Vamsee Juluri
My mother’s journey to Madras took place in the early 1950s. It was not a long journey in terms of miles, or of cultural distance. Her parents took her, then a precocious sixteen-year-old with a promising stage career in the villages of what is now central coastal Andhra Pradesh, to act in a Telugu film. I cannot see distance in it now. Madras wasn’t even in a different state then. It was where all the railway tracks converged, and where trade and art flowed, like things obeying gravity. Yet, as I read her memoirs about that journey, in the rounded Telugu script, I feel the arduousness of it, with my progress through the text slowed by unfamiliarity, just like the bullock carts and uncles’ shoulders on which my mother travelled in those days. At sixteen, she was making a journey I can only imagine now. She was leaving the village for the city, and for a career in the dazzling, frightening world of cinema at that.
The only parallel I can think of is when I left my home, Hyderabad, at the age of eighteen for college. I went to Bangalore to study. I did not even do that well. For years, I had to deal with that failure and the tantalizing possibility of what might have been. What might have been was not just the possibility of studying what I loved instead of what everyone was expected to study, but studying in the city I loved, too. In that hot, dry, promising, bewildering summer of 1987, I had pretty much just two roads left into the future: a possibility of an admission to study English in a fine liberal arts college in Madras, and a promise of admission to a private engineering college in Bangalore. I loved English, and I knew Madras. I professed not so much love for engineering as a brash preparedness for it which, needless to say, did not exist. I was also enchanted by Bangalore. To an eighteen-year-old from Hyderabad, which was mostly rock those days, it seemed to present the future, a world of cosmopolitan fancies and possibilities. It was a strange decision because, all my life, it was Madras that embodied every desirable thing on earth to me. It was my childhood home, after all, my earliest memories are all in it. It was what was, and might have been: my mother, my father, my grandparents, my cousins, and me.
I lived in Madras from soon after I was born until I was about six years old. It was a rich life in many senses of the word, especially in the sense that my life seemed to be surrounded by people. The oldest house I remember was in CIT Colony. It had a large backyard, at the end of which loomed a large tree that shed pods. My room was upstairs and I shared it with my mother’s old childhood music teacher from the village. She was my acting mother of sorts, since my mother was acting mother to all sorts of child stars in the studios of Kodambakkam. Downstairs, there lived an assortment of families, relatives, well-wishers, employees. There were lots of children too, and grannies, and feuds and tantrums, and drives to the beach, and accidents with holes that had been dug on the beach for reasons other than children to jump and play in them in the evenings, for morning reasons, that is. The women who were in charge of dealing with the aftermath of such expeditions were Akka, Akkamma, Attha, and, sometimes, Maami. The gentlemen who managed and paid for the outings were usually on the payroll, the Anna who belonged to the aforesaid Akka, or sometimes a visiting Mama (the Telugu Mama, uncle, though, and no relation to the Tamil Maami, our cook). My friends were Bava (cousin), Bujji (little one, an endearment) and Paapa (little girl). They remain now in one small black-and-white photo, all of four and five and six, each one striking a funny face as the adults in between us smile pleasantly, and I realize now, stoically. I could not have asked for a better childhood, with so many of us, or in a better place, after all Madras was the city with a beach, and an excellent toy shop, which were all that mattered. Yet, I did. I had to ask.
I saw my father about once or twice a month. He lived in Hyderabad then. Like my mother, he, too, had once come to Madras from coastal Andhra half a century ago. He studied in Presidency College in the 1940s, and worked in Madras as a science demonstrator for a few years as well. He and my mother met in Tirupati in 1965. That was possibly an easier commute. By the mid-1970s, my father was pretty much settled into his work in Hyderabad, and my mother, of course, was in Madras, where the Industry was. I did not understand it then, but the Industry, seemingly, was actually unsettled. Nearly three decades after the linguistic re-division of India, there was now talk that the Telugu film world would shift from Madras to Hyderabad. This was, of course, just the overheard talk of elders in the house, the assemblage of hunches in the intelligence loops of a child forever dependent on the echo chambers of the movie-star entourage for information on issues mundane and existential. I did not know what my parents’ plans were. But I associated Hyderabad with my father. It was tempting.
It is, of course, only now, since I have become a father that I see the peculiarities of the presences and absences that made up my childhood. My son rarely finds me, or his mother, too far away from him, for the simple reason that he is growing up in an American suburb, and he, and we, rarely see anyone else for that matter. I missed my father in my years in Madras, but in truth I should have perhaps missed my mother, too. She was busy in those days, acting in three or four movies at once. I recall seeing her in the mornings though, every day, before she headed out to the studios for work. I do not have too many memories of her in the evening, except for the days on which she came back early and took us out to the toy shop in Mount Road, or to the beach, but these were very rare. It was ironic. One of the songs we all used to sing in those days had the chorus ‘Monday picture, Tuesday beachee, Wednesday circus, Thursday drama!’ because that was how we seemed to be living our lives. The irony, of course, was that my mother wasn’t. She was busy acting in songs like that in the studios, take after take, night after day, while we all reaped the pleasures of her work.
