Balestier Road

One of the good things about not having had a car for the past ten odd years is that walking everywhere became easier.  It's actually not that difficult to walk a couple of kilometers though parents who did it back in the day everyday to school would have you think otherwise.  By walk of course I mean amble because its rare for my walk to be a power walk, I stop to look at things or photograph things often.  Small things come to your attention in a way they never do when you have a vehicle, even in the simplest of these - like a bicycle - the pleasure is in the movement not in observation.

My brother lives in a neighbourhood that is quite expat. Largely white, a few others.  There are tall, well maintained condos. Maids out with their charges.  Joggers. That sort of thing. But if you walk around a bit it changes. The other day when I was walking the neighbourhood got a bit more grungy and a bit more run down.  There were housing estates that had seen better days. The neighbourhood was also more "local" than the immediate area where my brother lives.  More lighting shops than you would care to count. Not picturesque local but merely the slightly ramshackle, fraying at the edges feel of the ordinary suburbs of Asian cities.

Of course this is Singapore so you do run immediately into a mall that has the familiar set of eateries and shops. Albeit a mall where the shops were crammed with items for the forthcoming Chinese New Year.

At some point in my walk it began to rain heavily.  There are plenty of frangipani trees planted around the city. The flowers fall now and then which kind of makes a walk pleasant. But it all looks wondrous after a thundershower as I discovered. Particularly if the trees are clustered around a small area.

This is a city that is lent character by the rain. Partly because it's a break from the constant, oppressive heat (the city lies close to the equator).  Partly because rain like snow is a climatic feature that evokes a myriad of emotions.

On my walk I came across the Sun Yat Sen memorial but left a visit there for another day.  Those fallen flowers are the nandiyavattai or crepe jasmine, also common here.  Almost every garden here has people at work, their maintenance requires constant attention though once in a while you do wish they would allow in a bit of chaos instead of the constant manicuring.

Right next to this is the Burmese Buddhist temple.  Street clusters in Singapore are often united by theme and around here a lot of street names are of towns in Burma.

The temple is a fairly new one. There are some elements familiar from Indian temples, the small shrines outside, the lamps, joss sticks though the whole is a lot more spick and span than you would find in an Indian temple. Everything is shiny new and the flowers are plastic. With temples for the large part I find that very few invoke a certain feeling - maybe not a religious experience but the feeling that something ineffable lies within. And there is a certain feeling to this temple, a quietness and calm, something beneath all that shine and colour.

I had been walking for 4 hours and yet it had felt like nothing (of course my days are idle and this makes a difference). But a walk in the pouring rain though a drab, old neighbourhood is sometimes good for the soul.

Bras Basah

The other day I went to the Bras Basah complex. While the city is largely a mall town, there are a few of the old complexes still around, including at Chinatown. This one is given over to books, including second hand ones, so I thought I would saunter along. Not that I need anymore given 5 boxes of books are in storage at the moment....

The complex has several floors with a central atrium that is open to the elements.  There are a few bookstores, some English, a large number Chinese.  And there are specialised bookshops too-school books, medical books etc. And there are the art supply stores, the music stores.  But little else. Something about it stirred some dim memory of childhood, I had a sense of deja vu but couldn't recollect a similar place. Was it in Delhi?

On the first floor there is a shop called Cat Socrates, named after the owner's cat. I have been to many a lovely knick-knack place but none as adorable as this shop. Partly I think because it's charm is not studied, you are just as likely to stumble upon a linen tunic as a hand made magazine.

The rest of it was good for a meander.  There is a very good second hand bookshop which for some reason stocks even ordinary titles at higher prices. My new copy of The Makioka Sisters that I bought in Sydney was cheaper than a copy here.  It didn't seem to be a rare or special edition too. There is a graphic book store.  And three floors of Popular....er...the most popular, well at least, ubiquitous bookshop here.  Several things struck me. One browsing shops is not as tiring as in a mall (and definitely not as disorienting) in this - I am guessing - 70s kind of layout. For one it is not closed, second the same handful of shops do not stare back at you. Though there is a food court adjacent to the complex, it is in fact refreshing to not stumble into cafes now and then (I reckon the first six months here even a non-foodie would be tempted to sample everything but post this food fatigue must set in in this town).

