For a long time when we came to Madras we used to stay in a room in a tower block, J.P. Tower, down Nungambakkam High Road. A ten-storey warren of flats and small businesses, it was only built in the late seventies, but already its yellow walls were stained black by the relentless heat and the monsoon rains. The auto-rickshaw would stop on the corner of a narrow dirt lane which led to the entrance to the building. You climbed out by a heap of rotting vegetation and soggy cardboard chewed over by a thin white cow which, like the rubbish, never seemed to move from this spot. Over the lane a new hotel was built in the mideighties with a liquor permit room at the back – Tamil Nadu was still a dry state in those days – and along with the cow, there would always be a doorkeeper in khaki fatigues and military beret on duty by the gate. Inside, when the clinging heat of the Madras night put its hand on your shoulder, there was chilly air-conditioning, and beer so cold it took your breath away.
Inside the tower block the foyer had a lingering aroma of DDT and incense. One lift was always out of action but, miraculously, one always worked. It was operated by a barefoot lift boy with a sweet smile, who never lined the lift up with the floor, so that you usually had to crouch to get out. (I never understood why; I had a crazy notion this was some kind of tactic because of the power cuts.) We used to stay on the fifth or sixth floor, I can’t remember now: a cluster of rooms for travelling salesmen which was dignified by the name of the Krishna Executive Lodge. It had been booked for us by a Tamil friend who worked in an office on the floor below. The rooms were very clean, if mosquito ridden; the lady at the desk was very quiet and patient, always game to spend half an hour trying to get a trunk call for you, before disappearing to another floor to do the mysterious other job which occupied most of her day. The boys, on the other hand, were quite unsuited to running such an establishment; they were ever helpful and always smiling, but insisted on turning on the TV at full volume at the crack of dawn while they prepared cardboard toast and muddy coffee.
The place was handy for midtown: in ten minutes you could walk to the restaurants and bookshops down Dr Radakrishnan road, under the flyover, where the sleepers on the street live on concrete ledges inches away from the traffic, cooking their evening meals on wood fires at the feet of the huge, hand-painted movie hoardings which line the road. Near by was Mr Balasubrahmanian’s Carnatic Music Bookshop, a treasure house of traditional Tamil culture, its shelves sagging under texts of Thyagaraja and the other ‘modern’ greats of southern music. Here too were books on the classical dance and, in the back, stacks of literary, philosophical and religious classics: grammars, glossaries, epics, poems on love and war, medieval treatises on literary theory, the songs of the saints (which are still memorized in traditional families). These are all part of a continuous two-thousand-year-old tradition which is virtually unknown in the West, one of the world’s last surviving classical cultures. And as if to to remind you of its wellspring, in the front room of the shop was a a little shrine with puja lamp, bowls of camphor and incense, and a picture rail lined with old gilt-framed pictures of the gods. Here Mr Balasubramanian did his prayers every morning before opening.
Close by was the Music Academy, where you could go to concerts of classical dance, Bharata Natyam – an art form now enjoying a renaissance after its suppression in the temples by the British in the early years of the century. And round the corner there was Woodlands Restaurant, where the vegetarian tradition of the south could be sampled, eaten with the hand from plates of fresh plantain leaf. The enduring connections with the British period may give India a strange familiarity to the visitor from these islands, even in the most unlikely places, but the newcomer to the Tamil south does not have to venture very far from his or her hotel to see that this is a wholly different civilization, which has survived to take modernity on something like its own terms.
The best thing about J.P. Tower was the view. To see it you had to climb up the stairwell, glimpsing through open doors some of the strange clientele of the upper floors: one-room import–export offices, astrologers, shipping agents and a specialist in sexual problems (‘MD, Mysore’). Past the room for the lift machinery there was an inspection door on to the roof. Outside you had to scramble over a jumble of air-conditioning pipes, building debris and pools of dried concrete, and then duck under washing lines snapping in the breeze which comes up from the sea in the late afternoon. At the railing you found yourself looking southwards over the wonderful urban landscape of south Madras: growth and decay intermingled, growing out of each other. Near by another tower block was going up: this was the beginning of the new boom years for the city. Labourers clambered barefoot over a forest of wood and bamboo scaffolding, baskets of bricks on their heads. Tiny white loincloths, red headbands, sweat glistening on ebony backs. The construction method can hardly have changed for a thousand years; temple towers and skyscrapers alike are thrown up with crazy webs of timber and bamboo poles lashed with coir rope, which look as if the slightest puff of breeze would blow them down.
Further out you could see a city of gardens, a green sea of palms dotted by the spires, domes and pavilions of the old British suburbs around Adyar Park, the Madras Club and the river. Looking southwards the first time, I found this view simply heart-stopping. And ever since then it has seemed to me like the threshold of a magical land. The sun sinks to the horizon, an orange ball, and the sky turns soft peach to the south-west, shading to a ripple of gold with translucent ultramarine above. Thirty or forty miles away on the horizon you clearly make out the red hills of Tirukalikundran, tipped by the spire of its ancient temple. There, every day towards twelve, two eagles come to be fed from bronze bowls by Brahmin priests in a mysterious ritual which was reported nearly four hundred years ago by European visitors. Always around midday; always two eagles – never one or three. It is one of those strange Indian fairy tales (like rope tricks, snake charmers and self-mortifying fakirs) about which we read in our childhood books – and which turn out to be ‘true’. A foretaste of the wonders and illusions which lie beyond.
Those distant hills mark the gateway to the south. From Madras it is five hundred miles down to the tip of India at Cape Comorin, where the Arabian Sea meets the Bay of Bengal. To the west and north-west, the Tamil country rises to high wooded mountains, the Western Ghats and the Cardamom Hills, which still abound in wild beasts. There the British built their hill stations, like Kody and Ooty, to escape the ferocious heat of the plains. But the heartland of the south is the flat country of the Coromandel coast, cut by the rivers Pennar, Vellar, Cavery and Vaigai. This is where Tamil civilization grew and flowered – ‘the most splendid province in the world’, Marco Polo called it. It is a land of dazzling emerald-green rice fields and immense palm forests, where at almost every railway halt the temple gateways tower above the trees like petrified vegetation, ancient centres of myth and religion which are still part of a living sacred landscape, ‘India’s Holy Land’. It is still, for those susceptible to enchantment, an enchanted country: a ‘land where it all comes back’, as an old India hand once said to me, ‘the stuff of your karmic dreams’. This is the story of a journey through that land, down to the southern tip of the subcontinent, through the landscape – physical, mental, imaginal – of the Tamil universe; one of the last – perhaps the last – of the classical civilizations to survive to the end of the twentieth century. The journey started long ago, one Christmas. And it started with a prediction.