What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city Cities can be huge or small, bustling or tranquil, charming or squalid, but the only question worth asking is: is it yours ?
Madras on my Mind, a collection of twenty odd short stories that takes us through tree-lined streets and mounds of garbage of Madras/Chennai as we wander through the patchwork of communities that piece the city together. There’s the Telugu settler whose earliest memories are bound up with it, an Anglo-Indian lad and his reminiscences of a laid-back life and men with Brylcreamed hair, the Gujarati community of Sowcarpet, and a Muslim girl growing up in a Tam-Brahm environment of rasam and Carnatic music.
Some of these stories are autobiographical in nature, the others fictitious and they run through the complete gamut of human emotions. Madras is at the heart of a child’s jingo where words once heard are strung together and chanted endlessly. It is a place of mild-mannered ‘curd-rice cricket players’. It is where a son attempts to shake off his dead father, who doggedly pursues him as smoke in his nostrils. For a small-towner it is a coming-of-age city. It is a place where love is found and love is lost or love is not found at all. There’s a longing for a city that once was, or is it longing for one’s time in the city, now forever lost ? It is Moore Market and Marina, Cooum and Covelong, Madras is this, Madras is that, Madras is this and that.