 

I did end up buying a few books, at 4 for 10$ it was hard to resist.  And I am just finished with the first, At Fault. Its an e-book but I still prefer the dead tree version:) And I feel soothed when walking around bookshops, when I hold one in my hand.

Just a few minutes walk away there is the National Library.  They had a few events on but I suspect the best of it is in the book collections itself.  Perhaps some other day...

I more often than not end up taking photographs on my phone or a basic camera that I have and perhaps need a more sophisticated one, I have certainly been urged to.  Initially I meant to photograph as many suburbs as possible.  But it isn't always possible. For one, I find it difficult to take photographs here due to the light. In Sydney and Mumbai it is entirely different, here the humidity seems to provide a pervasive film through which one views the world. And if you simply want to photograph small moments, the moments are fleeting and serendipitous.  Only once in a while does it all feel right. And on one day it was absolutely right. So next post on a day it poured and I went for a walk.

Bookish in Singapore

It turns out that there is a small press on the island that publishes local authors.

The Billion Shop was a shop near my office that sold paper money and other artefacts for ethnic Chinese people to burn as offerings to their dead. It no longer exists: Jixiang Traditional Foot Massage now stands in its place. I’m not one to lament change, and trust in Adam Smith’s invisible hand that the good people of Toa Payoh would rather please soles than appease souls. But I’m also sentimental: about places gone, loves lost, ideals overturned or, more often, outgrown. Consider these stories, then, as my own paper offerings to my dead.

Browsing the titles from the press at the bookshop, it was the back blurb of Stephanie Ye's book that attracted my attention.  Surely there must be a word for that simultaneous feeling of everything must pass and change and an attraction to and desire for the remnants of the past :)

Ye's book is a carefully constructed four parter linked by its characters. The writing is elegant and economical, a little bit on the "product of writing school and acceptable prose for the literary mags" side. Like Lahiri's writing, it too seems to be confined to a particular milieu, in this case Chinese Singaporeans. The four chapters are on a group of friends who have been to school together, their adult lives link the four stories.  Now and then it makes allusion to issues: compulsory national service, being gay in Singapore, subtle religious differences and the like.   But for the large part it charts the emotional terrain of its protagonists who come and go but can never entirely leave Singapore.  Not even those who have put the greatest distance between themselves and the country.  And it is effective in doing this, Ye has a few quietly devastating moments in the book, both of which have to do with the death of a character.  And for a visitor like me, it is a tiny peek into Singapore life. 

These days my only criteria for a book is the desire to continue reading it.  By this I don't mean an easy read, if anything easy reads are discarded even earlier if they are bad books:) Perhaps it was reading it on the train and in the parks here so there is a sense of the place that the book is rooted in, but it  held my attention right till its bittersweet, sad end.

[X]

Things We Find When Moving

While packing up my place in Sydney, I found an old storage box with partitions that I sometimes use for storing jewellery.  It is made of hard plastic and probably dates back to the 80s. My father would sometimes be gifted Diwali sweets and the tin or box it came in was reused. Particularly because these were often decorative, at least by the standards of the time.

In fact pretty much any packaging that we received was rarely thrown away.  Even cardboard boxes which my brother and I would gussy up with leftover wrapping paper.  Painting over things was a Sunday afternoon past time for us, be it a cheap earthenware vase or just little paintings for our wall. Sometimes my grandmother would give us a print from a Japanese calendar, my uncle had been to Japan and a calendar would often be sent to him. We would get a single print which we would mount on left over plywood.   All of this was far cheaper than buying a curio or a print - even a Taschen calendar poster was unaffordable.

I discarded a lot of these when I moved to Sydney a decade back except this box.  And for a cheap plastic throwaway it has lasted a long time. What's more it is in perfect condition despite being in careless hands. 

In Goa

Till November of last year I had never been to Goa. There would be rapturous reports of parties, weekend visits. beach sports, food, the lifestyle and yet I had never been to the state. When I used to admit this, everyone I knew would be incredulous.  That too when you live in Bombay! You must go! Its heaven! Its awesome! Etc. Etc.  I am not sure why I never did make the trip but it seemed hard to believe that it could be less than paradise in the face of so many glowing reports.

Well reader, it is less than paradise.  Despite the photographs this post is going to host.

This was a trip I was looking forward to because I was going to be spending several days with close friends of mine.  They are building a house in Goa and the plan was to motor around a bit and also look up their place and a few local architects.  All the planning had been done by them from a place to stay to things to see and do.  Eventually most of my pleasant memories of the trip are of time spent with friends.

