Nallathangam, with a head full of white hair, squats on the small cement platform outside her house from five in the morning to ten in the night daily. At 85, she has nothing else to do but simply sit and watch the world go by. Only thrice a day, she disappears briefly behind the curtain hanging over the main door of the house. “I need to eat three small meals. My five sons and their wives provide for me,” she says. Women from adjacent houses occasionally stop by to exchange banter. The postman, the vegetable vendor or the ‘uppu' seller sometimes pause to enquire about her health.
Nallathangam does not complain about life or, for that matter, anything else. Neither does another bent-with-age octogenarian Shanmugam living two lanes away. You will find her also sitting on the threshold the entire day once she has fetched water from the municipality tap 500 m away. “I go to fill water daily at 10 a.m. This one large plastic pot is sufficient for me. After that I enjoy watching the cars and other vehicles and people going past. It is better than watching TV,” she smiles.
One comes across many more such elderly women and their young daughters and younger daughters-in-law inside these narrow lanes, called the ‘kal sandhu', that branch off the busy North Masi Street. These are probably the only niches in the city where life still resembles a slow-motion picture of the 60s and 70s. These are Madurai's lesser known lanes which bear no names, where it is almost dark even in broad daylight, where the sky appears like a blue ribbon through the gap between the roofs of the old and new buildings.
Even if you step inside these lanes in the afternoon, you will find the colourful morning kolams still fresh, women sitting on thinnais gossiping and mechanically finishing household chores. You will smell the strong puli kuzhambu steaming in aluminium pots. Then the sights: clothes drying on a string by one side of the lane; cycles and mopeds chained to windows and doors on the other side; small children happily playing in groups or defecating, alone, in a corner. Cows and goats let out an occasional cry from the sheds, squirrels and rats gnaw into the cow dung, cats and dogs look for food, birds peck into haystack.
Life moves at its own pace and no one seems to be in a rush here. A cycle rings from behind and we almost kiss the walls to make way. A resident of 45 years, Sethuram Konar tells us there are at least 30 such narrow lanes, if not more, that branch off this main road and curve and bend and intertwine before reaching some dead end. Not even two feet wide, some of them run up to a kilometre and even more.
Mostly identified by the communities that inhabit these places, these lanes house some amazing structures. In Aadi Konar Sandhu, we find quite a few century-old houses with antique doors and wooden pillars, many abandoned and some still in use. They share their walls with newer structures. Except for this curious mosaic of the old and the new, it resembles a compressed village life, where people seem to have all the time.
The afternoon calm is occasionally broken by a rhythmic ‘tak tak' – the pounding of betel nuts. Ponnathal, 80, is preparing her post-lunch paakku, as she sits by the hand pump, her legs leisurely stretched Many of these women were born in these houses: they left after they got married and are now back as widows. Their sons and daughters, who now occupy the houses, leave a corner for them. In this burrow of theirs, they chat, fight, cook, exchange curries, watch serials, raise grandchildren and spend most of their time at the doorstep. The lane is their world.
Sooty kitchens and smoking stoves, dingy stairs and cramped rooms, creaking doors and whirring fans, wobbling cots and rickety chairs, torn mats and old calendars with photos of gods and goddesses — they make up the houses built on plots measuring not more than 450 sq. ft. There may be a tussle for space but there is no tension on their faces. They break into a smile whenever they encounter new people like us.
Ashok Kumar, a smartly turned out Yadava College graduate who now works in a pharmaceutical company, waves at us. He is the fourth generation of his family living in the same old house. “All our extended family members also live here. We can't imagine leaving this place built by our forefathers. This is prime location where the monthly rent is Rs. 6,000 and the deposit Rs. 1 lakh advance even for such pigeon-hole accommodation,” he shares.
Along with him, as we step out of the unimaginably narrow lane, a honking jeep on the busy Masi Street throws us back into our real life. Suddenly, the burden of living in a different kind of hustle-bustle comes back. Ashok Kumar shrugs it off saying, “We have learnt to adapt to both the worlds. Inside our lanes, it is very secure and traditional. Just a step outside in the scorching sun, it is the fear of the unknown.”
(City 3Sixty is a monthly column that captures the different moods of the city. It appears last Thursday of every month).
