Travel to India – Madurai to Chennai

(This is part of a series on travel to India. Please read parts I, II, III and IV before reading this for continuity.)




Aboard the good old Thiruvalluvar in SETC avadharam, I was headed for Chennai (formerly Madras). The green metropolitan buses in Chennai were a sight to behold after all these years. My stay in Chennai was pretty much the same as in Madurai – in the sense that there was not a single day that I stayed indoors. I was visiting friends and relatives, went to Mahabalipuram, consulted with the skin specialist, and saw Ilaiyaraaja in person (more about the latter in the next post). Even though I stayed for about a fortnight, and traveled around a lot, I could not find time to see some of my very close friends from MCC (Madras Christian College) days. I found some time to go to the college though (sketch 1). I sat at the “botany tank” and did a quick sketch of the café road intersecting the road that leads to Bishop Heber hall. The "botany tank" is a water tank adjacent to the botany department. The tank had a couple of concrete benches underneath - during my B.Sc days at MCC we would monopolize this place and try to convert it into "physics tank". A nerdy friend of mine even wrote several physics equations with chalk on those benches prompting a harsh response from the botany students. As I was sketching I noticed a couple of girls sitting there discussing how so-and-so was the butt of jokes at a party, “Semma ottu ottunaanga theriyuma di?” I shamelessly eavesdropped on them and sighed as they brought back memories of such useless banter (vettippechi) that I had engaged in a decade ago.

My mother wanting me to see the skin specialist was in the back of my mind all the time. Also, the welts pretty much appeared with clockwork regularity every day to remind me of the seriousness of the situation. This specialist is in great demand all over the country. He practices out of his house in Chennai and people queue up – believe it or not – at three in the morning to see him. The doctor does not believe in giving appointments or using the token system. You could be a business magnate or an unemployed person, he makes no distinction, you are to come there and wait in the queue if you seek his treatment.
I went to his house at about 11:00 in the morning and was not surprised to see a serpentine line. There were at least a hundred patients waiting in the line that stretched from the clinic’s door, ran along the corridor, and then spilled out into the garden. The doctor lives in one of those big houses with ancient colonial architecture. The house has a huge Nagalinga maram (the cannonball tree - Couroupita Guianeusis). The tree is an imposing sight with its big leaves, beautiful flowers, and gigantic fruits. Now and then the fruits would fall off – true to the tree's name – like cannons, creating a furor among the patients resting in its shade.

I had prepared myself for a long wait. I brought some snacks, my sketch book, and a novel. I took my place in line and sat on a tree stump. I alternated between sketching and reading while munching on the snacks. I could not help sketching the majestic tree (sketch 2). A mother was deeply absorbed in a book while her child sat by her side playing with a leaf (sketch 3). I could see that the child had the same striking features as the beautiful and dusky mother. The features are lost in the sketch as I could only manage to draw them with their backs to me.

Seeing me engrossed in my sketchbook, the person next to me requested that I draw his portrait (sketch 4). This man has a certificate in sidha medicine and runs a small practice in his town. He joked that as a sidha doctor he could only cure others and was never successful when he tried his own medication. He said that there was no other doctor like this specialist here and praised him to the skies. Following the encomium, he prescribed some medication for my allergies. He said that he would go with the meat reaction theory and doubted the credibility of the heat school of thought.
After a few more sketches (sketches 5 & 6), I took a break and started reading the novel. A lady in line who had obviously seen me sketching asked to see the sketchbook. She went through the book and pointed out the people I had sketched and even passed it around to some of my subjects - the mother and daughter pair.

I was happy when the sidha doctor had liked his portrayal and said he wanted a photocopy of the portrait. But I felt immensely satisfied and flattered when the small child kept looking at the mother-daughter sketch for a long time and said, “adhu naan (That’s me).”