I like to believe I am a person ‘born, bred and spoilt' in Madras. We would go to school in a hand rickshaw, manoeuvred deftly by a man who would tell us stories all along the way. Arumugam was his name, and he would stay on with us to become a peon in my mother's Padma Seshadri School.
The school began on the terrace of our rented house in Nungambakkam. It was started by the Ladies Recreation Club, with about 20 students under a small thatched roof. We would even have games for them around our house. The owner of the building never asked for a penny when we turned his house into a busy school.
A few years later, we shifted the school to the Lake Area, and decided that we needed a little more place for the children to play. My mother came up with an idea — during her meeting with the Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, she asked a young boy from the school to read out a poem requesting him to kindly grant space so they could play. It worked splendidly! Valluvarkottam became our playground.
Mohammed Rafi's first performance in Madras was around 1959. My father, Y.G. Parthasarathy, had arranged rooms in the Dasaprakash Hotel for him and his brother. When their first show, at the N K T Kalamandalam, was over, they turned up with their luggage. My father ran to ask them if everything was all right. “The hotel that you put us up at is absolutely wonderful,” said Rafi, “but there are no people there!” For a moment, we were at a loss as to what to do. “We don't even have a spare room in our house. All we have is a terrace,” said my father. “And that will do!” laughed Rafi, and he moved in under the thatched roof for a week. One night, he took control of the kitchen and made parantas and bitter gourd; and every day at ten o'clock, our street would fill with rare ghazals that Rafi never sung in the movies.
The United Amateur Artistes, which began in 1952, was a path-breaker in the theatre fraternity. Conversational Tamil was used on stage, a sacrilege for its time. We were also one of the first troupes to have women onstage, with artistes such as Sandhya and Vidya. One of the young men who used to take care of our props once wrote a play for us — it has had thousands of shows since then. The play is ‘Vietnam Veedu', and the scriptwriter was Sundaram.
Several artistes who went on to become giants in their own right — Cho Ramaswamy, Nagesh, Visu, Lakshmi and Mouli — had begun their theatre lives with the UAA. So did Jayalalithaa, who used to come and watch her mother Sandhya and aunt at our rehearsals.
The 1960s were a wonderful time for the arts. Comedy in theatre was subtle and nuanced, and there was a welcoming space for new artistes. The December music festival used to be held in a pandal at the P. S. High School in Mylapore; a place where legends such as Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Alathur Brothers, and M.S. Subbulakshmi have performed.
Coming to cricket, an India-Pakistan match was as great an event as it is now. The first scene of ‘Then Nilavu', the famous film of Vyjayanthimala and Gemini Ganesan was to be shot in the stands during one of these matches at the Corporation Stadium. That evening, Hanif Mohammad, Haseeb Hasan and another player came looking for Vyjayanthimala in the evening; their faces filled with awe as they met her.
The A-stand of the Chepauk stadium during cricket matches was always colonised by about 50 of us, complete with bongos, drums and whistles. Whenever Viv Richards was at the crease, and he finished an over, he would turn around us and ask us to play. We obliged, playing even louder. And Richards would do a little dance, right there, in the time the bowler readied for another over.
Now it is these memories that keep you content.
