeds are peppered with that view.

I miss CLT, and the door on the stage left that always creaked at the uncanniest times. I miss the high of being side-stage minutes before a LitSoc drams performance, and the comfort of settling down into the blue chairs to listen as WM/LM solo filled the air. I remember the adrenaline of a two-minute costume change, and a play that saw saris falling off and hairstyling being improv-ed into the act. I remember the anxiety of events, hoping the seats fill up, briefing photographers to shoot at flattering angles, and the unfettered celebration when people stood in the aisles for an HSS department event. I miss being a freshie, cheering a classmate on while she sang, and being a senior, waltzing into the auditorium only to hear our favourites.

I miss the shortcuts – the OAT route to Guru, the dirt path leading up to CLT, and feeling like each of us discovered a step of it. My eyes are still not used to that monstrosity of a new department next door to CLT (Chem?) and its multi-coloured fountain. Instead, my eyes will forever be trained on the massive banyan tree that acted as our parking canopy, our photoshoot backdrop, our shade for late night conversing and confiding. And all this while, I will chuckle at the memory of someone asking me if insti had a banyan tree, and my response barely hiding my amusement. “We have a Banyan Avenue,” I explained.

I miss the rooftops, and the times that were spent on it, whether we were supposed to be there or not. From a freshie who climbed up Jam Tank in a sari to a senior who vegetated on ESB, I will carry pictures of that clear, starry sky even as my hands swatted at pestering mosquitoes. I will always belong to that generation who complained (against the dictats of conscientious citizenship, sure) about the newly installed solar panels on top of HSB. Where would we host department events now, we cribbed.

I miss the perpetual hunt for first phone signal, and then WiFi. Sometimes I imagine voices behind me asking “Airport Three or LAN5?” and for a second, I am back in that dingy, unhealthy, artificially recycled air of MML. Even today as I scroll down my phone, I see Wlan of varying numbers and each tells a different story – some classes survived thanks to class groups, some semesters when we’d know each other’s timetables based on Whatsapp activity, some classrooms better loved than others (freshie classroom, please!) And on days that I feel particularly lonely, I miss hosting WiFi networks, being asked whether it is my “usual” password and creating a map of our hours, each network name speaking of the trials and triumphs that dotted that night, that paper, that presentation.

Sometimes I even miss SAC, and the journey it represents. From meeting a girl in red tights and a white kurta at Orientation to treating her home as my own, from entering a lost freshie with no idea of what lay ahead to dancing my heart out for the first time at Sunburn, from getting lost on my way from Sharav to sitting for hours in a horrendous yet momentous graduating gown, what that hall has not seen.

I could go on about how much the classroom has taught me and what the professors gave me. I could write pages on how much we have grown and found the hints of our adult selves in that place. I could speak about getting a degree and everything else that we lost or gained. But I think I will stop here.

I miss the jungle and so, I write. Sitting hundreds of kilometres away, I create a map of memories that weave together half a decade, creating a dotted path through the jungle that this MA in Development Studies has been.

In what may be the first in a rather long series, this is just to say I miss it all.

Celebrating home

Dear Chennai,

Happy Birthday! You've turned 373, you oldie! It puts things into perspective, you know? All of us turning 20 feel so much younger now!

On your birthday this year, here are things I've always wished you knew - some are the emotions you inspire, others are bits of advice, the rest are just the flighty ramblings of a girl in love... with you.

You see, there will always be people who call you an overgrown village, cribbing about hemlines and sleeve lengths. There will always be complaints about deserted streets when it is 'only' 11 PM and the absence of a 'decent' life. When flipped around, these cribs and rants transform into statements of adulation and amazement of how a metro can maintain such character, of how you are in touch with your roots and of how you have a strong, independent identity. Listen, smile and move on. But wait, you already do.

I often wonder, if you were to look yourself in the mirror what would you see? An old man (perhaps a la Dumbledore?) with flowing silvery hair with deep-set eyes filled with wisdom from the years gone by? A beautiful woman decked in a Kancheepuram sari and lengths of jasmine flowers that stares back? Scores of children playing barefoot on the sun-baked lanes, pretending to be Dhoni or Tendulkar? Posh, sophisticated elite walking into malls or pubs? If you were to look yourself in the mirror, would there even be a singular image or would it be like looking out of a window?

I may not have been here as long as some others. I may not have seen everything there is to see. I may not have experienced everything you have to offer. Yet, I am enchanted.

Writing hurriedly in the sand before violent waves swallow my letters in one sweeping motion. Picking out seashells and carefully rinsing them to store for years to come. Roaming the sands, getting our futures told and sampling the characteristic tastes of the corn, the bhajji, the sundal. Who else can give us Besant Nagar?

Bargaining till our throats are parched. Navigating nooks, crannies and side lanes until we are surrounded by makeshift stalls with no idea where we are. Emerging with our loot barely managing to carry it all but with a big smile, our sanity and a hardly-harmed wallet in place. Who else can give us Pondy Bazaar?

Every brand you can think of. Food that not only gets your mouth watering but also brings the world to your doorstep. The guarantee of meeting someone you know every time you set foot into its doors. The perfect solution for a hot, sultry, empty summer afternoon. Who else can give us Express Avenue?

The best of classical music and dance. The majesty of silk saris and the aroma of jasmine. Hot samosas and filter kaapi. The talk of sabhas and kutcheris; the joy of a whole new language. Who else can give us the December season?

Oh, I could go on and on! After all, history is replete with stories expressing adoration. Who would know better than you?

Over this next week, everyone's eyes will be trained on you. We will cycle through you, take walks through otherwise ignore alleys and try to get in touch with our roots. Through most of the year, it may seem like we do not pay as much attention but every time we see Central Station or CMBT or the beaches or just about anything at all, we know exactly where we are. It is, after all, namma Chennai that grounds us, makes us come running back home.

With much love from,

a Madrasi ;)