Murugan's Cycle and the Vanished Princess

 “The past is not a place we left. It is a place that left us — and occasionally, on certain roads, on certain borrowed cycles, it lets us find our way back.”

— The Hillranger

— ❧ —

I. The Journey

The year was somewhere around 1977. I use the word somewhere deliberately — memory, like the monsoon, does not always arrive on schedule. But certain images are sharp enough to date themselves: the smell of a new cotton shirt pressed for a function, the particular excitement of a summer journey, and the knowledge that at the end of it all waited the highway home at Kollenvilai.

My cousins Ganesan and Kalyan were to have their Vratabandha — the sacred ceremony that marks a young boy’s formal initiation into traditional learning. A family occasion of the first order. And so we came — my parents, my brother, and I — all the way from a southern district headquarters in the then Orissa, riding the Indian Railways for most of that improbable distance.

The journey began, as all great journeys from Odisha forests must, on the Kirandul-Vizag mountain railway — an engineering marvel built with German collaboration that winds its way down from the Eastern Ghats to the coast. To a young boy, this was no ordinary train ride. The track negotiates grades and curves that defy common sense, the locomotive groaning around bends where the jungle presses in on both sides and valleys open up suddenly a thousand feet below. It was, looking back, the most dramatic stretch of railway I have known — and I did not fully appreciate it then, as children rarely do with gifts handed to them freely.

From Vizag, we joined the Madras Mail — that grand old artery connecting Calcutta to Madras, carrying within its coaches an entire cross-section of the subcontinent. The Madras Mail had about it a certain unhurried authority, the confidence of a train that has been making this run since before independence and intends to keep doing so long after we are gone.

Madras received us, and then delivered us to the Pandian Express — our passage south to Madurai. The Pandian was a different creature altogether, more intimate, more Tamil in its character, the landscape outside the window shifting from the broad coastal plains to the drier interior, the vegetation changing tone, the light itself acquiring that particular quality of the deep south.

And then — Madurai. Beyond Madurai in those days, the railways had not yet stretched their fingers into the deep peninsular south. The last stretch, all 250 kilometres of it, belonged to the State Transport buses.

It would be dishonest to romanticise those buses. They were, by any reckoning, a trial of endurance — hard seats, unpredictable halts, and roads that appeared to have been designed more as a suggestion than a commitment to surface travel. Seven hours of this, with as many stops in between. But the stops had their compensations. At Sattur and Kovilpatti, there were vendors who appeared at the bus windows with peanut candies — kadala mittai — that I have never quite tasted the equal of since. The simple alchemy of jaggery and groundnut, small cuboid shapes, sold in transparent packets by men who knew that a tired traveller’s hunger is a particular and forgiving kind.

Eventually, the bus deposited us at the district headquarters of Nanjil Nadu — that ancient southernmost principality where Tamil and Malayalam have long conducted a quiet conversation with each other across the fence. From there we made our way to the local bus terminus at Vadasery, where we boarded another bus — one headed, as I would learn to say many years later, for the constituency of a certain Mr. Shashi Tharoor.

This bus was a gentler thing. It left the town behind and moved into green country, the Western Ghats rising in blue silhouette to our right — not the dramatic escarpment of the Eastern Ghats I had ridden down on the Kirandul line, but a quieter presence, steady and reassuring, like an old uncle standing at the edge of the room. The road meandered through villages, under trough bridges, past paddy fields where egrets stood in their characteristic attitude of patient indifference.

And then — the Villukuri aqueduct.

To a child returning to a beloved place, landmarks acquire the character of old friends. The aqueduct was ours. It announced, with the quiet authority of a familiar face in a crowd, that we were nearly there. Down through Puliyoorkurichi, and we knew: one more small bridge across a stream, one more stop, and then we would alight and walk — a hundred meters, no more — to reach my grandfather’s highway home at Kollenvilai.

The journey was over. The summer had begun.

— ❧ —

II. The Arrival

The highway home at Kollenvilai announced itself simply — a main gate opening directly onto the trunk road, with the world of the highway on one side and the quieter, deeper world of the joint family on the other. As we stepped through that gate, still carrying the dust of two days’ travel on us, I caught sight of him immediately.

