A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  It was Radu, who had just arrived back from Holland, with a typically literary flourish. I took shelter in his house, where part of the roof by the light well had caved in, and the whole family were struggling to anchor a plastic sheet which flapped noisily in the teeth of the gale.

  Radu wrapped himself tighter in his shawl and laughed ruefully: ‘We are dissolving in rains, I think.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘This is Shelley, Shelley.’

  ‘Ah.’

  His son brought us some hot coffee. We sat in the living-room with an oil-lamp. His face was fatter. Beard trimmed. A few months in Europe had changed his look. Still twinkly-eyed though. He’s in his mid-forties now, I’d guess, the long, flamboyantly curled black hair starting to go grey. Radu had been one of the first of the Dikshithars to take me under his wing years before: I had been ill with a bout of amoebic dysentery, exhausted after losing two stone in a week. I was sitting at a brown Formica table in the coffee house on East Car Street, staring blankly at a mural of a sunlit Alpine view, when he breezed in to rescue me. He cheered me up with a blast of his enthusiasm and promptly hauled me off to his house ‘to eat some good rice’. Then he presented me with a tub of foul-smelling Ayurvedic medicine. (‘This will do the trick,’ he said. ‘Where do you rub it on?’ I asked. ‘You don’t rub it on; you eat it.’ It was foul. But I did get better.)

  He is a remarkable man; he did his first degree in English literature by correspondence at Annamalai University. Then he took an MA in Indology. To say he’s eclectic would be an understatement; he can and does quote Simon and Garfunkel, Keats and Robert Pirsig in the same sentence: ‘the body is the bike; the soul is the rider.’ (‘Actually, Michael, this is from the Gita, with a minor change converting Arjuna’s chariot to a Harley-Davidson; technology may advance but spiritual reality remains the same.’)

  Radu stands in an extraordinary position vis-à-vis the archaic community to which he belongs. In the old days in India the Brahminical taboo on going overseas was rigidly observed, but it has been dispensed with in modern times. From the Minakshi temple in Houston to the Murugan shrines in East London or Singapore, pukka Brahmins are serving and doing rituals overseas without having incurred pollution by leaving their native soil. It is not so in Chidambaram. Here the Dikshithars have stuck to the letter of Manu’s law. Virtually alone among temple priesthoods, they haven’t budged on the old rules. Radu was the first serving Dikshithar to go overseas. And he suffered the inevitable consequence. No longer pure, he was struck off the puja rota, with all that means in terms of lost livelihood.

  So Radu branched out. He did a two-year MA in one year and published odd articles on the temple for Indian magazines. Because he speaks excellent English, he had long been a source of information, for scholars who came to Chidambaram seeking to learn more about this notoriously secretive community. (Several of them indeed have made careers out of the temple.) Radu has also done translations from Tamil and Sanskrit; he once showed me a fragment of a mysterious unfinished novel. But for all his questing, in reality he was still part of the Dikshithars’ world; as a Brahmin priest with a large extended family to support, the pressure he was under was becoming intolerable. Money and social status are everything in his society; now he was in trouble. The collapse of his house roof that night seemed to symbolize it.

  We moved back from the inner room to the hall, which was dry, and sat there, an oil-lamp at our feet, looking out over the darkened street towards the albino’s tea stall, where the awning sagged under the weight of water. Radu fulminated: ‘The Dikshithars don’t like change; they are stick-in-the-muds. But where is it leading them? Have you seen the latest Lonely Planet guide?’

  This is the most popular guidebook, even among Indians; it carries travellers’ reports, which are often scathing and always on the look out for the rip-off.

  ‘Can you believe this? It says the Dikshithars are money-grabbing: it says visitors are only taken into sanctum for money. Well this is not how it was and not how it should be. They are in danger of losing a priceless gift, Michael: their integrity.’

  I asked him about the report in India Today magazine, which said they have money troubles which may finally unravel the whole thing and endanger their independence. He would have none of it; according to him they have enough. His fourteen-year-old son returned and we rushed back inside to help fix the sheet once again. Radu was almost in tears.

