The Writer’s House

It was well past mid-night. Actually, it was two-to-two. Purasawalkam High Road, which was once a sprawling road with trams plying, had a ravaged and desolate look.

An old man with a big, balding head and thick-framed spectacles was feeling lonely. Seemingly alive, he was sitting on the steps to the front door of the first house on Vellala Street near the junction.

Opposite, a rickshaw-puller was sleeping on the pavement. As a child sitting on the same door front, the old man had watched rickshaw-pullers with wiry frames, puffing beedis into their rickety lungs, and struggle with life. Poverty and rickshaw pullers were synonymous in any city.

All through his life, the old man had lived in his own dreams in a nondescript village that sprang out of some corner of his mind with real-life characters coming to life in fiction.

At that odd hour, he was waiting for his newest character to spring to life and soon saw a faint light approaching him from the far end of the street.

A young man got off a motorcycle. Puffing heavily, he looked restless. He seemed to be neither happy with the world nor himself. Unsteady in his step, he yelled at his friend who rode past without a word, for no reason at all.

Left alone, the young man looked around. Swaggering to the post box, he unzipped and peed into its ever gaping mouth.

“Ah, this city is full of peeing toms. Why can’t I,” he said to himself. Turning around, the young man saw the shade of an old man sitting on the opposite side with a mocking laugh.

“Hey grandpa, don’t think of posting any letter in here. I pee into it most of the nights. By the way, this is the time for ghosts like me. You better go home,” he yelled at the top of his hoarse voice.

“This is my home. I belong here. You seem to be the new, ugly face,” the old man replied in a dignified tone. He knew he had a character to write about, if he can. The young man was in no mood to fight as he was drunk.

“Let us have lunch at the restaurant tomorrow. Meet me at the corner table,” said the young man, banging into his home next to the post office.

Next noon, the sober young man caught up with the old man who came out of a shaded corner near the restaurant at the entrance to the Vellala Street. They sat in a corner table and started a conversation.

"Did I shout at you last night? I can’t stand advice. I don’t want any. I don’t like or know your generation at all. Somehow, I have some respect for you. Are you a writer? I’m aspiring to be one," queried the young man.

"I used to write a lot. Especially, after I left the garden house of my grandma at this very place. That was a long time back. Now, I have stopped writing. I wish I could."

“Don’t you feel bad for the house is not there?”

“The last time I walked the Vellala Street, they were dismantling the old house. The other house I owned at the hill-town is also waiting to be razed down. I am not touchy about houses. But I do have wonderful memories of my grandma’s house. My uncle, one of the first amateur photographers, in the country, would make me pose with my pets under the scorching sun. I am sure Rama, the monkey, would love the dishes at this restaurant.

“Actually, the food is awful here. I feel it is more like eating plants.”

“My grandma reared all kinds of hibiscus and jasmine. With hope, she tended to even delicate plants like geranium which would grow only at high altitudes. Eventually, the wilted plants usually found their way into the corporation caravan. Sometimes, when I used to sit at the street door watching the caravan, the peacock stood beside me.”

“Chennai sure is warming up. I hate this city. This place is not for writers. Tell me more of the old world stuff you enjoyed.”

“Not joyous always. It was at the garden here my grandma taught me multiplication and thirty Tamil alphabets, two of the most difficult things in life. But I liked to roam around the streets of Purasawalkam.”

By now, they had finished meal. The food was not good but the bill was terribly bad. They watched a good number of customers cursing the hotelier while paying bills. It was plain day-light-robbery. Perhaps, it explains why the owner of the hotel ended up in the biggest prison in city.

Outside, the only one old house, painted in yellow with wooden windows in green, a few yards away, resembled the old world. Everything else had been clinically destroyed and clumsily rebuilt.

Right opposite, the pharmacist was minting money. A band of boys ran as patients waited with fear and pain in legs, cursing. The pharmacy owner, they say, has been in the bed for four years now.

They walked up the Vellala Street. The three temples, from the old man’s childhood, were still there, with the same gods — Ganesha, Perumal and Ponni Amman — rested for decades.

Outside the temples, the flower selling women were selling, and then there were the ageing beggars waiting all day for a few coins to be thrown into their dabbas , and there were lepers, bandaged and begging in wheels.

A scene unchanged over a century.

“Neither the thousands of gods nor the new age nethas have made any difference to their life. For the poor, life is the still the cruel same,” said the old man.

As they walked, the unmistakable sign of the Municipal Corporation was simply in evidence.

Following High Court directions, the hawkers were cleared of the platform for pedestrians. In the stretch from Purasawalkam Tank to Thana Street, the corporation had removed the platform itself!

The traffic was terrible. During the old man’s school days, the tram plied on the road. Now, it was one way and yet dangerously congested. If someone wanted to park, then they needed to pray to Purasawalkam’s gods.