My Nana — my grandfather — was settled into a cane easy chair by the window that faced the highway. It was his observatory, that chair. From it he could watch the world go by on the road outside while remaining entirely rooted in the world within. He had, I imagine, been watching that highway for decades — the bullock carts of an earlier era giving way to the Ambassador cars and State Transport buses of ours. He looked up as we entered, and in that look was everything that two years of distance had accumulated — quiet recognition, restrained joy, and the particular dignity of an old man who does not leap to his feet but whose stillness itself is a form of welcome.

We were meeting after two years. In a joint family calendar, two years is a long absence.

And then the house took over. It was alive in the way that only a large household preparing for a significant occasion can be — a controlled, cheerful chaos of cousins appearing from unexpected corners, uncles exchanging pleasantries with the authority of men who have opinions about everything, aunts moving between the kitchen and the courtyard with the purposeful grace of people who know exactly what needs to be done and in what order. And beyond them, a plethora of others — neighbours, relatives twice removed, errand-runners, well-wishers — all orbiting the household like satellites around a warm and generous planet.

Ganesan and Kalyan, the young men at the centre of all this activity, wore the slightly dazed expression of boys who have been told repeatedly that this is a great occasion in their lives and are doing their best to believe it while the preparations swirl around them.

— ❧ —

III. The Highway Home and Its Neighbourhood

Kollenvilai, as an address, was deceptively simple — a stretch of highway that those passing through would have registered merely as another roadside settlement. But for those who knew it, it was a place of quiet consequence, its residents arranged along that tarmac ribbon with the understated dignity of people who had no need to advertise their standing.

Directly opposite our highway home stood a rice mill — a working, breathing, clanking neighbour that punctuated the day with its rhythms. The smell of paddy husk and the low mechanical drone of the mill were as much a part of Kollenvilai as the birdsong and the highway traffic. It was a landmark that would endure through my grandfather’s years, before eventually yielding in the early eighties to something altogether more cerebral — the Hindu Vidyalaya Matric Higher Secondary School, which now occupies that ground with the quiet authority of an institution that has forgotten what stood there before it.

Our home itself was in distinguished company. On either side, and in the houses stretching from our gate right up to the then Canara Bank, lived the town’s professional and landed aristocracy — advocates who argued cases at the district courts and came home to large evening meals, a magistrate whose front door carried the invisible weight of judicial authority, landlords whose connection to the surrounding paddy fields was ancestral and absolute. It was a street that knew its own worth without needing to proclaim it.

The Canara Bank deserves particular mention — because the banker who presided over local finance did so from within his own ancestral home, his office tucked beyond a sheltered well deep inside the house compound. Banking conducted from behind a domestic well, in the shade of a family courtyard — there is something both charming and entirely characteristic of that era in this arrangement, a time before banking became a transaction and was still, in small towns, a relationship.

Beyond the bank, the highway offered two institutions that served entirely different appetites. The Burmah-Shell petrol bunk — those distinctive red and yellow colours that were the universal grammar of the Indian roadside in the seventies — stood as the town’s connection to the larger mechanical world of trucks and Ambassador cars moving up and down the Kerala-Tamil Nadu highway. Beyond the bunk, the road ran down to the local bus stand, not before branching out to a neighbourhood town, Eraniel. Opposite to Burmah-Shell sat the Little Flower Bakery, managed, memorably, by a young girl of British origin — a detail so unexpected on a South Indian highway that it lodged permanently in the memory of a visiting child. What she made of Kollenvilai and what Kollenvilai made of her is a small mystery I have never fully resolved.

In the other direction from our home, the highway carried a different character — bungalows of local traders and merchants, a more commercial sensibility, the town’s productive rather than professional class. This stretch ran to the Kollenvilai junction, and the last house before it belonged to the father of one Brahmanayagam, who would, decades later, become a practicing GST consultant — proof, if any were needed, that the children of every era find their way to the regulatory preoccupations of their own times. At the junction itself, the Sahib Shop dispensed provisions, and the Nadar Shop stood its ground with the permanence of a neighbourhood institution.