  He is no doubt a sensitive soul who takes all hurts deeply, whether real or imaginary. Unfortunately the roof and the Dikshithars were not the end of his problems; he said that there had been a campaign of Chinese whispers. He wouldn’t elaborate, but the story was well known in the town. He had developed too close a relationship with a foreign scholar. In a small town like this it is impossible for anyone to have such a friendship without everyone knowing, and such friendship is not countenanced, especially between a Brahmin priest and a foreign lady.

  The gossip was damaging to his relationship with his community. He didn’t wish to talk about it and I didn’t wish to press him. He had more immediate concerns.

  ‘Look at this situation; we are plagued with power cuts here. Really I need my own generator for light, especially to help the children’s education. I wrote for help to one scholar I know in the US, but I received no reply. This was the most unkindest cut of all.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Julius Caesar,’ he added, in case I needed reminding (which I did).

  ‘They are jealous of the course I have taken. They are objecting to my growth, to my development. But I have no option but to carry on down this path. Build up my lectureship in Holland. Trouble is, so far I am making almost no profit out of it. Air ticket costs 56,000 rupees; it takes almost all my fee. Still, there are changes coming. Soon Lufthansa will try to break the monopoly; then you will see the prices tumble. And other things have improved greatly. Look, you can phone Chidambaram from Holland now. Direct. This is great. Digital! Faxes too. This Rao is a wizard! One day soon there will be e-mail in East Sannadhi, the vedas through the ether! No really; I am serious. There are more things than are dreamed of in their philosophy.’

  The rain was still incessant. I told him about my bus journey, and of the projected trip to Tirunallar. He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘They are the richest priests in India. Just look when you are there: Rolex watches and Mercedes cars. Believe me.’ He finished his coffee. ‘Let me show you my latest project.’

  He crossed to the bookcase to retrieve a translation he had done of Chidambaram’s Mahatmya, the official version of the temple’s founding myth. It is the story of a leprous king who was cured by bathing here and then built the first temple. Not so long ago a German scholar tried to prove it all a twelfth-century concoction, which Radu doesn’t accept.

  ‘I have done it in verse: friends who have read it compared my version to the poems of A. K. Ramanujan.’

  It did indeed read well.

  After an hour I decided to brave the storm and got out the plastic mac I had bought in Bazaar Street (75 rupees). Radu held up the lamp.

  ‘You don’t look so good,’ he said as I was leaving.

  ‘It’s been like this since Palani; my eyes are sore with conjunctivitis, I’ve got a bad throat, a mild dose of malaria, a dicky stomach and I’m getting a cold. Apart from that I’m fine. I think I prefer it when it’s hot.’

  He wagged his head. ‘Well, well. Travellers must be content.’ The twinkle came back to his eyes. ‘Shakespeare: As You Like it.’

  I waved goodbye, dived into the flood and started pedalling furiously. Before I reached the corner tea shop, my hat blew off, and was dexterously caught one-handed by an old lady struggling calf deep in water while she clutched with her other hand a covering made out of an assortment of plastic carrier bags. I gave up on the hat and held it in my teeth as I pushed on down East Car Street. The town was still blacked out, and my hired bike of course had no lights and threadbare brakes. The familia
r landmarks of East Car Street were shifting fast in a black lake populated by shadowy semi-aquatic creatures: hogs, cows, bullock carts, parked rickshaws, a lone sweet vendor pushing his carriage and, in the middle of the road, a hapless holy man, bald and white-bearded, wrestling with a large metal trident and a disembowelled umbrella.

  At the corner of East Car Street the road comes off the plateau where the temple stands and slopes down towards the canal and the bus stand. There I ran into trouble. At the junction a torrent was pouring across the road, ripping away the crumbling remains of the tarmac surface. All the way down to the bus stand the water was now a foot deep, and with every stroke of the pedals, my trousered leg went into a river of sludge, fuel oil, refuse and sewage, while the bike slewed over broken bits of road. Finally I careered into an open stretch of sewer by the roadside and came off. As I stood there sodden, the man in the pan and beedi store shouted a greeting from his perch, sitting snug and secure on the wooden drop-down front of his shop, three feet above the flood. An oil-lamp burned comfortingly by his side. He waved expansively at the swirling water underneath his little kingdom: ‘This is all from the drains,’ he said, with inexplicable enthusiasm.

