Mala’s house lay in a dusty street of beaten earth, hard beneath the feet, heavy with sun. Chidambaram is really just a big village clustered round the temple; and hers is a village street lined with ancient wooden houses with thatched roofs, little latticed verandas and pillared porches. At the threshold of the house every morning she laid out a kolam, a pattern in rice flour on the swept floor: intertwined geometric shapes, a flower, a peacock, a maze, auspicious signs to protect the home. Here in the south, the unseen is always palpable, and is always threatening to break in upon the present; it can never be ignored.
It was Mala’s choice to live here, so as to be close to the great temple of Nataraja. For south India’s Saivites, devotees of the Great God Siva, this is the holiest of all shrines, where the god is enthroned as Lord of the Dance in the golden-roofed sanctum whose origins, it is said, lie back in the remotest antiquity. The immense rectangle of the temple dominates the town, and its towers can be seen for miles across the flat landscape of the coastal plain; at night, when their lamps are lit, they are landmarks to sailors out at sea. After her husband lost his sight, Mala returned here, to the place where she was born, to bring up her children, and to be near Nataraja. Sometimes her devotion drove the girls to distraction. There was nothing much for them in Chidambaram. Life would be better in Madras or Pondi. But as Bharati always said, ‘Mother would never leave Nataraja’.
Every day without fail Mala would go into the temple at six in the morning when the air is still cool, walking barefoot through the spacious courtyards to hear the music and see the flame lifted to Siva’s eyes. And again at ten, for the offerings of honey, milk and coconut, and then in the evening when the age-old Tamil hymns are sung by the oduvars, hereditary singers from the middling castes like her own, who must stand outside the sanctum, for this is the preserve of the Brahmins with their Sanskrit rituals. Even when she was away, Mala could tell you to the minute which of the events of the temple’s ritual day was under way. It was a rhythm as ingrained in her daily life as waking, eating and sleeping, and I suspect it gave her as much sustenance.
Mala’s house was a few minutes’ walk from the East Gate of the temple. She had a single room with a lean-to tiled roof around which lizards and rats scampered; a row of triangular air vents in the bricks allowed a little breeze in the hot weather. Inside there was enough space for a wooden bed, a folding camp bed, a metal chest for the family treasures, a treadle sewing-machine and a small table. When everyone was at home the children slept on the floor. On the walls she hung brightly coloured religious posters depicting her favourite gods and goddesses: many-armed creatures with kohl-dark eyes and dreamy smiles, garlanded with flowers, their saris seamed with gold. Above the bed was an out-of-date calendar from a sparking plug firm in Madras, with a picture of the god who is beloved of all Tamils, Siva’s son, the divine boy-child, Murugan: a beaming cherub with a plume of peacock feathers. At the other end of the room there was a narrow kitchen space behind a five-foot-high brick partition; here she had a Calor gas burner, stone shelves for pots and pans, a vegetable basket, a grinding stone and pestle. Outside her door a communal passageway led to a latrine, a well and a small tank for rainwater. In this confined space, the surrounding streets and shops, and the temple itself, most of her daily routine passed.
It is like any other small southern town sweltering in the plain, but here the hot, brick-kiln blast of midday is always dissipated by the breeze which comes in from the sea in the afternoon. Just down the lane, past the thatched shed where Mr Ragavan mends broken-down auto-rickshaws, is a yellow-painted concrete water-tower. From here you can see the whole place laid out before you, from the golden roof of Nataraja’s shrine over the temple gardens and out to the green and white minarets of the mosque on the Cuddalore road, where the town abruptly ends and the paddies begin.
It is a warren of thatched and tiled houses, shaded by palms and dotted with little exuberantly painted shrines. It has three mosques, a couple of churches and three big cinemas. There are tea stalls on almost every corner. The one I used to haunt is in East Car Street. It is run by an unlikely couple, a big albino man and his wiry little assistant. The small one does the mixing and pouring; like a conjuror playing to his audience, he throws his tea in a great arc from jug to cup and back again, never losing a drop.
Outside the albino’s tea stall, beyond the shadow of his awning, a little lane runs up to the temple gate. Mala comes this way every day: it is full of people from dawn till midnight, walking to and from the temple, stopping to shop or to talk to friends. Here is Raja the priest’s house, and Ravi the tour guide; there is the woman who sells pilgrim souvenirs, painted plaster geegaws of gods and pottery busts of movie stars. Further on is the lugubrious seller of almanacs and astrological texts who squats impassively under his sunshade. By the gate, next to the man who does door-to-door ironing, is the boy who looks after your shoes for a few paise when you go into the shrine.
