Madras, for most of us who grew up here, stands for everything that is old, traditional, authentic, unhurried. It is how we romanticise our childhood. Chennai, that clunky harsh word, summons up elements of the new, occasionally kitsch, the modern; it is the city of our adulthood. The temptation while reading an anthology on your own city is to also share your own story — about how Madras is a slow intoxicant. Madras on My Mind is “a tribute to the city with two names”.
The editors, Chitra Viraraghavan and Krishna Shastri Devulapalli, give us a mix of fiction and non-fiction and warn that this isn’t about “mallipoo, filter coffee, and lungi dances”. Bollywood can go take a hike. The writingsflit between Madras, the storehouse of memories, and Chennai, a pastiche of the old and new.
While ‘Flowers on the Madras Train’ is a view of the old city from the eyes of a small-town boy and ‘Curd-rice Cricket’ a fond recollection of a cricket-crazy yet thayir sadam-soaked culture, the ominously named ‘Still Life at Marana Vilas’ and the distressing ‘House of Powders’ speak of struggles of survival and acceptance.
‘Objects of Desire’ is an entertaining account of how on IITian goes out on a rainy night in search of potlum (weed), an experiencevery different from the nightmare that unfolds in ‘Water and After’, a grim reminder of that day two years back when unrelenting rains threatened to swallow up the city whole.
Expectedly, the writing ebbs and flows through the book. The stories seem carefully collected — some like ‘A Passing Show’ and ‘Triplicane to Taramani’ are rooted, providing glimpses of entire communities and lives, and some like ‘Eclipse’, a dark, haunting tale, seem like they could be from anywhere, with only some clues betraying location.
The theme and tone of each story is different too. Pick up the book if you like cities as characters, for flashes of good writing, and if you truly love Madras. But some pedestrian descriptive prose weighs down a collection that has much more potential and that fails to stand out in the ever-growing pile of books on Madras that we have seen over the years.