But it was the view across the house that I return to most insistently in memory. Behind the rice mill, across the road, stretched paddy fields that seemed to go on into a green infinity. In the midst of those fields stood a Sastha temple, as self-contained and purposeful as only a rural temple can be — unenclosed by town, surrounded by cultivation, belonging entirely to the landscape rather than to any street.

And from the house itself — from the single room on the first floor where raw paddy and grain were stored in the manner of old households that grew and saved their own — you could look westward and see the Western Ghats in silhouette against the evening sky. That room smelled of raw grain and old wood. It looked out at mountains. It is the kind of room that a child files away in the deepest drawer of memory, to be retrieved, still intact, fifty years later.

A narrow road ran behind the school — it still does — threading its way up to the Thangam Cinema and onward to the Padmanabhapuram Palace. In 1977, that road was one of those quiet connectors that linked the domestic present to the historical past, without anyone who walked it necessarily being aware of the transition.

— ❧ —

IV. Murugan’s Gazette

Every adventure needs a confederate, and mine was Kalyan — younger brother of the ceremonial Ganesan, and infinitely more interesting company for a boy with wandering feet. He knew the terrain, I had the appetite for exploration, and between us we formed a partnership of cheerful mischief that the adults in the household were too occupied with the festivities to monitor with any great vigilance.

The one obstacle between us and freedom was the absence of a cycle. We did not own one. But Murugan did.

Murugan was my grandfather’s man-of-all-errands — the essential figure without whom large households of that era simply could not function. His official brief was to fetch provisions from the Sahib Shop and the Nadar Shop, to carry messages, to procure whatever the household’s daily momentum required. But his more significant role — the one he clearly relished above all others — was that of morning correspondent.

The deeper truth about Murugan was this: he was a man with an agenda. He had been trying, with the quiet desperation of someone who has been trying for long enough that desperation has curdled into routine, to secure a government job — specifically at the local Telephone Exchange or the Electricity Board. The former fell, in those days, under the sovereign authority of the Posts and Telegraphs Department — the single empire that managed the post, the telegram, and the telephone alike, bound under one roof and one government order.

My grandfather was a retired Superintending Engineer of the Electricity Board — which, in the geography of Murugan’s ambitions, made him something very close to a deity. A man who had once commanded the EB from such heights surely retained, even in retirement, the gravitational pull to nudge a junior appointment in the right direction. Or so Murugan reasoned.

And so the arrangement had evolved — organically, without any formal negotiation, in the way that small-town understandings always do — into something of elegant mutual convenience. Murugan would arrive each morning, squat outside Nana’s highway-facing window, and proceed to deliver a comprehensive oral gazette of Kollenvilai, and the wider world of Cape Comorin district.

The content was admirably varied. On any given morning, Nana might receive intelligence on the latest postings at the Telephone Exchange — who had come in, who had been transferred out, which vacancy had been quietly filled before it was officially advertised. The Electricity Board’s internal weather was covered with equal thoroughness — promotions, suspensions, the quiet disgrace of a lineman somewhere in Marthandam, the unexpected elevation of a junior engineer who had, apparently, the right connections. New bus routes were announced with the authority of an official gazette. A recent accident near Mandaikadu received the detailed treatment that the newspapers of the era rarely managed — Murugan’s account included the make of the vehicle, the number of injured, the name of the driver, and a considered assessment of who was at fault, all delivered without notes. A minister’s visit to the Neyyur CSI Hospital to call upon an ailing MLA was reported with the timing, the entourage, and a postscript about the MLA’s prognosis that no press correspondent could have bettered.

Nana received all of this from his cane chair with the composed attention of a retired senior official who has learned that information, even when it arrives unsolicited, is never entirely without value. He asked questions — precise, probing questions of the kind that only a man who has spent decades in administration knows how to ask. These questions sent Murugan off on fresh tributaries of narration, each one adding another fifteen minutes to the session.

The cycle, meanwhile, leaned against the compound wall. And Kalyan and I waited — not always patiently, but always strategically.

— ❧ —

V. The Application Form

It was the application form that gave us our chance.

On a morning that had begun like any other, something unprecedented occurred. Murugan arrived carrying, in addition to his usual cargo of news and intelligence, a form. A government form — printed on that particular shade of off-white paper that only government stationery suppliers seemed to produce, its columns and boxes arranged with the bureaucratic confidence of an institution that has been asking the same questions since before independence.