The places we stayed in were homestays which in  way mitigated some of my negative feelings about Goa, had I stayed in a hotel I might have fled the very next day.  The one in North Goa was a bit of a fancy affair albeit in an idyllic setting.  The one in South Goa on the other hand was unpretentious, the family more casual and the children unaffected. It made for a few happy hours.

Starting the vacation in North Goa was perhaps not the best thing to do.  It is a place over run with tourists and suffers the malaise of famous beach towns.  That is it is just another party town, an away place to get drunk (or perhaps smoke something stronger), have a fling and more.  It isn't just the foreigners, there is a steady stream of cashed up Indians (yeah some Goans still refer to us as Indians) for whom this is the place to sport short shorts, kiss discreetly but openly and be "modern". It's the closest thing to being abroad without actually leaving the country. In this Goa is quite liberal, there are none of the other unspoken constraints of travelling elsewhere in India. But this also gives a sense of empty and even sad decadence to the place, it is all body and no soul.

To add to my unhappiness, the background score for all this was pop hits of the 80s and 90s. Everything I managed to avoid as a young adult now follows me everywhere!

The Goan countryside is pretty, there is little doubt about that. So are the houses, in this the Portuguese have left a far greater legacy than the British.  And architecture seems a fairly serious (and creative) preoccupation judging by the visits my friends made. And things improve as one heads south even though there are murmurs of beaches here and there being taken over by the Russians or the Israelis or the Indians and how things were far better before some unspecified time. 

Part of  my lacklustre response is because there is little that engages one intellectually (and yes I know no one goes to Goa to sip coffee and peruse bookshops - there are other places for that!).  What I really mean of course is a sense of place that arouses one's curiosity. Goa's most famous son is Mario Miranda. And while the permanent display of his early works in Reis Magos Fort are a wonderful and amusing insight into Goa in the early 50s (thank you friends), he is so ubiquitous that even an illustration like Street in Fontainhas that seemed charming becomes overused.  Other artists are little known, I only found some fading postcards of Angelo da Fonseca's work for example and in fact I only knew of the artist because of my vintage clothing blog.  Perhaps these are mere initial impressions that will stand corrected on further contact, on the other hand I had gone with friends who had avoided beach party tourism and taken pains to locate museums and artwork and bookshops.

Everyone goes to Old Goa. And the complex of churches at its heart is quite spectacular. Of these Bom Jesus which houses the body of Francis Xavier is by far the most popular. Were there not photography restrictions, I fear people would be making V signs and posing in front of the long departed saint. Outside though everyone poses against the edifice. In fact there are a large number of honeymooners here, rustic girls in skimpy clothing taking photographs with their husbands, no doubt to be secretly savoured once they return home.

As always the better parts lie in the fringes. There are the ruins of the church of St Augustine. There is something a little eerie and spectacular about it.  The quiet convent on the other side which was undergoing some restoration work when I was wandering around. The small and perfectly formed Italian church, St Cajetan (everyone seemed to be trying for a Goan toehold). This place in fact has the gate of the old Adil Shahi palace.  So strongly associated is Goa with several centuries of Portuguese rule that everything before is barely mentioned in the tourist pamphlets.

As my friends were busy that morning, I had taken the bus from South Goa to Old Goa.  The buses are cramped but its fairly easy to travel by the bus.  Again I am struck by the absence of middle class India, almost everyone in the bus appears blue collar, a few locals and most workmen from outside the state.  From Old Goa, I took the bus to Ponda which is not really on the tourist route. The only reason I knew about the Mangueshi and Shanta Durga temples was because I had friends from the state and they often visited the temples for the usual Hindu rites of passage.  Ponda as it happens is more or less like rural parts of Maharashtra or Karnataka and decidedly the less glamorous cousin of Goa by the Sea.  Partly this is because the temples are not as spectacular as their counterparts in many other Indian states though they are a little different with their blend of Hindu, Islamic and Portuguese influences. Later my friends met me at Ponda and we drove around a bit. It felt a bit like being in a 70s movie, say Chitchor, right down to little kirana shops and Marathi programs on radios and little B&W  TVs.

Ironically despite a recent ban on foreigners entering temples, it was the Indian visitors who were in Western clothing.

