“So, did you end up changing the way you spelled your name?” I asked her.
She responded in the negative, adding that he gave her ridiculous instructions to follow that involved her waking up at the crack of dawn, taking a bath and writing her “new name” one hundred and eight times in a notebook. This was to be done for a month.
On hearing that Siva was my friend, she expressed her surprise. She did not exercise an ounce of moderation when she spoke of him.
“He must be completely mad now,” she said.
I requested a little insight.
She told me that he, during his brief interaction with her, had remarked that she, a goddess in the flesh, had no place in the sex industry.
“Goddess-ing,” she knew full well, would not keep her afloat.
When she expressed her dislike of pointless flattery to Siva, he raised the roof and threatened to have her handed over.
Ashwini, whose temper was on a leash, could restrain it no longer.
“You son-of-a-bitch!” she yelled in his face. “Did your numerology ever tell you that a whore would show you the door?”
Ashwini and I never met post that encounter. No, I never loved her, Anjali. Never take a drunk man or a sober numerologist seriously.
Siva returned to India, but he never went home. Instead, he started a business in Tiruppur. I got wind of his having got into some trouble, the nature of which I will not pretend to know, for which he served time in prison. After his sentence, he returned home. No misfortune in life had succeeded in dulling his interest in numerology. He added astrology to his repertoire and soon after, he adopted the lifestyle of a monk. It wasn’t long before he changed his name to Amba, a woman’s name.
I did ask him what prompted the change of name.
“The life of a woman is the life I was destined to live, not the life of a man.”
He was far from being a man of few words. He launched into a numerological and astrological explanation of his decision that endured for hours. He then sought to interest me with his collection of books.
As I was examining them with piqued interest, he said, “Udhaya, Mercury is exalted in your horoscope. I have taken that and several other parameters into consideration and have concluded that you will see greatness face to face if you apply yourself to the study of astrology.”
The idea actually did resonate with sense, because, you see, as a writer, I’m always strapped for cash. I was starting to think better of all the astrologers I’d regarded with a jaundiced eye. I could never hope to be their equal in riches, but at least I could guarantee myself a stocked refrigerator and pantry.
“You know I have the memory of a ninety-year-old,” I said in jest.
“Everyday, eat the leaves of the brahmi plant,” he advised me, “and watch your memory improve exponentially.”
“You are intelligent, so intelligent in fact, and yet the world sees you as a half-wit,” I told him.
He showed me a little gleaming silvery bead on a thread that encircled his wrist.
“The rasa mani,” he said reverentially. “Rasam is mercury, Lord Shiva’s. It channels the vata, pitta and kapha energies, orders them, thereby helping man achieve whatever he seeks to achieve. I have found the gyanam I have long sought. A rationalist, a writer, a rationalistic writer like you would never believe what a saint says.
“I hope you understand someday, Udhaya. This rasa mani was bestowed on me by my guru, an alchemist. I intend to advance it into kekana gulikai, the rasa mani’s superior in power that allows the wearer to experience the transcendental. A man engaged in such an arduous, demanding effort is above the invectives of common men.
“My guru transmutated tin into gold, made solid beads out of liquid mercury.”
Siva put a poem of Konkanavar to tune. The poem treated of alchemy.
“It’s not magic,” he said.
What inevitably followed was a long-drawn-out lecture on the liaison between chemistry and alchemy by my friend Siva, in a chrome yellow silk saree and a blouse with elbow-length sleeves.
He is Amba now. She is Siva no longer.
2 – Homeward
Every human being has a special niche in his heart for his hometown. It will never be easy for him to reconcile himself to change in its appearance or functioning.
I was in an auto riding in a narrow street of Mylapore. The driver, Murali, told me that there used to be weavers’ looms on that stree thirty years ago. Now, they had all vanished without a trace. I could hear an ache in his voice when he spoke of the Mylapore of the yesteryears, the Mylapore he knew as a youth.
