My bond with Madras city

 

We are comparatively new to Chennai city having a permanent home here only since June 1982, a year and a half before I was born. My father grew up in Chingleput while my mother lived her early life in Kumbakonam. But I was born here and spent my entire childhood here. And also, we had been familiar with Madras city for generations - both my grandfathers had done their schooling and graduation in Madras city and my maternal ancestors have had a house in Egmore since 1933. My dad did his BSc in Chemistry from A. M. Jain College, Meenambakkam commuting to-and-fro by suburban rail from Chengalpattu on a daily basis. When he took up the job with the bank, he was posted at Maduranthakam and then, Calcutta before moving to the bank's Adyar branch in 1981. The next year, he purchased a plot in the then village of Porur in the Saidapet taluk of Chingleput district. Though classified as a suburb of Madras city by MMDA, Porur, in the late eighties, as I can faintly remember, was more similar to  Chengalpattu town than any part of Madras city. Plots of empty land marked out for future construction, the ubiquitous potti kadai, the market near Porur junction and the receiving towers of the Airport Control Station are some lingering memories from those times. The Mount-Poonamallee Road and Arcot Road were our lifelines and fields of paddy, plantain or sugarcane were a common sight if we dared to venture half a kilometre or so from the main road.  Buses to the moffusil stopped next to a tamarind tree. This later became the site of Sakthi Nagar bus stop though the tamarind tree itself is no more. As I grew up, I joined the school in Virugambakkam where my brother was studying. Our Honourable CM was a year senior to my brother in the same school but though my brother could recall one or two occassions he had interacted with the actor-politician, I was too young then to remember him. But what I've always found fascinating about Madras city was how you would get a countryside vibe even in the middle of its urban heart -  I remember staring out of my first standard classroom window in 1989 or 1990 upon the rows of paddies that stretched all the way upto Kaliamman Koil Street.

 
We moved to Virugambakkam in July 1991 to be closer to school and this marked the start of a new chapter in my life as it also brought me closer to Chennai's urban core.  It was a time of great change - liberalization, cable TVs and pop culture - the city would make waves in film music all over India for that was when a young prodigy by name A. R. Rahman  burst into the scene. Growing up in the Madras of the 90s  meant playing cricket with neighborhood kids in the terrace or road corners, waking up on Diwali at 4 am to burst crackers and the customary oil bath - a day that would progress with sweets, film songs, comedy programmes and interviews in the morning and end with matinee shows on TV in the evening and other routine of the 90s. Sometimes we recorded favourite programmes or movies on video cassettes. Additionally, there were features unique to Virugambakkam - streets that would be inundated for weeks due to monsoonal rains for the Virugambakkam canal would overflow without fail, and a wonderful comraderie - school was just two streets away from where we lived and nearly every house had someone who studied there. Then, after school, I moved to Thanjavur for college. When I completed my graduation in 2005, Dad who was by now approaching retirement, decided to renovate our old house in Porur and settle down there for good. I took up a job and had my first taste of Chennai's public transportation system. A short stint in Bangalore and then in 2012, I got posted to our Thambu Chetty Street office. Growing up in Virugambakkam, our world was centered around Arcot Road and shopping meant T. Nagar or occasionally, Mount Road, Mylapore or Adyar. We had relatives in Egmore but Central and  Parry's, we would visit only if we had to go on an intercity journey or if we had some hardware or electrical equipment to buy that wasn't available anywhere else. Beyond Parry's in the north and Thiruvanmiyur in the south, lay the great unknown - Velachery and Sholinganallur were tiny hamlets in the ninetees and areas north of Parry's were too far away for us and had a reputation for crime. But barring a short stint in Mangalore, I have now been commuting to Parry's everyday for almost ten years. And over the last decade, I've seen a Madras different from what I've witnessed in my childhood. In those narrow lanes of Georgetown, where rows of vans, cars and bikes could sneak into an alleyway barely 20-30 metres wide, I got to know that traffic jams affected not just vehicular traffic but pedestrians, too. When it rained heavily, you find the civic infrastructure come under severe stress - flooded streets, leaky or overflowing sewers,  much more here than in other parts of the city. You could find empty green spaces in other parts of the city but nope, not in Georgetown which was cramped up and nearly every inch of it put to use for some purpose or the other.

Over the past few years, I have also been to parts of Thirumangalam, Royapuram, Thiruvottriyur, Washermanpet, Purasawalkam, Kilpauk, Anna Nagar and  Perambur in the North and Siruseri in the South. I can claim to know Chennai considerably well though I have a lot still to explore. But if I am given the chance to choose the best of the lot, I would definitely go for Virugambakkam for I still cherish fond memories of my childhood years that I spent in Tarachand Nagar between 1991 and 2001.