Not much after I returned to Mumbai, the happiness I had felt in the wake of being in Kumbakonam felt a little diminished. And for a long time after I felt a certain aloofness towards Goa. Maybe this was because after travelling elsewhere I felt even more strongly the contradictions and underlying ennui of Goa.  Maybe it is because Goa is a de-stressing holiday, the kind you may look forward to after being stuck week long in traffic in Mumbai. Not therefore a holiday for someone having a mid life gap year. But largely it maybe that places are like people, sometimes we just do not get along. Looking at the photographs for this post, I thought perhaps I had misjudged Goa a little. But when I think of Goa, I can only recall the feeling of listlessness, even a lack of joy, that I felt at so many moments. Everyone is there to relax and have fun, to chill in current parlance, we are assured over and over again that this is the state of mind we all long for and yet at almost every moment you feel that vital life, the life that truly nourishes us, is elsewhere.

In Tiruvidaimarudur-2

I was aware that my great grandparents neighbours still lived in Tiruvidaimarudur. But it hardly seemed right to knock on their door given our tenuous connection.  As it happened, they spotted me on the street taking pictures of the other half of the house and called me in.  A cup of coffee was made for me, a lunch invitation was extended.  Their grandson, a cute little scamp, hung around to play with me.  It turned out that the little kids I had played with were all now grown up with families of their own. They had kept in touch with other branches of the family.  So I stayed a bit, we chatted a bit about this and that, about our lives at present. When I left they gave me the customary gift of a small sum of money as my elders. I myself had arrived empty handed, unsure of who I might know in the village. The house itself, rather their part of it, was as I remembered it, right down to the tubewell, the fields at the back. The road that led to the river was green with growing rice and small groves of coconut trees.  The pathashalai opposite the house was now a school, albeit run from Kanchi. It was hard to sit there and not remember the past. At the same time, life had moved on and yet a continuity remained. Normally a sense of detachment is part of all my interactions, at this point though my emotions felt inexplicably stirred.

This feeling was only intensified by a visit to my mother's aunt (much younger than her though) who lived in Kumbakonam.  The old house here was much discussed in our family but I had never been there. Nor had I ever met the aunt.  The house had been demolished to make way for a newer model but otherwise the family's manners and habits seemed pickled in time. They remained a vaidika family with all its attendant rituals and prejudices.  The lane their house was in led to the Kaveri and I strolled down for a bit.  The girls doing their washing at the river (in salwar kameez, now an approved dress for young girls in Kumbakonam), fell into an easy conversation.  As did the men painting the old temple at the end of the lane.

My aunt herself was a bit quiet, perhaps unsure as to how to treat a woman she barely knew, but as the hours progressed she felt more at ease. Later we went to meet the daughter-in-law who lived in a rented portion of a small house.  The daughter of an orthodox man with many daughters, she was married to the eldest son who was a purohita. All kinds of conflicts raged in her and she was not shy about discussing them.  Every conversation was an assertion of the life that was hers, though the assertion only made her happiness suspect.  Everything about her was different from me-her decrying of education, her caste obsessions, her narrow definition of acceptable femininity-and yet I felt drawn to some inner warmth and truth in her that was warped by her upbringing.

Just before I left I went to the Darasuram temple. I regretted leaving it to the last, it was incredibly beautiful.  It's a small but perfectly formed temple that holds its own against larger, grander temples. By all accounts like Banteay Srei, yet barely visited.  There was far too much to see and far little information.

Travel isn't a preoccupation of mine of late.  Too often in our times it is just a few days in a town. a rush through the sights captured in photographs, a bit of eating out, a sampling of the local capture. I prefer to stay for awhile or just meander in my own home town. But some trips have resonance, they take you to a different place internally.  Going to Kumbakonam and Tiruvidaimarudur was such a trip, I came away with my heart and mind full of a certain kind of happiness that I have not felt for a long time. The colours, the light of the land stayed with me for many days. Though this happiness wasn't entirely due to the people I met, I thought of them often too. Most of all of Vidya's life and her kindness.