Paying was not enough. People were not able to cross the road despite it being one way. Elders and children were seen holding their hearts in the mouth while crossing. There was not even a traffic signal.

“The corporation surely has a vision,” exclaimed the young man.

The duo managed to escape from being bumped off by the speeding traffic a dozen times and walked down to the Spur Tank where the old man used to play football with friends in his boyhood. Now, the tank was mired in encroachments. Later, they walked along the Cooum river, the shame of the city.

"Cooum was a fine, flowing river in my childhood. Now, it looks as if the city’s sins are being washed in the river, apart from the dirty linens," the old man reminisced.

"For forty years, the politicians have been promising to clean up Cooum. Mayors and officials have visited and studied all the rivers. Cooum is still the same. This could be the only river on earth where even the fish can’t live."

"Cooum represents the political class. So dirty, that it can never be redeemed."

While walking back, they watched many young fellows walking into the slum near the Chetpet rail tracks, over the under-bridge, to the house of the drug peddler and fill the air with a joint, dreaming of distant stars, under the watchful eyes of the few cops posted at the junction.

"The police and peddlers, eternally bonded, are truly brothers-in-arms!"

Early that night, both men, who began their careers as reporters before becoming writers, entered the colorful and lively market.

The first to spread their ware on the platform were two paan-chewing beetle sellers. A lonely lady was selling banana leaves opposite corner.

A drunkard was in conversation with the rickshaw-puller near the shop where a transgender was bargaining hard as a beedi puffing old man enjoyed his joy ride on a bullock cart going down the Thana Street.

It was business hour as well. A team of four women were busy making fresh jasmine garlands; an old, generous woman with a huge kumkumam on her forehead was selling kanakambaram flowers and the jewel shop owner was punching his calculator converting weights into currency. A step away, the crowd was milling around Balaji Lunch Home.

At the left corner street, Dr. Subramanian was busy advising one patient after another. In the age of corporate hospitals, the retired government doctor was charging ten rupee per person. For poor, consultation was free.

“The market was my favourite place. In a century, life in the streets has not changed at all,” said the writer from the old world. “All my stories were about commoners. Funnily, most of them never spoke in the language written by me. Not many of us notice the beauty or pain in their lives.”

By now, the young man had learnt all about the old man’s literary pursuits.

As they walked into the Vellala Street from the other end, they entered into a conversation again.

"It is time they recognized you. You were born here but not many care. May be the street should be named after you?"

“It is better if people remember the world created by me rather than the world we are born in.”

“Are you not the first one to show a new world for generations to come?”

“I am not sure. I would prefer people to remember my world and not me.”

“No. Just like how I am delighted as I walk this street now, I want the world to feel for you. The Dravidians are good at building memorials and keeping statues. I think it will be a great idea to have your statue in front of the house (now a readymade shop and the restaurant) where you were born,” the young man said.

“So, you want the crows to crap all over my bald head?”

“No, we will have the statue of a four year old boy, with a peacock beside him, sitting at the door, keenly watching the world. I personally feel that your colorful childhood images have inspired you equally to that of the zombie hill-town where you settled down. Your windowed house in the hill-town is also widowed now. This is our best chance. If you want, we can have a roof over your statue,” the young man was persistent.

“You are an absolute idiot.”

The Young Man’s Diary:

Undated.

Last night, I had a great time walking with a writer. He inspired me to finish my first story.

After calling me idiot, the old man suddenly vanished as we were crossing the vegetarian restaurant located on Number 1, Vellala Street, Purasawalkam.

Bemused, I came back to my haunted home near the post office.

I went to bed dreaming of corporation bulldozers pulling down the money-making hotel and an octogenarian chief minister, specializing in statue diplomacy, opening the rebuilt home, a memorial-cum-library.

Then the dream alternated like the governments in Tamil Nadu. The five time chief minister who calls himself the leader of Tamils worldwide refused to build a memorial for the English writer.

In my new dream, the State’s three time chief minister, convent educated and often referred as the Iron Lady, threw open the memorial for the writer by spraying flowers from a helicopter hovering over the house. Then, her love for the English language urged her to visit the memorial in person.

The day she chose to visit the memorial, there was a heavy drizzle and she had to come in a boat to open the memorial-cum-library. And, the municipal corporation, after a century, discovered that the Purasawalkam High Road – Vellala Road junction gets flooded even in the slightest of drizzle. The minister and commissioner were sacked and the mayor vanished.

The Talkative Man, a friend of the writer and the once Editor-in-chief of Madras’s English newspaper, graciously handed back the door of the original house.

The four-year-old boy, with a peacock beside him, was sitting silently in statue.

The plaque behind read: The Writers House, Malgudi.

(My life as a writer and the memorial for the English writer continue to exist only in my very own dreams. This is written for the very simple reason that this nation is yet to publicly honor the memory of R.K. Narayan, the first full-time English writer, who grew up at Namma Chennai in No. 1, Vellala Street, Purasawalkam.)