Besides Nagore, there are at least a hundred towns that evoke nostalgia in me – and many of these towns I have never seen. When I read Dostoevsky, I feel like St. Petersburg is my home; when I read Mario Vargas Llosa, I feel like I know the towns and streets of Peru like the back of my hand. I wonder, can a writer lay claim to a city or a country? Two millennia ago, the Tamil poet Kaniyan Poongundranar wrote: . All the world is my world, all humanity is my fraternity.
Pattinacheri, an age-old fisherman’s hamlet, was situated along the banks of the Vettar where the tributary met the sea. It was to this place that Shahul Hameed, the Sufi mystic, came some five centuries ago from Uttar Pradesh. When he died in Nagore, a magnificent dargah was erected to commemorate him.
When I was a boy, there used to sit a eunuch near the dargah at the corner of Kunjali Maraikkar Street – a street named for the man who opposed and fought the Portuguese. The eunuch sold fried vaadas that I hogged with great relish. I only got to eat vaadas like his thirty-five years later on a visit to Malaysia. Vaadas are made with urad dal batter. The eunuch’s were filled with delicious shrimp.
Nagore’s intercourse with Malaysia goes back many centuries. Nowhere else did I find anything similar to the meats served in Nagore, except Malaysia, in Penang. Dining there at Tajudeen Hussain Nasi Kandar took me back in time.
In Penang, where I’m sure no one has ever heard of Nagore, one can find a street named after the South Indian town. I’m not surprised they don’t know anything about Nagore because I wouldn’t think people who live in Chennai’s Armenian Street know its history. There wasn’t a soul from Nagore on Nagore Street. Near the street stood a dargah, a miniature replication of the one at Nagore.
I’ve visited Malaysia and Thailand during their summers. Summers there did not melt or burn people. While Tamil Nadu experienced eight to eighteen-hour-long power outages, the Government of Malaysia saw to it that its citizens remained oblivious of the meaning of load-shedding.
On a day when the sun beat down mercilessly, I went to the dargah in Nagore Street. There, only an old man who was somewhere between sleep and wakefulness was present. I sat myself down next to him and said, “I’m from Nagore too.” But he didn’t even deign to look at me. I doubt he’d even heard what I said. From there I went to the tomb and made a wish and left the place.
If the Vettar is crossed by boat, you will reach a small village called Melavanjur. A little beyond Melavanjur lies Keezhavanjur, and a little beyond Keezhavanjur lies Thirumalairayanpattinam, another tiny village with a hundred and eight ponds in with an abundance of water lilies and lotuses. When I visited in 2010, the ponds were replete with water.
Between 1453 and 1468 A.D., a representative of the Vijayanagar Empire,Vitharana Raman, better known as Thirumalairayan, created the village of Thirumalai and built a palace there. When his daughter fell ill, he made a pledge to the goddess and she survived. To honor his pledge, he dug one hundred and eight ponds, one of which he named after himself and another of which he named after his wife.
There were around fifty ponds in Nagore too, but we knew nothing of the people who dug them, not even a name. There were a dozen ponds on my street itself. There was another pond in the palm grove in National High School where I studied. I remember bathing and playing in i
t. The streets where poor people lived had no plumbing and they relied on the public tap at the end of the street. The clay pots would be deposited at the tap in the night. In the morning, you’d see women there, tearing each other’s hair and pulling each other’s sarees. Sometimes, they’d end up rolling on the ground. I’ve heard that the Punjabi language contains the highest number of dirty words, but only people who are unfamiliar with my writing will say so. I owe a debt to the scrappy women in the neighborhood, for it is from them that I learned how to swear. Their words and their volumes could have made ears bleed. They fought with ten times more rage than WWF contestants. But towards the evening of the same day, the same women who’d beat each other bloody in the morning would be seen picking lice out of each other’s hair.
