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.