I saw my mother at the studios fairly often. I cannot recall the occasions, so perhaps it was something as mundane as the logistics of transportation that sometimes took me there. But it was always a strange feeling being in a studio, especially the way the world changed when you entered the giant cavernous mystery of the floor. There were other occasions as well when my mother’s world could come to include me, like the outdoor shootings which often took place in Mahabalipuram, and once, even in my school. There, too, my cousins and I would find our own games to play while the important and tedious business of cuts and takes went on around us. Maybe all of that led to a strange kind of respectful distance between my mother and me. There was a wall of something that seemed to stand between us. Mostly, it was people, studio staff, assistants, and the like, and, of course, when we went out, it was the fans. There was a way they appeared, usually just after we drove across the state border into Andhra Pradesh on one of our monthly trips to Tirupati. My father told me that one time, soon after they were married, he and my mother drove themselves into a dead-end in a futile bid to escape a madly adoring crowd. Once they were trapped, with no room to reverse the car, my mother ordered her fans to help them out, and they did. They lifted the car, turned it around, and sent their beloved heroine and her real-life hero on their way.
But whatever distance, human and intangible, existed between my mother and me vanished on the days when she did not have to work. Those were days of warmth and comfort for me, though this might have also been because of the dozen or so Pomeranian dogs with whom I had to share her maternal love. On her holidays, she would take us all to Spencer’s, that now long-gone landmark of an older Madras. For that joyous outing, though, we would all have to then suffer the endless waits of her other shopping points, old and venerable jewellers and sari specialists of Madras. My cousins and I stared at the world outside, the old film posters with their garish colours, the occasional Ambassador cars, and waited.
My father’s trips to Madras were of a different order. He would take me to the strangest, most fascinating places, all connected with his zoology research in some way. I have vague memories of standing under the skeleton of a whale in a museum with him, and then a long drive out past the coast one day to some kind of a marine biology station. But, more than anything else, my father opened up to me the one great useful passion I have gained in my life, a love of books. A drive out to Mount Road with him would mark the beginning of the greatest mornings I could have imagined in those days. He took me not only to the stores like Higginbotham’s and Kennedy, but to the world of distributors who had strangely low-key offices all around the area; he seemed to know everyone in that world. That is how I believe I first discovered Tintin. Years later, even after we left Madras, that was my pilgrimage circuit, the nexus of bookshops and distributors who still remembered me as my father’s son. And it was perhaps the bookshops I would miss most about Madras, once we left.
Our withdrawal from Madras unfolded in ways that make sense only now, and in ways that never occurred to me before. The official narrative on it, which still holds good as far as matters of office and work go, was that the Industry was moving to Hyderabad, and that was where my mother’s work would now increasingly be. My take on it at that time, or at least my stake in it, had to do with just one thing really, school, and my desire to escape from it. I started school in Madras, in my own house. But it was not a happy beginning because it was no longer my own house. There were hundreds of people in it, and the very first one I had to face was a tyrannical watchman who snatched me from someone’s shoulders and threw me in behind the gates. I am told that it rained that day, and it was not just my tears that have given me a vague, grey, wet memory of that traumatic occasion. The trauma, it should be explained, was not just about a child’s first day at school. The school had apparently been our home until just a few days earlier. It was one of my mother’s best and largest homes, entourage legend used to have it, a former maharaja’s summer palace or some such thing. My mother sold it to a school, and then had me admitted right back there. The elders of our world described the situation to her and I was then taken out and admitted somewhere else. I was less traumatized here, except that I went through many months not knowing whether I was in Hindi class or Tamil class, so I would go and sit where I could until the teachers told me to go somewhere else. Finally, when my father asked me if I would rather study in Hyderabad and stay with him, I happily embraced my escape.
For a couple of years, we were a two-city household. My mother stayed on in Madras, and I started school in Hyderabad under the care of my father. I would now go to Madras during holidays, and each time there was a different house, once in Venus Colony, then in Kamdar Nagar, and then, finally, one rainy afternoon, a whole lorry was loaded with our things, and the last of my mother’s many homes in Madras was closed down.
Madras would not leave us though. While Hyderabad solved some of my educational quandaries (I now had to choose between Hindi or Telugu as my language, and settled for Telugu), it seemed strangely empty in comparison to our purposeful days in Madras. Purpose, as a matter of fact, still seemed to be in Madras. My mother had moved but the film industry stayed put, and now she would stay in a hotel each time she went back.