It was an application for the post of messenger in the Posts and Telegraphs Department.

The irony was exquisite. The man who had spent months reporting on vacancies in the P&T empire — whose entire morning dispensation of news was an elaborate tribute paid at the altar of Nana’s presumed influence — had now applied to enter that very same empire through its most modest entrance. The messenger’s post was not a retreat from Murugan’s ambitions. It was, in its own way, a foot in the door of the very citadel he had always coveted.

Murugan needed Nana’s help filling the form. This was a transaction that would require, at minimum, full and undivided attention from both parties — Nana reading out the columns, Murugan supplying the answers with the careful deliberateness of a man for whom every box represented a formal encounter with destiny.

It would take a while.

Kalyan was, at the precise moment of this development, drifting around Nana’s cane chair in the vague, purposeless orbit that boys adopt when they are present in a room but not required to be attentive. He registered the form. He registered Nana reaching for his reading glasses. He registered Murugan settling in with the particular posture of a man preparing for an important occasion.

He did the arithmetic instantly.

He came for me at a run.

I was in the backyard, standing beneath a tree and engaged in a project of my own — studying, with the focused intensity that only a boy’s ambition produces, the question of how one might climb high enough to reach certain nuts that hung at a height calculated, it seemed, specifically to defeat casual attempts. I had been circling this problem for some minutes when Kalyan appeared around the corner of the bungalow, eyes bright with the specific excitement of someone who has just seen an opportunity open like a door.

He said what he had to say in very few words. That is the economy of cousins who understand each other.

The nuts could wait.

I dropped my arboreal ambitions without a second thought, and together we moved — not running, because running attracts attention, but walking with the swift, quiet purposefulness of those who have a plan and approximately fifteen minutes to execute it. We took the exterior path along the bungalow, skirting the main rooms where adult activity was concentrated, staying close to the compound wall, emerging finally at the gate near the highway.

Murugan’s cycle rested against the compound wall exactly where it always did — patient, unguarded, leaning at its customary angle, entirely unaware of the role it was about to play in the afternoon’s history.

Inside, Nana would be reading out the first column of the form. Name in full. Murugan would be spelling it out, letter by careful letter.

I took the handlebars. Kalyan fell in beside me. We wheeled it through the gate and onto the highway without a sound.

The road to Eraniel lay before us, stretching southward in the summer heat, empty and inviting and slightly longer than either of us had admitted to the other.

We did not look back.

— ❧ —

 

 

VI. The Freedom Ride

Cheenu, the Bank Manager, spotted us the moment we passed the Canara Bank — two boys on a single cycle moving with suspicious velocity along the express highway. He called out. We should ride carefully, he said, with the concerned authority of a man who has a bank manager’s sense of responsibility toward the community at large.

We heard him. We did not stop. Every second spent within recognisable distance of the highway home was a second in which the geometry of discovery could reassemble itself against us. Speed was diplomacy.

Past the Burmah-Shell bunk with its red and yellow geometry, past the bank, past the Little Flower Bakery — and then the Eraniel road junction, where the road forked with the clean decisiveness of a choice. One arm went right, up toward Amala Convent. The other went toward Eraniel.

We took the Eraniel road without discussion. Some decisions do not require words.

The road was a different creature from the highway. It moved at its own pace, curving gently through a landscape that had no interest in efficiency. On either side, paddy fields stretched in the particular shade of green that the early summer produces — not the deep monsoon green, but something lighter, more tentative. Small hamlets appeared and receded, each with its cluster of homes and a petty shop at which life’s daily requirements were negotiated in small quantities. A dog regarded us from a doorstep with the philosophical indifference of one who has seen many passing cyclists and found none of them ultimately remarkable.

We rode briskly, the carrier rattling with Kalyan’s weight, the cycle navigating the uneven road with the stoic resilience of a vehicle accustomed to harder use than this.

And then we came upon it — a large horizontal clearing, raw earth levelled and graded, cutting through the landscape with a purposefulness that the surrounding paddy fields did not share. We stopped. We dismounted. We looked at it with the instinctive curiosity of boys who know when something significant is happening even if they cannot yet name it.