On the other side of the temple courtyard is the bazaar. This is the oldest part of the town, and it grew up around the sacred precinct in the Middle Ages. Mala’s father’s house is in this part of town, and it is here that her oldest son Kumar is hoping eventually to set up in business. The daily fruit and vegetable market is here, the bank, the police station and the telegraph office. Near by you’ll find the merchants, the goldsmiths and the importers of electronic goods from Singapore and Malaysia. You can see the new money here, as India’s economy starts to open up. Fancy houses with marble floors and security gates nestle cheek by jowl with the decaying mansions of the old landed class (people like Mala’s father). In their carports are brand new Ambassadors, chrome gleaming under protective sheets, bonnet insignia sheathed in little leather pouches.
During business hours this side of town is jammed with cycles, bullock carts and honking buses. At the ‘Hackney Carriage Stand’ horse-drawn rickshaws queue for business, little two-wheeled covered carriages which trot up and down at an alarming pace carrying veiled Muslim ladies home with their shopping, or ferrying the pot-bellied moneylender, dabbing his brow, to a rendezvous with some insolvent client. On the corner with Bazaar Street is the pan man, cross-legged at his table, absorbed in his ritual. Like an alchemist with his metal tray and cutting block, his silver tins and blades, he concocts explosive mixtures of powdered white lime paste, betel slivers, tobacco, cloves and cardamom. These he rolls up in the fleshy green betel leaves in the bucket of cold water at his feet to make a mouthwatering (and mildly narcotic) digestive. Like all good pan men he knows the individual tastes of all his regulars as they stop by his stand for a chat on the way home after work.
If you are heading further afield, the bus and train stations are down in the new part of town, east of the temple. Here, close to the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, are the cinemas, packed every night even at the late show. There are flower sellers, sweet vendors and dosa stalls, and a rank of black and yellow auto-rickshaws, little two-stroke three-wheelers which buzz around the dusty streets like cross bumble-bees. All day and most of the night the area round the bus stand is a hive of activity as the long-distance coaches roar in, plying between Madras and the deep south, and battered and windowless country buses lurch out to pound the lanes of the hinterland. Hang around here for a while and you meet the people who always seem to be on the move in India, whatever the hour: families coming home for the Diwali festival, itinerant holy men and women ‘wandering between the great shrines and little bundles of people clutching their life’s belongings, heading who knows where.
Beyond the perimeter wall of the bus stand is the canal which circles the town; on its banks live the poorest people, in thatched shanties, close by the steps under the bridge. It is dry for most of the year here, but perilously close to the flood when the monsoon comes and the water begins to rise. These people live by recycling everyone else’s throw-outs: glass, plastic bags, bottle tops, bits of metal. Unlike Western society, nothing is ever wasted here, everything finds a new use, a new life. Their self-contained little world lies on the edge of Chidambaram. Cross the canal bridge and you soon reach the town limits. Before you the road snakes off over the tracks toward Annamalai University, past the long sun-baked platforms of the railway station, where a smudge of smoke hangs in the air from the 1230 Chingleput Passenger.
Just passing through, as most do, you might get the impression the town is dirty, inefficient and chaotic; corrupt even. (I have heard many Indian visitors, north Indians, overseas Tamils, say as much.) But once you have stayed in it for a while, you get to feel something of its real character, to discern its unseen patterns and hidden charms. Chidambaram is a small place, but bursting with life and vitality. In it there is an intricate, many-layered order which works in a way one feels no Western town ever could. At any time of day or night, for example, you can find hot tea, food and shelter. At any time you can travel on to another destination. Nothing is standardized, and hence nothing is ever monotonous. And for all the great variety of people, jobs, religions and castes, there is not the huge disparity in wealth and condition you find in the great northern cities of India, where the poverty is desperate and seemingly irredeemable. The man who bags bottle tops by the canal bridge has his own independence and economic being, and, no less than the tax collector and the town archaeologist, his own outlook and philosophy.
And in the centre, dominating the skyline and visible from everywhere in town, there is the temple; symbol of an older order, social, economic and psychological. The temple was the meeting place of earth and heaven, focus of a social and moral system which for thousands of years determined how people were born, lived, procreated and died. Now all around it the order is shifting: in the rich houses in the bazaar, in the huts by the canal, in the Muslim and Harijan villages in the hinterland. For the small-town mafiosi, the smugglers of gold, spices and videos; for the pan man and the moneylender; for the temple priests; and for Mala and her children, it is all changing day by day.