Was I ten or was I twenty-two when I fell in love with Madurai? I am not sure. Loves are like that, scrunching and compressing precise timelines into irrelevancy.
I’ve visited Madurai nearly every year. It’s a city that almost never sleeps, has been lived in for more than two thousand years, has food to die for and arresting architecture, once you go past the usual traffic-jammed modern bits.
And for the past thousand or so years, the centre of the city has been the magnificent Meenakshi Temple. Four hugegopurams act as lodestars for the area and with set a of interlocking, directional streets, each with their own set of characteristics, life teems here.
It’s the first time in a while I haven’t been able to visit, so I’ve been busying myself in reprocessing photos I’ve taken over the years. Most of these were shot on a Zenit E with Kodak Tri-X and Ilford film.
Sitting by the inner tank at sunset. There’s a tranquility in this moment, despite the throng of devotees, that can’t be described well.Busy streets leading upto the main gopuramStunningly detailed work on the facadeWalking the courtyardInside the thousand pillared hall, with painted ceilings
What’s a temple without intense devotion and detailed, larger than life sculpture?
The vaulted outer arcades, full of shops selling everything.
The ring of streets around have brilliant food, not always healthy, but so good.
I was reading something yesterday about lonely places inhabited by people who seemed to have ended up there not of their own volition, but by the fickle nature of chance and circumstance.
And I was instantly reminded of the guards at Chandratal. At the base of the hills over which the bowl of the lake sits, these guards occupy a lone tent, billowing against the constant howling wind, the canvas sheared a little bit each day, hastily patched by weak thread or ineffective electrical tape.
Each stay for three months at a time, absolutely alone, save for some summer weeks when visitors come up past the cleared pass. They walk the perimeter of the lake, ensure the nomadic shepherds with their horses and sheep and yak don’t wipe out the thin, green grass too early.
I imagine their walks and their daily life. I imagine what it must be to live without the anchor of even seeing another human for weeks.
After weeks of being stuck at home, I went out for a walk in the neighbourhood I grew up. It’s a bit of a drive from where I live now, but I felt I needed to do this. To clear my head, to recalibrate, to celebrate the living and to honour those who are leaving us soon or have left already.
It has a been a very difficult month, as you, dear reader will notice from the lack of posts here. But things took a good turn just before Diwali, so we celebrated a bit by lighting lamps and eating lots of kaju kathli. I hope you too had a beautiful Diwali.
On one unusually damp summer morning in 2007, we found ourselves bleary eyed and dazed on Shimoga Town’s narrow platform number one. The overnight passenger from Bangalore had arrived earlier than usual. A coffee vendor was found and two, strong, invigorating cups later, a sense of purpose as to why we here started dawning.
We soon spot our quarry. Across on the far side of the station, stood the decrepit looking trailer railbus, the only one left of its kind in Southern India. Soon it would begin its plodding journey to Talaguppa, at the base of the Western Ghats, on the metre gauge branch line that was finally commissioned in 1940, twenty years after its construction began. Built by the Maharaja of Mysore for the Southern Mahratta Railway Company, it was later operated by his own concern, the Mysore State Railway.
Until the 1990s, it was operated by steam locomotives, but when they began to be phased out, a railbus was chosen as the replacement. Given the lowly status of the line, this railbus was built by the local workshop: An Ashok-Leyland engine and drive train, using a 5-speed gear box mated to a frame borrowed from a four-wheeler tank wagon, with a hand built body. As expected, the workmanship was quite poor and the railbus saw frequent failures.
Waiting to depart Shimoga
But on the day we were there, it was all glistening in the damp dew that covered everything, ready to sputter to life. And when it did, an unexpectedly large contingent of passengers boarded. The driver raised his eyebrows quite a few times.
I spent most of this afternoon going over my photographs. Thousands of them, scattered over fragile disks. I often think of this fragility. What will happen to me if they one day just break? Will my heart shard like those pieces of silicon? Then I think of the photographs themselves. Which of them look fragile? Seem fragile? There’s one in which an old lover is up on a tree, balancing on a branch. Her face is radiant, as was my heart. (10 seconds later, she was on the ground with a twisted ankle)
Then I come across this photo. The opposite of fragile. The sun gleams from top, certain of its strength. The mountain, so resolute and aware of its weight, so confident of its place on Earth.