A man was working nearby. We asked him what this was.

He told us. A railway line. It would run from the Cape — from Kanyakumari itself, the very tip of the subcontinent — all the way up to the neighbouring state capital. The tracks were coming. The earthworks were already underway. Stations were being planned along the route.

I asked him everything I could think to ask. Where would the stations be? What was the one before Eraniel, and the one after? How many stations in total between the Cape and the destination?

Kalyan watched me conduct this enquiry with some puzzlement. We had not come to Eraniel road to discuss railway infrastructure.

But I had seen something he had not yet seen — a lifeline. We had, in our hands, news that Murugan did not have. Fresh intelligence. Ground-level reconnaissance on a matter of considerable public interest. If I could deliver this to Nana — fluently, accurately, with the detail that only a firsthand witness could provide — I might walk back into the highway home not as a truant returning to face justice, but as a correspondent returning with a scoop.

I filed the details carefully in memory. Then we turned our eyes down the road.

The ruins of the Eraniel Palace were somewhere ahead, in the mid-morning light.

We remounted the cycle.

— ❧ —

VII. The Lamp Beside the Empty Couch

The road narrowed as we approached Eraniel, as though the town itself was asking us to slow down and pay attention. The paddy fields gave way to older vegetation — trees that had been standing long enough to have opinions about the landscape, their roots lifting the edges of the road in places, the tarmac surrendering in patches to bare earth. The morning sun, which had been a cheerful companion on the open road, was now filtered through canopy, arriving in shifting pools of light and shadow.

We left Murugan’s cycle leaning against a tree near the road, in the custody of a boy who was sitting on a stone wall and who agreed, for no particular reason and no particular compensation, to keep an eye on it. These arrangements, in the small towns of that era, were made and honoured without ceremony.

We walked in through what had once been the Padippura — the entrance gateway. Or rather, what remained of it. The majestic entrance way that had once announced this palace to arriving royalty was now a ruin of the most honest kind — not picturesque, not romanticised, simply old and broken and largely unattended, its stones settling gradually into the earth with the patience of things that have outlasted their purpose. Weeds had made their home in the cracks. A portion of the upper structure had come away entirely, leaving a gap through which the sky entered without permission.

But even in ruin, the Padippura had about it the ghost of authority. You could feel, if you were paying attention, that this had once been a threshold that people crossed with awareness — that passing through it had meant something, had required something of those who entered.

We passed through it with the irreverence of children, which is to say, with complete and unself-conscious openness.

The palace compound spread over what felt, to two boys on foot, like a considerable acreage. The main palace — the Kuthiramalika, the horse palace — stood in the centre, its wooden elements largely gone, the roof in various stages of departure, the walls still holding their ground with a stubbornness that spoke well of the original masons. The carved elements that had survived were extraordinary — you could see, in the remaining woodwork, the hand of craftsmen who had worked with an entirely different understanding of what a building should be.

We moved through the main palace quickly, with the slightly nervous energy of boys in a place that feels simultaneously abandoned and inhabited — abandoned by the living, inhabited by something less definable.

And then we found the Vasanthamandapam.

The spring pavilion. It sat at the edge of the compound with a quietness that was different from the quietness of the rest of the ruins. Smaller than the main palace, more intimate in its proportions, it had about it the feeling of a private space — a place built not for ceremony or administration but for something gentler. Rest, perhaps. Contemplation.

In the centre of it, on a slightly raised platform, lay the stone couch.

It was exactly what the name suggested — a long flat slab of stone, smoothed by centuries of use and by the hands of those who had tended it, its surface cool even in the summer heat in the way that old stone always is, as though it draws its temperature from somewhere deeper than the sun can reach.

And beside it — this is the thing that stopped us both, that made Kalyan, who was not given to silence, go completely still — beside the stone couch, in a small niche in the wall, a lamp was burning.

A small, steady flame. Oil fed by someone who came regularly enough that the lamp had not gone out. The flame did not flicker in the still air of the pavilion. It simply burned, with the quiet purposefulness of something that has been burning for a very long time and intends to continue.

We stood and looked at it for what felt like a long while.

