A secret: You can visit a city for the first time as many times as you’d like. Just offer a new inquiry, a new gaze. You’ll find a new place. I come to Chennai for the first time all the time.
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When I ask it for the Madras I grew up in, Chennai foregrounds softy cones melt-dripping bright-white into beach sand; tamarinds stone-struck off branches and cracked open, tang on tongue; flute-song wafting on sea breeze, lullabies drifting into tuition classrooms; school-bus daydreaming past peepal, past palm.
In my twenties, after years of working and studying on other shores, I came back to Chennai newly curious about collectivities, politics, power. Chennai offers, then, Periyar Thidal, where stone slabs under banyans announce, “There is no god” — sacred blasphemy serenely nestled in the leafy heart of a temple town. It offers me protests at Valluvar Kottam — memorial to a poet activist — where hundreds gather, banners proclaiming: “Stop bull-dozing democracy” and “No place for hate.”
Then, in a difficult soul season, when I ask Chennai for a healing quiet, it lays, in my path, Tholkappia Poonga — an estuary surrounded by mangrove green, frequented by only a handful of walkers and lush with other life. I go every day. I learn, there, words like “cormorant” and “egret” and “wagtail”; learn to walk attentively to spare domino roaches, red bugs and beetles. I learn, from thoughtful rock-slab signage, how effortfully restored and conserved that old, fragile ecosystem is.
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One evening, another walker pauses to ask: “Have you heard? They’re going to put concrete everywhere. They’re going to cut down the trees.” Heart-sink. A week later, I’m in the Chennai River Restoration Trust office, across from an irritated bureaucrat telling me that they would not concretise the paths, they would not cut the trees. But of course: Concrete has been carried in, trees cut, the estuary closed for renovations for the past year. In me, a new gaze finds a new Chennai: this is, above all else, a waterscape in relentless negotiation with urbanity’s impulse to conquer, to want.
In Odiyur, a lagoon resists a highway. In Kattupalli, a coast resists a megaport. In Ennore, a river and a creek stand where industries and power plants spill poison upon poison. Urbanity wins small battles. In annual floods and relentless erosion, water has its say. The casualties, regardless, are the same: Vulnerable communities, displaced or put out of work; marine and avian and insect life, rendered breathless, habitat-less; a city at large, flood-prone, conscience heavy.
I ask Chennai: Is it possible at all? For human impulses to coexist with the rest of life? It offers, a short drive away, Vedanthangal, where for centuries farmer folk have protected the waterbirds, grateful for their fertilising guano. It suggests a peek at the Theosophical Great Banyan, kept effortfully safe and alive for hundreds of years, allowed an acre of its own. I think too of the frangipanis and copperpods I climbed as a child, the gulmohar buds we wore as nail paint, the rosary pea seeds we collected like gems. Our truest impulse, Chennai memories remind me, is to playmate and co-create with non-humanness. Someday, we’ll remember.
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In my present Chennai, I drink two coffees slowly across the dining table from my partner and we chitchat, late into the morning, about essays we’ve both read in quiet. It’s a clear-skied Sunday. We realise we want to be outside. We talk over a prawn curry lunch about where to go. Kotturpuram Urban Forest, to see the flying foxes in the cluster of fig trees? Or Croc Bank, to the gharials and muggers and komodos? Or Pallikaranai or Sholinganallur or Broken Bridge, to meet the storks and pelicans and herons and terns? We settle on a popular beach cafe — a third coffee would be nice — but when we get there, the music is too loud to hear the sea so we set off shore-walking instead.
We’re on a bit of Panaiyur Beach I haven’t seen before, in 16 years here. Egrets are picking at fish drying on sheets. Crows are diving for clams. Barnacles have made homes of abandoned chappals, bottles, driftwood. Couples canoodle, toddlers chase waves, ice-cream and balloon and juice vendors gaze sea-ward. This is familiar, gorgeous stuff. This is home. Then, by the tide line, we see an Olive Ridley sea turtle, shell dented by trawler. Then another, eyes bulged open from trawl-net suffocation. Reflected in those eyes, I see its Chennai for the first time: Treacherous, drowning, blue.
Jha is an essayist interested in the politics of the everyday