At the start of my trip I took a cycle rickshaw to my hotel. Mr Murugesan my driver was perhaps in his late 50s. The rickshaw is kind of "low class", a cheap alternative for short trips.  Anyone with a little money takes the motorised "auto".  Due to several reasons, largely Mr Murugesan, I ended up taking a rickshaw. It was a long ride to my hotel, Mr Murugesan had misheard me and had not anticipated that he would need to cycle a few kilometers.  This left me a bit agitated because of the effort Mr Murugesan had to put in. Still he had committed to the job and he was determined to reach me to my destination. Once we reached, we parted. A few words of appreciation, a little bit more money than he had asked for left him happy. I asked for a picture.  And he let down his veshti, combed his hair a bit and posed, a dignified man in a lowly trade. I felt moved, a little teary even.

Everything flowed on from then, touched with a little magic.

In Tiruvidaimarudur-1

Almost all of my family can trace their (known) roots back to a clutch of villages in and around Kumbakonam. Because my parents themselves were not brought up in the south of the country, these were mere names to us. Or would have been had it not been for my great-grandfather's "country-change", much like a sea change or tree change, in the 1950s.  In doing this my great-grandfather moved back to a house in the village of Tiruvidaimarudur which had belonged to his mother.  My mother had been exceptionally close to her grandparents and had spent a good part of her childhood with them. In turn, she had wanted us to be better acquainted with them. Additionally my parents were related so my great grandparents served as elders for both sections of the family. So though most of our holidays were spent with our own grandparents in Bombay, we did make the occasional trip to Tiruvidaimarudur. These trips remain etched in memory being few and far between and to a place that was entirely different from both genteel, incestuous cantonments and the louder delights of the city. The last visit I made was in 1988 as a young woman. Without the freedoms of childhood it felt a bit restrictive. Most of my visit was spent writing letters to friends in Mumbai and playing with the gaggle of kids next door. At this point, the house had been partitioned as my great-grandparents found its upkeep difficult. The subsequent year my great grandfather died, the house was sold and my great grandmother moved to Bombay.  And though I had every intention of returning once I never did until last year.

The Day Express was the train we took to Kumbakonam from where on we took local transport to Tiruvidaimarudur.  This has been replaced by the car for most people I know.  But it had also been years since I took a train. I had the time and the inclination so one morning I took the train from Egmore station and was on my way.  And cliche as it is, a different India takes public transport, especially if it is second class. I had been warned of course. Do not talk to strangers! Do not give out your own name! Do not accept food! As it turned out, everyone was voluble with the details of their own life leaving me little time to explain my own. As for the food, it was delicious:) No doubt the lack of a marriage and my travelling on my own was puzzling to most people I met, yet most accepted it or in the odd case went out of their way to be helpful.  After the dust and chaos of Chennai, it was comforting too to see clean stations, an endless stretch of greenery with the added bonus of pleasant weather.

I had little idea what I would do in Kumbakonam where I was staying bar booking a car at some point and making my way to my great-grandfather's place. As it turned out, the time I had proved to be very little. Kumbakonam itself was half-remembered. I wasn't very interested in the town as a child though the women in the house would make a trip now and then to escape the confines of Tiruvidaimarudur. We would tag along to the sari shop or to the temples (the minute I spotted the temple lake I remembered sitting on the steps with my mother), the trip made tolerable by the promise of dosai and ice-cream.  As a young adult I never found it pleasant, my Bombay manners and clothes attracting more than a few comments. Now as a much older woman I found the  town changed. There are a few swish resorts and it takes some time to take in the fact that a breakfast of muesli and toast is possible.  There are more than a few foreigners as well as Indians on the temple trail.  But it all felt familiar, quiet and soothing. Beneath all that is the hint of a stifling small town though this is unlikely to impinge on the average visitor.

Returning to Tiruvidaimarudur itself, I was surprised by how little had changed.  Of course the place had grown, the demographic had changed. It seemed more prosperous and yet poverty persists.  But more than the physical changes, it was something of the spirit of the place that hadn't changed.  Perhaps too I had come in the right season, the region had had two weeks of rain and everything felt green and promising.  The river, which I last remembered as very dry, had water. Everywhere one turned it was green. And though narrow roads and tiny houses remained, the courtyards were swept and tidy.  And above all this the temple loomed, still the same and so vast that parts of it are simply locked up.  Here, as in Maruthuvakudi which has a small temple that is my father's kuladeivam and where I stopped by briefly, you wonder why at a particular time the region had such an efflorescence of temple building. Few temples compare with the sheer size and variety of those found in and around Thanjavur.