I knew, even then — not in words, but in the way children sometimes know things before they have the language for them — that this lamp was not decorative. It was maintained. Someone came here, regularly and without announcement, and fed this flame. Not because anyone had told them to, perhaps, but because the stopping of it would have felt, after so many generations, like a small act of violence against something that deserved better.

The story came to us in fragments, from a man we found sitting in the shade of a wall nearby — a caretaker of sorts, though he wore the designation loosely. The princess, he said. Long ago. She had been sleeping on that couch when she simply — vanished. Not died. Not fled. Vanished. Taken, the story went, in her physical body, to wherever it is that such people are taken. No explanation. No trace.

And so the lamp had been lit. And so the lamp had been kept lit. For longer than anyone in Eraniel could reliably remember.

Kalyan and I looked at each other.

In all our imagined versions of this adventure — the escaped cycle, the railway clearing, the road through the paddy fields — neither of us had included a vanished princess and a lamp that refused to go out. This was beyond the imaginative budget of two boys from Kollenvilai.

We sat with it for a while, in the cool shade of the Vasanthamandapam, the flame burning steadily beside the empty stone couch, the ruins arranged around us in their patient silence, the summer heat locked outside by the thickness of the old walls.

Then, because boys cannot sit still indefinitely even in the presence of mystery, we got up, thanked the caretaker, and walked back through the compound, through the broken Padippura, back to the tree where Murugan’s cycle waited. The boy on the wall had kept his word. The cycle was exactly where we had left it.

— ❧ —

VIII. The Return

We rode back toward Kollenvilai in a different mood from the one we had ridden out in. The freedom ride had delivered more than freedom. Something had been deposited in us — some sediment of antiquity and mystery that would take years to fully understand. The lamp beside the empty couch. The princess who had not died but simply ceased to be present. The idea that some absences are tended, rather than mourned.

The paddy fields came back into view. Then the hamlets. Then the petty shops. Then the railway clearing, where the earthworks for the new line sat in the morning sun, the most modern thing on this ancient road. I rehearsed my railway intelligence one more time, checking the stations in order (Alur, Neyyoor,Palliyadi…). It was still good. It might still work.

The Burmah-Shell bunk appeared on the left. Then the Canara Bank — Cheenu was not at the window this time, which was a mercy. Then the Little Flower Bakery. Then our gate.

Murugan’s cycle went back against the compound wall exactly as we had found it.

Inside, Nana was still in his cane chair. The P&T application form lay on the small table beside him, filled and folded. Murugan was gone.

Nana looked at us over his reading glasses with the expression of a man who has retired from the Electricity Board after a full career of assessing situations accurately and has not lost the habit.

We presented our railway intelligence before he could say anything. Stations, distances, the clearing we had seen with our own eyes, the number of stops between the Cape and the state capital.

There was a pause.

“I know,” said Nana.

A longer pause.

“The cycle,” he said, “goes back to Murugan.”

And that, for the moment, was that. Justice in a joint family, like the lamp in the Vasanthamandapam, burns steadily and does not go out.

— ❧ —

Postscript

A small note for those who may wonder:

The railway line we saw being laid that summer morning did indeed come to pass. The Thiruvananthapuram–Kanyakumari broad gauge line opened in April 1979, two years after two boys on a borrowed cycle stumbled upon its earthworks and thought they had discovered a secret. Eraniel got its station. The Cape got its railhead.

Murugan got his messenger’s post in the P&T Department. He went on to serve the organisation faithfully through its transformation into BSNL, and retired, in the fullness of time, as an Upper Division Clerk. Not bad at all for the school dropout from Kollenvilai who used to squat outside a retired engineer’s window dispensing morning news. He entered through the humblest door and walked out with a pension and a designation. Life, occasionally, rewards persistence.

Kalyan, my partner in that morning’s crime, tried his hand at maintaining ledgers in vain and the finally, went on to trade the open road for a khaki uniform and a whistle, standing guard at a retail showroom near The Hindu College. I hope, on quiet afternoons, he still remembers the lamp.

The Eraniel Palace continues to crumble, tended by no government and no archaeological authority worthy of the name. But the lamp in the Vasanthamandapam, I am told, still burns beside the empty stone couch.

The princess has not returned. But no one has stopped waiting.