Dudley Christy is sitting on a discarded slab of concrete, beneath a tree inside a Madras Race Club facility on Five Furlong Road. As the shadows lengthen, buses lumber past, packed with people returning from work. The rush hour has no effect on Dudley: he is spared the trouble of commuting between home and workplace. He lives and works at the Race View Stables and Trainers Quarters, one of the MRC facilities on this road, which lies in Maduvinkarai.
As his father W.J. Christy was on the rolls of MRC, Dudley first came to the quarters as a newborn swaddled in a cushy blanket. He grew up there, becoming a trainer of racehorses in contrast to his brothers Royston Christy and Eugene Christy who took to jockeying. Sixty years old, thin and visibly past his prime, Dudley has now settled into a quiet life amidst horses and memories.
I ask him about Five Furlong Road of those days. He smiles warmly and offers me a broken plastic chair, the only one lying around. “When I was a kid, this road was just a mixture of red sand and blue metal,” says the Anglo-Indian. From there, his account slips and plunges into the predictable, dwelling on the rural flavour of the area, dotted as it was with paddy fields and thatched houses.
This description could fit any road – at some point of time, any stretch in Chennai that is now considered upmarket, would have had a touch of the pastoral. Many of them would have been lined with paddy fields. Beyond the commonplace, one observation of Dudley’s glows bright and provides illumination on the development of the area. “Even in the 1970s, the locality was marked by a deplorable lack of bus services. There was only 51E. Even this service was not operated through Five Furlong Road. One had to walk up to the Velachery Main Road, extremely unremarkable in those days, to catch this bus,” recalls Dudley.
A look at the MTC list of services that touch Five Furlong Road is all it takes to understand how much things have changed now. It includes 5A (T.Nagar to Tambaram East), D70 (Velachery to Ambattur Industrial Estate) M7 (T. Nagar to Thiruvanmiyur), V51 (T. Nagar to Tambaram West), M70 (Thiruvanmiyur to CMBT Koyambedu), 570 (Kelambakkam to CMBT), 570A (Kelambakkam to Ambattur Estate), M45E (Anna Square to Keelkatalai), L51 (Ottiambakkam to CMBT), D70 xt (Medavakkam to Ambattur Industrial Estate) and 170M (Velachery to Manali).
With the development of the southern sections of Chennai, Five Furlong Road has shot into notice – for those living in the central, northern and western parts the city, it is a gateway to the far-lying areas in the south. The factor that has most conspicuously contributed to the current status of this road is the rise of Velachery as an upmarket neighbourhood. Another factor is the Maduvinkarai road over bridge, which provides shorter and quicker access from Velachery to Guindy.
In the 1980s, even in the 1990s, days before Velachery began to rock Chennai’s realty charts, civilization seemed to come to a ‘neighing’ halt at Guindy. The bogey of inundation during the monsoons was among the insurmountable blocks that existed in the minds of those indecisive about moving to Velachery – the ones that overcame the mind barriers must be congratulating themselves now.
In those days, Five Furlong Road was just a minor link road. Its only claim to glory was its connection with horse racing in Chennai. Even there, it was accorded only the importance of a footnote in discussions about MRC’s history. This road, which hugs one side of MRC’s meandering compound wall, is named after the five furlong race stretch at the course – race courses are measured in furlongs, with five furlongs amounting to one kilometre. With this stretch having a few facilities that support horse racing, including the equine hospital and race park and race view, which are home to horses and their trainers. The ignorance about the significance of its name is great: it is surprisingly prevalent among many residents of the locality. An array of misspelt name boards proves this: one calls the road Fiber Long and another, Parlong. No matter what you choose to call this road, it is not going to be easy to have an address there anymore. That is, going by the details of a luxury house project that is coming up on the stretch. But the modest alternates with the grand on this road. N. Ramadoss, a 67-year-old labourer living a humble building, one of many found along a section of the MRC compound wall, is a beneficiary of a housing provision made decades ago. Says the senior citizen, “In the 1960s, local residents were allowed to build houses on pieces of land with frontages ranging from 18 ft to 19 ft.”
These time-worn, modest-looking houses show the old has not been entirely jettisoned by the new.
(A column about the lanes and bylanes that lie hidden behind arterial stretches, but are interesting in their own ways.)