  Calf deep in water I pushed the bike past the Nataraja Talkies into VGP Street. There, to my amazement, the flower stalls were still open, their storm lanterns casting a marigold glow across the oily pond of the street; though what nautical passing trade they hoped for was hard to guess. At that moment, headlights sweeping the gloom, the Sirkali bus swerved past the Talkies into the bus stand and sent a rippling tide across the street which knocked me over again, to applause from the flower sellers. I decided to walk the rest of the way home.

  At the canal bridge the river was now all the way up its banks; it had risen six feet in forty-eight hours. Perched on their muddy berm of rubbish the shanties by now were nearly flooded, surrounded on three sides by fetid swamp and fields of bobbing water hyacinth. In a couple of houses, lamps were still burning. By now their owners must have secured their belongings in the roof, and crowded up the slope to the road, to huddle under makeshift plastic sheets, lashed by the rain. The houses nearest the river, carefully built of palm stems and fronds, salvaged wood, wattle, daub, twine and other people’s throw-outs, were now starting to move; their swept floors, the kolams by the door washed away. The man who recycles paper litter was desperately bagging his ‘savings’ in sodden bundles; the woman who collects coir sacks full of broken plastic carrier bags and the boy who gathers the metal tops of soft-drink bottles were scrambling away from the rising tide. For them, it was going to be a long night.

  I aquaplaned out of the dark into the hotel forecourt, cape flapping like one of the four cyclists of the Kali Yuga, dripping from head to toe. The night staff and the kitchen boys watched with amusement.

  ‘Your macintosh is not buttoned up, sir: this is why it is not keeping out the rain.’

  ‘Thanks for the tip.’

  ‘This is monsoon season, sir.’

  ‘Ah, I see. That explains all the water in VGP Street,’ I said, trying to be funny. ‘What food is left?’ I continued brightly. ‘Meals are available?’

  Inscrutable smile and wag of head which may mean yes, may mean no: ‘Restaurant closed, sir.’

  ‘But it’s only five to ten.’

  ‘Yes, but no one was here, sir.’

  I moped disconsolately to my room and lit a candle to find various winged creatures of the night and half the mosquito population of town. They would be too miserable to bite, I hoped.

  I got a beer upstairs in the bar of the former permit room. There in the half-light of the hotel generator was a hard core of drinkers: a travelling salesman, a couple of medical students and a balding professor from the university who was drinking Golden Eagle beer with rum and Thumbs Up chasers. (On the wall, a faded old notice: ‘Tourist information. Temporary liquor permits for foreign tourists can be had from the government TN Tourist Office, Chidambaram, or the District Collector’.) The waiter mournfully mopped up with a heap of sackcloth at the doorway.

  ‘Cyclone is now 350 km off Nagapattinam,’ said Prof, turning over the pages of The Hindu with gloomy relish. ‘River Vaigai dam is opened and Madurai city itself is flooded. There is derailment at Dindigul Junction due to line being washed away.’ He ordered another rum. ‘Trees have been uprooted in Madras and ships grounded. The elephants in Madras zoo have run amok.’

  Life was tasting better by the minute. He turned to me. ‘During the last big cyclone electricity here was cut off for ten days; for eight there were no trains or buses. My wife luckily had laid in a great supply of dried vegetables and fruits and pickled delicacies. Our rice store lasted the time so the hardship was not great.’ He smiled; he seemed to be quite looking forward to a repeat. ‘You are staying long here?’

  ‘Difficult to tell,’ I said, queasy at the prospect of being marooned in Railway Feeder Road.

  Later I went down to the foyer to secure an emergency supply of mosquito coils. If I was not to eat, I thought, at least I would try not to be eaten. The light was on in the restaurant. Inside the boys were tucking into a hearty meal of steaming iddly and other delights.

  ‘I thought you said the restaurant was closed?’

  ‘Staff meals, sir.’

  ‘I see. I don’t suppose there’s a chance of a cup of tea?’

  ‘Sorry, sir, not possible now; restaurant closed at ten o clock.’