The palm grove was the site of Nagore’s famous football matches, the most important of which pitted Nagore’s National High School against Mannargudi’s National High School. It was probably because of the Muslim majority that football was the main sport, but our sports instructor, Kannayyan Saar, did all he could to popularize volleyball. In the thirties and the forties, the name Vaduvur was associated with Tamil’s foremost detective fiction writer, Vaduvur Duraisamy Iyengar, but I’d heard only of Vaduvur Ramamoorthy, the volleyball champion of Thanjavur. There was such intensity in the air when he and Kannayyan Saar played volleyball. As I was very slight and frail, I was excluded from participating in games. My playmates were the girls who lived in my street with whom I played dice, pallaankuzhi and paandi. I am quite the expert at dice even today.
Besides Kannayyan Saar, the Tamil teacher, Seeni Shanmugam Saar, was an unforgettable character whose classes were a riot as he was a quick-witted debater who engaged everyone. After being my class teacher for three consecutive years, he went to Karanthattankudy to pursue higher studies in Tamil literature. He returned as my Tamil teacher in the ninth grade.
Another local hero was B.A. Kaakka. Kaakka is one way of saying “elder brother,” and the man was always shown off for being the first person in our town to obtain a bachelor’s degree. And another one was Farid Kaakka, who was an expert stuntman who went on to work in a number of Tamil movies.
When I visited Nagore recently, I saw – to my utter horror – that the seashore was no longer a sea shore but a garbage dump. Food was the only thing that appealed to my senses there. Nagore’s parottas and dumroot, a kind of halwa, are to die for. However, Nagore’s dumroot is not as famous as Tirunelveli’s iruttukadai halwa.
Vellore is famous for its idlis which are served with vadai curry. In Nagore, you can enjoy delicious, soft, fluffy idlis in the Sethurama Iyer Hotel that serves delightful tiffin.
Sports and cinema were the two greatest obsessions of the youth in the days I speak of. In Nagore, movies were screened for six months in a theatre people called “Dooring Talkies” which was actually a licensed tent. In 1943, when Sivakavi was released, it ran for six months when other movies could barely run for a week due to Nagore’s sparse population. After Sivakavi, the owner of the theater, whose name was unknown to us, was dubbed Sivakavi Iyer.
Another striking aspect of Nagore was the ghostly silence that pervaded the western part of the town – much like the eerie calm of the cemetery. After forty long years, the silence still reigned supreme, lending the place an air of antiquity.
In Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Pedestrian, the protagonist, Leonard Mead, is taking a walk through the deserted city streets one night. He gets picked up by the cops and gets incarcerated in a mental asylum. Bradbury wrote: “Mead is the only person to be out in a city where no one else is out of doors, ergo, he is mad.” I too, like Mead, traipsed the streets of Nagore at night but the cops never bothered to bother me. The streets were completely empty. The abandoned rice mill near the post office looked like it had been frozen in time. Time hadn’t changed it a bit. Nagore was often devastated by cyclones but remarkably, even the chimneys of the mill were intact.
A good number of houses in Nagore have the same decrepit look they have had for the past two hundred years, and these houses I speak of are not to be found only in some murky alley; they stand like old rotten teeth on the main street itself.
Traveling on foot in Nagore gave me a better understanding of the theory of relativity. As a boy, I’d have to walk from my house in Kosatheru to Perumal South Street, turn left onto Perumal East Street and take the first right onto Pidari Kovil Street where my school was. At the end of this walk, I used to feel like I’d traversed the length and breadth of an entire city.
When I failed to pass my pre-university course, I decided to learn shorthand for which I had to take the train to Nagapattinam. Although I was eighteen then, the walk from my house in Kosatheru to the railway station felt like a tiresome journey from the North Pole to the South Pole. Till today, Nagore’s roads – its arteries and veins – and its landscape as they had been remain fresh in my memory. However, when I returned twenty-five years later, my hometown didn’t seem as big as used to be. It was like a forty-foot giant had shrunken into a four-foot dwarf.
I was ten when my Uncle Subbiah came to visit us after twenty-five years. He remarked that not even a brick had changed. Looking at the tin plate on the wall of a house on which the name of the street was engraved, he said, “The British left this a century ago and it’s still here, just a little faded due to the sun and the rain.”
