Forever Chennai! – Chennai, India

Forever Chennai!
Chennai, India

Home is where the heart is? Well, yes: there will always be a part of Liverpool inside me, yet the heart is a wholesome thing; it can hold so much within. My roots are firmly planted in English soil, but are obviously no longer exclusive to England.

My affair with Chennai began in 1997, when I first came to rest my bones in crumbling Broadlands Lodge in Triplicane during a backpacking journey through India. From that time on, something happened. Tamil Nadu – the heartland of Dravidian culture; a land of the preciously guarded Tamil language; a land of temple-towns, sacred sites and fertile soil.

Chennai – Tamil Nadu crammed into a specific space by the sea. When I enter Tamil Nadu or Chennai from other parts of India, it always seems like I am entering another country. It feels different. These days Chennai feels even more different. Since I first came, I have laughed, cried, been homesick in Chennai, and have even fallen in love in Chennai. In short, I have lived in Chennai. I didn’t just visit or pass through. I even got published in Chennai, and rubbed shoulders with the Indian writers Ashokamitran, ShreeKumar Varma and Theodore Baskaran.

It’s a very special place. Black velvet skies and bright summer moons are something else in Chennai. Magenta, nighttime mists over Marina Beach are more haunting and the city lights are brighter. Delhi doesn’t compare, Chowpatty Beach in Mumbai cannot compare and Liverpool – well that’s a different time, a different place (a different story). And when I dream of a girl who I once knew in Chennai – was it her who captured my heart or the tropical atmosphere of a Madras January?

When I get homesick in Chennai, I get really homesick. It hurts just that much more. I stand and look down Triplicane High Road and feel alien in a way I do not experience elsewhere. On the High Road, village India surrounds me. In the middle of a metro, families from villages live on the street; they are earthy characters, smelling of a village life left somewhere behind in Tamil Nadu. Banana leaves litter restaurant tables, bullock carts haul produce and deities from rural India are worshipped at small shrines in almost every back alley. If all of that does not make a westerner feel like an outsider, then nothing ever will; and, in my case, it often does. Chennai is intense, whether experienced through the life of Triplicane, the crowded streets of the port area of Georgetown, or the fume belching traffic on Anna Salai (a main thoroughfare).

American singer-songwriter, Paul Simon, wrote about homesickness in the song Homeward Bound. He mentioned about each town looking the same and of every stranger’s face instilling a desire to be back home. He wrote that song while sitting on a bench waiting for a train in Widnes, a small town bordering Liverpool. Paul was touring the area and I can see why the harsh industrial landscape in that part of the world would compel anyone to want to go home. But that part of the world, I guess, is my home. And wanting to return to such a place can only be induced by intense feelings of homesickness. Alas, at times, Chennai is responsible for me wanting to go back. Paul Simon couldn’t wait to leave the area – and I don’t really blame him: someone’s home can often be another’s hell.

Chennai overwhelms and contains six million strangers’ faces. And, at times, each street, area and traffic choked thoroughfare looks and feels the same. In the middle of May the place can be unbearable with soaring temperatures and humidity. I have travelled through the heart of the city along Anna Salai countless times in the back of an auto-rickshaw during that month. At least when we move, the hot breeze offers some degree of comfort. It is when we are stationary that things get bad. And on Annai Salai, caught in the traffic, you find yourself stationary all too often.

Even when in the shade the heat burns the skin. So to get some relief I blow some breath upwards and over my face. At that point I come to realise that the air inside my body is even hotter than the stuff outside. My breath is like a flame-thrower. At that point I usually poke my head out of the side of the rickshaw to get some air, only to take in another mouthful of diesel fumes.

It is then I wish to be where Paul Simon didn’t want to be. But I know that one day I’ll be back to that over-crowded spot on the Coromandal coast. I just need to get away in order to return. And when I get sick of Liverpool, the call of Chennai will be too strong to resist. As insane as this may sound, when things seem too lifeless and sanitised in the UK, for a few silly seconds, I will even come to miss travelling along Anna Salai in May.

For many, Chennai is always Madras; but not for me. Madras is forever Chennai. It changed its name in 1997 and that is what it has been called ever since I have been there. If I had to get published anywhere, where would I have wanted to be? If I had to fall in love anywhere, where should it have been?

If I had to have lived in a crumbling lodge anywhere, where could it have been? And if I had to think of anywhere while writing this in Liverpool, where can it be? Only one place: there will be somewhere in my heart that always says – forever Chennai!

Originally Published in the Chennai edition of the New Indian Express, January 1, 2004.
Colin Todhunter is the author of Chasing Rainbows in Chennai, which reached No.3 in the bestseller list of India’s largest bookstore, Landmark.