  Back in my room the mosquitoes had dried themselves off and regained their appetite, so I retreated behind a prophylactic smokescreen, and as the mosquito coils curled up, I dosed the tap water, fearing it could not be long before the local water supply mingled with what I had been cycling through – a groundless fear as it turned out. I went to bed to the sound of rain pattering on the leaves of the banana trees in the garden and a torrent sloshing on to the soil out of a broken gutter. It was, I imagined, like having an incontinent bull elephant urinating all night outside one’s window. Eventually I fell asleep and dreamed the hotel was floating down the canal to the sea. The boys were still smiling.

  KUMBAKONAM

  The worst of the cyclone passed down the coast during the night. The main damage was to the north of the state. We settled down to a period of continuous monsoon rain, when nothing ever seemed to get dry. But my time was running out. Leaving aside the growing dangers of trench foot in VGP Street, and eyes permanently red with conjunctivitis, I felt I couldn’t wait any longer to finish the journey Rajdurai had given me. When I had come to Tamil Nadu the idea of going to Tiruchendur had been the last thing on my mind. But after the adventures on Mr Ramasamy’s video bus, I felt not merely curious but driven to complete it, to go to Suryanarcoil and the sites on the Cavery river, and to visit old Saturn at Tirunallar. Maybe I would even get to see Kamala’s fabled Tiruvidaimarudur. To see them entailed a journey into the Cavery delta, the heartland of Cholan civilization. Mala had to go off to Coimbatore, so we agreed to team up at the end of the week to go together to Tirunallar; I would go on my own to the Cavery. I decided to get the train south.

  Two days after the cyclone, in a lull in the rain, I donned my mac and went along to Chidambaram station to find out the time of the down trains. The lines were flooded, goats queuing up the stairs to the railway travellers’ retiring rooms. I walked on to the platform, and bought a tea from the stall as a new storm advanced down the line and engulfed the station, drumming on the platform roof and thrashing down on the Cholan Express, which had just come in heading north.

  Suresh, the ticket inspector, was in a jolly mood. ‘So would you like to go to Madras right now?’ In my mind’s eye I saw a dry hotel; a hot-water shower; scrambled egg instead of the interminable iddly.

  ‘Well, I would like to go to Madras. But I have to stay here in Chidambaram for another ten days; I have to go to Tiruvidaimarudur.’

  ‘Whatever for? It’s a small place with an old temple in disrepair. There is no hotel. And now it is flooded by the Cavery river.’
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  The porters were still loading the goods van, while passengers ran on and off the train, covering their heads and clutching steaming cups of tea from the stall. Suresh put his flag under his arm and brushed the water from his jacket. ‘You see, in Tamil Nadu there are six seasons. Now is the rainy season, kar in Tamil; then is winter; then in the New Year munpanni, early dew; February/March we call late dew; then April/May is ilavenil, time of young warmth; June/July is mutirvenil: this is the ripe heat. This is when it is very very hot and we sleep out on the rooftops or in the street. After the ripe heat come the rains again; the best time for tourists to come is in the winter: December and January. Next time you should come then.’

  ‘But which time is best?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said as another sheet of rain sprayed us off the roof of the carriage, ‘hottest. Hottest is best.’

  It was time for the train to go. He shook the water from his whistle, blew, and waved to the guard: slowly the train rumbled off into the darkening morning and soon disappeared behind a veil of rain. When it had gone, the proprietor of the tea stall emptied his sock of tea reflectively into the bin while on his roof two monkeys hugged each other for warmth. The station master strolled back into his office to take his seat once more beneath his garlanded picture of the Goddess Lakshmi, and the goats in the booking hall bleated in sympathy.

  That afternoon I took the slow passenger to Kumbakonam via Sirkali and Mayavaram Junction. The Coleroon was high now, a fast swirling brown flow half a mile wide. Everywhere the paddy-fields were flooded, only the winding baulks standing above the water. Lines of palms disappeared into a grey mist; the horizon closed down to a few hundred yards. The rain was continuous, whipping up in intensity every few minutes and then falling away to a steady drizzle. In a field near Sirkali we trundled slowly past a farmer in a loincloth who stood sharing his umbrella with a brown cow, the two of them staring at his ruined groundnut crop.