For many years, S Muthiah, a couple of friends and I were part of a lunch group. We met — travel schedules and health willing — every month, usually at a new restaurant of Uncle Muthu’s choosing.
For an octogenarian, he was gastronomically adventurous, at least to the degree that Chennai allowed him to be. But two things remained unchanged. He usually got there before the three of us and he always — always — started the meal with soup.
Our lunchtime conversations varied and flitted from subject to subject — happenings in the city, the odd bit on national and state politics, and the sharing of personal information.
You got a sense that Uncle Muthu filed these conversations, squirrelled away the information he considered relevant, in his mind. The lunches meant more to him than mere gossip. They were a part of a life that drew few, if any, lines between work and pleasure, between personal and professional. Unlike most of us, his life wasn’t slotted into compartments. His Madras Musings magazine, his columns for MetroPlus , his interests, his friends — and I dare say his family — seemed like a seamless integrated whole.
‘The historian of Madras’ is a title he earned because of his books on the city and his columns in The Hindu . He preferred the expression chronicler and it is easy to see why.
A historian summons up the image of someone at a desk poring over records, inscriptions and other history books to fashion one’s own account. Uncle Muthu did this but he also did so much more.
For one, he was interested in chasing down the smaller details, the kind that would escape the attention of those who assume that the broader the brush, the greater the scholarship. He was a historian of many things — of neighbourhoods, of shops, of companies, of roads, of families.
At lunch one day, I was surprised to learn how much he knew of the father’s side of my family, which once dealt in timber and had business connections with Burma. He also took the trouble to meet and befriend my journalist uncle on the maternal side, who was a cricket writer of some repute. It was my uncle’s Madras childhood that interested him most.
A chronicler is an apt title, since Uncle Muthu was essentially a storyteller. His stories of Madras were often the stories of people. What he seemed to enjoy most was charting the course of people’s lives, the unexpected twists and turns, their triumphs and tribulations. I suspect he liked to put the story back into history.
What set him apart from others was method. His data didn’t come from books and records alone, but depended critically on others — a vast body of friends, contacts, admirers, and strangers who thought it fit that he should be in the know. Uncle Muthu crowd-sourced information at a time the expression didn’t even exist. Someone would provide him a tidbit of information that would find a place in the section, which would lead others to add something (or contest a fact or interpretation) and thereby — layer by layer — the stories often grew and assumed a life of their own.
Anyone who followed his column in The Hindu would recognise how critical the ‘When the postman knocked’ section was to his work. There was the odd day when the entire column would be made up of this section (“The postman has certainly kept me busy this past week answering his knocks.”).
Since he got his information from so many sources, he was not shy of asking for it. To cite a random example, the daughter of a former British Deputy High Commissioner wrote to him with details of a French double agent called Graf, including his visits to Nungambakkam to call on a certain Madame Minx, who he was close to. This led to the postman knocking again with another letter in which a reader said he lived on Gilchrist Avenue, off Harrington Road. “Any more information?”, Uncle Muthu asked.
He lived to a ripe 89, but the outpouring of grief — natural, reflexive — on the news of his death reveals how much he meant to the people in the city he had adopted and loved. We mourn him for many things — his prodigious knowledge, his impressive work ethic, his unfailing decency, and that very special old-fashioned grace, which made his company feel like a refuge, a shelter from an angry modern storm. For those who knew him, it feels like a part of the city just died.
It was Madras he truly loved, but I do hope he is somewhere even nicer, where the soup is always tasty, where there are many stories to tell, and where the postman routinely knocks. Maybe he will deliver this letter of love as well.
