Kamalamma’s conversation frequently veers towards returning home. In her 60s, she has been living at Sakshatkaram, the beggar rehabilitation centre run by the city Corporation, since she was found by the police at Thampanoor on April 25 last year.
Slightly built with short hair and dressed in the ubiquitous nightie, Kamalamma, aka Kala, calls Chennai her home. But for getting down at Madurai to drink water and seeing the train chug away, she has no recollection of how she reached Thiruvananthapuram.
She is much better now, after treatment at the Mental Health Centre, Peroorkada.
In Tamil, interspersed with English, she speaks about Chennai and her daughter Suguna. In a mostly lucid account, she mentions clearing her SSLC from a tutorial near the T. Nagar police station, and getting married to Selvamani in 1972. She says she was a door-to-door sales representative of an FMCG major. Her husband was reluctant to work and took whatever little she earned. Suguna and Selvamani, Kamalamma says, forced her to sign papers to sell a house she had at Kotturpuram and pocketed the money. She also claims to have lived in a hostel for a decade.
When asked, Kamalamma reels off Suguna’s address — AC 27, opposite Tadanta Nagar, Saidapet.
Relatives
Selvamani has a sister in Chennai and Kamalamma’s nephew too lives there, but Suguna is whom she wants to go back to. Upbraiding the rehabilitation home staff for keeping her back, she says the food here does not agree with her stomach, and the medicines make her vomit. All she wants now is to leave for home so that she can get treatment for her leg which she had injured in an accident and her eyes. “I want to work, earn my living and be happy,” Kamalamma says.