Apart from Siva, I had other friends in Nagore. One of them was called Chandran and he looked like a Hawaiian. He had a strong and sinewy body and worked as a welder. When I enquired after him after thirty five years of non-communication due to my being away, no one seemed to have any idea of who I was talking about. Finally someone said, “Chandran, you mean Naina, don’t you?” and gave me the directions to his place. He was delighted to see me and said that he often saw me on television and that his daughter-in-law held my works in high esteem.
Vijayan was another friend who was doing business. I managed to find his telephone number and call him. “Come to the big minaret of the dargah,” he said. When I reached the place, I saw him stringing up lights for the upcoming Gandoori festival. We were meeting after thirty-five long years. Though he was hoary, he was still fit as a fiddle. “Come, let’s go up and talk,” he said casually, like he’d been seeing me every day all those years. He bounded up the narrow staircase like a mountain goat. He probably had enough energy to run a hundred laps after climbing three flights when I felt exhausted on the first level itself. I stood there panting and he came back down to look for me. We stood there talking for a while. I could see the main gate of the dargah from where I was. If I went up further, I would have been able to see the sea and the seashore but I wasn’t feeling up to it. Chandran and Vijayan were in good shape, both physically and mentally. They were not well-educated, but were dedicated and capable physical laborers. Siva was educated but had the reputation of a madman. As for me, too much introspection has scrambled my mind. So, which should I blame for turning into a psycho – introspection or education? Maybe the people would have been more sympathetic towards me and not considered me a psycho had I been uneducated like them.
After leaving Vijayan, I went to the dargah where I’d spent the better part of my youth and prayed to the ejamaan. I held my face over the pot of incense after which I felt like sitting on the cool mandapam for old times’ sake, but I couldn’t as it was crowded with heavyweights.
Once I’d finished praying to the ejamaan, I made my way to the western part of the village where I’d lived as a child. My friends who had lived on this street were the sole testimony of time’s relentless passage. Though they were only sixty years old, they looked like they were eighty and some looked like they were on death’s doorstep.
Kandaswamy was one of my schoolmates. I will never know how he managed to identify me after all these years. He rushed to me and enveloped me in a warm hug. He made his living rolling cigars and had a son who was working in Singapore. Moving
to Singapore or Malaysia is considered to be the greatest achievement of a Hindu in Nagore.
A dilapidated Draupadi amman temple stands at the end of the street. Once in a while, someone would light a lamp there. I have observed that religious fervor has increased among the people the same way the statistics of murders and rapes have. As a sign of their rekindled faith, the townsfolk had the temple renovated. I remember how much time I’d spent alone in that temple, refusing to talk to people, preferring my own company. People used to frighten my mother saying I’d become a sanyasi.
I made my way to the street where Chettiyar’s house was. It was another place where I’d spent many happy hours as a boy. Chettiyar had passed on but his son, my school friend, had taken his father’s place. The magnificent Siva Temple Pond was situated behind the house. The men and women stood in the steps of the pond bathing and washing the clothes.
After leaving Nagore, I headed to Thanjavur which was not much different than the former. Only the areas that were given a facelift reeked of modernity; the western parts had remained the way they were at the time of the Naickers. Only the occasional scooter served to remind one that it was the twenty-first century. Here too, there are several streets and places that take you back in time – Rani Vaykkal Lane, Naalukaal Mandapam and Venkatesa Perumal Street. There are several people who glorify the beauty of India. Just pay a courtesy visit to the places I’ve mentioned. You will be promptly greeted by the sight and smell of shit and urine that flow in the open gutters around houses that lack underground sewers.
Think about this: Thanjavur’s population is 2,500,000 and roughly 500,000 people live in the western part of town. We are human beings who eat thrice a day and expel whatever we eat at a later time. With no underground sewers and no proper sanitation, do you think people are going to worry if they turn the ruins of a temple into a toilet? I don’t know which whiz-king was responsible for building Thanjavur. The western part is like a maze with one street intersecting ten or twenty others. You can’t even begin to guess where these streets lead to. At most, two people can walk abreast of each other in the narrow lanes. If you were on a bike, pedestrians had to pin themselves to the walls to avoid being knocked into the gutter.
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