Tamil is not a language. It’s a melody. Soft and round like the sea gooseberries we found in Pondicherry, and kinda like the name Pondicherry, and with a wave-like rhythm, lalala. It comes after the people who speak it, who live life so melodically. It was strange that she was a stranger in Tamil Nadu almost as much as I was – a stranger in her own country, a Mumbaikar who spoke a different language and wore a different face as though she had arrived from another planet, just not quite as far away as the planet I’d arrived from – stranger almost than this sentence that was. The differences between Indian states were less like regional flavors, and more like national idiosyncrasies. Citizens of the same land had to default to English – a linguistic import from a faraway nation. It was both logical and hard to comprehend that they borrowed this common denominator from their former oppressor; after all, it had been forced onto them for a long time, which seems as much reason to embrace it as it could be reason to reject it.
"Social ties were strong but short."
They embraced me too, the foreigner, with wide smiles that they wrapped all around me, and coddling services that felt like professional cuddles. Given history, I would have understood racism towards white-old-me to the point of welcoming it. But no. They loved me. All over the country and back. The radius of people's love for their own people was a little narrower across India. Social ties were strong but short. They would tightly string together families and vicinities, but they wouldn’t always extend to those of another caste, another religion, or those who were a shade darker. I never understood this intranational racism – neither in India nor against indigenous people elsewhere – and fortunately, I never will.
What I will understand, always, are the physics behind the kind of human gravity that makes the world spin. Like clinging on to her like a wet t-shirt while she rode that dinky, sputtering, miniature moped back to Pondicherry after we found the sea gooseberries at Serenity Beach.
Chennai was a smoothie of cement and trees that Lord Rama and his monkey army had poured out by the beach. And all that stuck to you and grew on you until you were all covered in it without any desire to wash it off. Two fine mini-lives I lived there, a few years apart, setting an interval for future returns.
The first time around, I lived right on Anna Salai near the botanical garden. The place had terrible reviews, but I wouldn’t say that they were terribly deserved. It was what it was: cheap. My room was blue and she wasn’t allowed in. I found out the loud way when desperate knocks started hitting the door like missiles. All scandalized, both the receptionists/managers/owners had scurried up the stairs to protest the violation, which was more of a moral than a house-rule-ish kind. Since it wasn’t written anywhere, I guess it went without saying, culturally. To my surprise, their moral antibodies kept them completely immune to the genuine innocence, decency, and sweetness she radiates like a cotton candy lamb.
There was no kitchen, but fortunately India is one of those blissful places where eating out can be cheaper than lifting your own spatula. My staples were omelets and pakoras, which I would pick up in the mornings and evenings in a charming, grimy back alley around the corner. In the mornings I would get some more after I became something like friends with an old homeless couple that lived along my way to work. Our only lingua franca was smiles, but they said it all. It wasn't until a few months into my stay that I got a chance to talk words with them, when I visited with an interpreter as part of the project I was working on while volunteering with AID India. That's how I learned that they were Christians and that they saw me as heaven-sent, when all I was really was back-alley-sent. We were trying to build a food network for the homeless, who turned out to be some of the happiest people I’ve come across as long as they weren’t homeless alone. And alone they weren’t usually. Some lived on the streets with entire families, eager to send their kids to school and put food on the cardboard table. I liked them and loved how their laundry would color the sterile fences of fancy high rises like the LBR Towers.
“Am I gonna die,” I asked myself, feeling the itch along my jugular. “Probably, but maybe not,” it echoed back. Fair enough.
That apartment we shared the second time around was a third-floor basement, but not not cozy. The cheap dosa restaurant right outside was a fat perk. Dosa dosa dosa, can’t ever have too many dosas. My wallet still looked pretty anorexic in those days but just nourished enough to have an appletini at Amelie’s now and then.
Strolls along Marina Beach didn’t hurt at all, unless you’d step onto all the trash. But to me, the way there was the true journey-is-the-destination-bla-bla tale, for no road in Chennai gets me more than Cathedral Road and its wordier extension Dr Radha Krishnan Salai, leading from that little botanical garden all the way down to the beach. That road is a shelf and every building a book, and every book a genre. If you walk slow enough, you get to read enough to decipher a meaning of life or two. I mean, don’t get me wrong – when I’m in Chennai, I love me a good White’s Road too, passing by the Wild Garden Café’s wild garden café and whatnot, and you can’t go wrong with or on Anna Salai Road – but to me, Cathedral Road is the most spiritual experience. And I was never attacked by a caterpillar there, and neither by a motorcycle – both asterisks I have to attach to White’s road – so that’s a plus. Of course, being run over by that motorcycle was my fault entirely and I accept the scar on my foot gladly, for a lack of other choices; it is just what happens that one time you don't focus a million percent while crossing an Indian street with that killer traffic. But that caterpillar was no accident and had been waiting for me right outside the Wild Garden Café’s wild garden café, and I blame that black beast for every single seta she had to pull out of my neck that night. “Am I gonna die,” I asked myself, feeling the itch along my jugular. “Probably, but maybe not,” it echoed back. Fair enough.
Not many parks in Chennai, but every street a green canyon with arching trees on growing sprees. The rivers were sewers. Slums like Triplicane were a reality check. The festivals an escape from reality. Like everywhere in India, there were people everywhere.