For the next several years, Madras became synonymous for me with just one place, and that was the Hotel Savera. My mother took me with her because – or so it seems like now – she saw Madras as a place for growth. Hyderabad in those days, seemed very still, like the rocks that had lain there since the day the earth began. In contrast, Madras was still a place where things happened, where a child could grow, and learn things. Specifically, it meant only one thing, and that was swimming. I recall my first sight of the swimming pool from our sixth-floor room in the hotel. In the night, it seemed surreal, like a giant, haunting invitation to some sort of mystic ecstasy, though I probably didn’t know words like that then. I was intrigued and somewhat scared by the two giant mosaic figures at the bottom of the pool. Under the shimmering waters, they seemed dangerously alive. My cousin, who was in those days well-established as an expert in such matters, assured me that they were indeed dangerously alive, but he had somehow got them under his control with the help of some magical mantras he had uttered. Each morning, we swam, and then we played, all day and all afternoon, in our room, in the lobby, in the lifts, in the back passageways, in the laundry rooms, in the kitchen, in virtually every corner of that concrete universe. Only one room was forbidden from our curious explorations. It was in a basement, and looked forever dark and damp. It was called the Permit Room. It did not seem a happy place at all.
Over the years, the trips to Madras grew shorter, and more infrequent. The Industry finally did move to Hyderabad but by then my mother was retired. The reasons for our visits to Madras became more about family, weddings and farewells and such. As a teenager, I found myself missing Madras, or whatever dream life I associated in my mind with the place. Each time, there was a different part of the city that offered its glimpses to me. I went a couple of times to watch cricket matches, a legacy of my mother’s father who was a life member of the Madras Cricket Club. On another occasion, I went to stay with my best friend’s grandmother in her old and large home in Mylapore. It was a stately, older world I could see, and a newer world of high-rises sprouting all around it. There was never a time when I did not desire Madras. Yet, at a point of my life when it might have been, I went somewhere else, to Bangalore, then Delhi, then America.
My most recent trips to Chennai seemed to tell me something about place, and, of course, time. At one level, it was fascinating, even heartening (and occasionally made me wistful) to see the place change, much like the changes that we have seen in most of urban India in recent years. I stayed in a hotel where the menu seemed to have very little to offer from the life in the streets below, and regretted that. But Woodlands was the same, and the beach, and the gopurams towering up amidst the uglier concrete forms. Like all sojourners from an ever-perpetual past that seems to only gather up one’s emotional energy as one goes forward in time, I liked noticing the things that did not seem to have changed; the name change to Chennai didn’t matter to me as a political or philosophical statement, I suppose. Unlike Hyderabad, where a once-distinct landscape of stunning rock formations has completely disappeared under the faceless mess of concrete and commerce, or even my short-lived home of Bangalore, where on my last visit I saw miles of giant uprooted and upturned trees all along the drive to what was going to be a new airport, in Chennai, I did not think the land had changed so much; or, at least, the violence was less visible. Chennai, to me, still seems to look green, from above, and the sea seems to hold its own on the horizon, like some eternal sleeping Vishnu keeping watch from a timeframe mere cities cannot fathom. I dream this, and like the long-lost rocks of Hyderabad, I dream sometimes of a distinct landscape surrounding Madras. It is noon, and I am in the plane, as it heads out over the silver, lapping waves briefly before turning back. In my dream, I see the land below, and it looks startlingly like the village landscape my mother used to arrange in her bommala koluvu (a tradition she kept up for Dussehra even in Hyderabad as a tribute to her old and cherished home of thirty years rather than switch to Sankranthi). In this landscape, of wet, glistening paddy fields, and happy farmers’ little tile-roofed huts, there are temples, and temples everywhere. Their gopurams rise, as they do still, and somewhere, in my dream, I see the giant, supine, majestic figure of the Endless One, like the deity in Mahabalipuram, his smile subtle and enigmatic in black rock, taking a nap, too.
The last time I visited with my mother, she showed me a temple where she and my grandparents first came to pray when they came to Madras in 1952. I thanked the goddess who made my mother what she is, and made me a beneficiary of great privilege. On the next trip, I went with my wife and son, who was just about a year old, for a reading of my novel. I was told by a friend that my son was carrying himself already in a way that suggested a future in cinema and that made me feel immensely happy. Unexpectedly, I had to recognize myself at that moment as nothing more than a stepping stone in time, a generational hiatus in whatever glory past and future might have for us, a glory that for my family took place so much in Madras. I wonder now, as I have wondered many times before, about what might have been had we never left, or if I had come back to Madras when I had the chance. When I think of my moment with my son in Madras, I know it all comes back to the same thing, and home is a place with no regret, even if longing is still what makes it what it is.
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The writer is the son of Jamuna, the famous movie star of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, known for her work in Telugu and other south Indian films