When the Breeze Brought the Song

 

Kollenvilai, Thuckalay (Cape Comorin)

It’s not about a house. It is about what a house holds, and what remains when the house is gone.

The house stood slightly tucked behind its silver-painted main gate, set back from the highway by a short pathway flanked on either side by a small grove of coconut trees. The soil there was black and loamy and perpetually damp, the kind that swallowed your feet an inch if you stood still too long. Only Murugan could navigate it with purpose. On days when the coconuts needed harvesting, he would loop a rope loosely between his ankles, tuck his 'Aruval' — that long, confident Tamil sickle — into his waist, and go up a trunk with the unhurried ease of a man climbing his own staircase. From the ground, we children watched with our necks craned back, shielding our eyes against the sky, as he disappeared into the crown and the great green bunches came crashing down one by one.

Just inside the compound wall that separated the property from the highway stood a large moringa tree — drumstick tree, if you insist on the botanical courtesy. The tree had been growing for what seemed like yore and so it bore out sturdy branches, the likes of which I haven't seen elsewhere. Kalyan and I claimed it as our own personal observatory. On most summer afternoons, when the adults had retreated into their post-lunch silences and the house settled into its midday hush, the two of us would shinny up and find our favourite branches, legs dangling, watching the traffic below with the superior indifference of young zamindars. We also, on occasion, attempted to whistle the speeding buses to a halt. The buses, it must be said, paid no heed to our 'catcalls'. But that never discouraged a second attempt.

To the right of the pathway, before you reached the house, stood the well — enclosed in a protective ring of low masonry, solemn and purposeful. It was a working well, not a decorative one. But it was in the backyard that the more important well lived, the one that ran the household.

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The house itself was what Tamils call a 'Rezhi' — an elongated passage running from the front door all the way to the rear, with rooms peeling off to the right like sticky tabs in a long page. It was entirely tiled at ground level, the terracotta cool against bare feet at any hour. Step down from the road into the open cemented veranda — squarish, shaded, the first room of the house before the house truly began — and you immediately understood you were somewhere that had been built to last.

Midway down the Rezhi, the passage opened upward. No ceiling here, no solid roof — just a square frame of sky, threaded across with a mesh of steel wires. This was the 'Mitham', the courtyard-within, the lung of the house. When the monsoon came, rainwater collected here in a shallow pool before draining away down a channel that ran the full length of the compound wall, past the coconut grove, out to the common drain by the gate. The Mitham was the house's way of staying in conversation with the sky.

To the right of the main passage, a flight of wooden steps led upward to the only upper room — used, officially, for grain storage, and used, unofficially, by Subramoni, my uncle, Nana's prodigal son, as his private kingdom. Subramoni was a man who needed his own floor, and the house had accommodated him. The window of that room opened south-west, towards the South Western Ghats and the green haze of paddy fields stretching between the highway and the hills. It was also where Kalyan and I stored our most important possessions — marbles, foreign coins, a stolen compass, items of supreme value that needed to be kept from adult surveillance.

Between the wooden steps and the Mitham lay rooms that had beds and also stored the documents and valuables of the joint family — the official memory of the household, kept in the cool dark. Beyond the Mitham was the dining hall, and beyond that, to the right, 'Adukkalai' the kitchen. A long passage beside the dining room led to a final chamber: the timber room, stacked with firewood for the three mud stoves, the room opening at the far end to the backyard and its different world entirely.

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The kitchen was the true centre of the house. Not the drawing room, not Nana's easy chair, not even the Mitham — but the kitchen, where three fireplaces burned through the day and my aunt, Nana's eldest daughter-in-law, ran operations with the focused authority of a woman who had long since made peace with the scope of her domain.

The aromas changed by the hour. Morning arrived in the smell of dosas crisping in oil, or idlis lifting their steam from the vessel, the sambhar bubbling alongside. Midday brought the deeper, rounder smells of vegetables cooked in coconut oil, the rasam thinning and sharpening at the back of the throat. And the evenings — but the evenings deserve their own telling.

And then there were the evenings. Around six o'clock, as the light over the paddy fields began its slow amber turn and the breeze from the south-western ghats picked up its quiet insistence, the kitchen moved into its third act. Murukkus went into the hot coconut oil with a fierce, celebratory hiss. Somewhere on the stove, ghee was being measured for Mysorepak — that dense, crumbling, golden sweet that a good kitchen produces only when it is in a generous mood. The aromas of both — the savoury sizzle and the sweet unctuousness — rolled through the Rezhi and out to the veranda in a combined assault that required no invitation to follow.

It was in these moments, standing in the veranda or up in the moringa tree watching the buses destined to a number of towns around the district labour past on the highway, that the music came. From somewhere beyond the rice mill, across the green stretch of paddy fields, from the direction of the Perumal temple near Padmanabhapuram Palace — a loudspeaker would release its sound into the cooling air, and the breeze would carry it to us faithfully, note by note, across the fields. An old Tamil film song, unmistakably of the seventies, from "Ilamai Oonjaladukirathu" — Youth is Swinging: "Ore naal unai naan nilavil paarthathu, ulavum un ilamai thaan oonjaladuthu" It was composed in Pahadi, a raga of the hills, of cool mountain air and distances. That detail felt almost too fitting to be accidental — a mountain raga, set loose from somewhere near the South Western Ghats, riding the actual mountain breeze across verdant paddy fields to reach us. The song spoke of youth swinging like an 'Oonjal' — and there we were, two boys in a moringa tree above a national highway, swinging between the world we knew and the larger one rushing past below us, not yet aware that this too was a kind of youth that would not last.

♪	Ore Naal Unai Naan S. P. Balasubrahmanyam & Vani Jayaram Ilamai Oonjal Aadukirathu (1978)  |  Music: Ilaiyaraaja ▶  Click to listen

I cannot tell you, even now, what it was about that particular combination — mountain breeze, paddy fields, murukkus in hot oil, Mysorepak being cooked in ghee, and that song arriving unbidden from across the evening — that made it feel like the whole world had been arranged, just then, for our senses to savour. But that is how it felt. And that is exactly how it felt.

But the dish that belonged only to that house, the one I have never encountered in quite the same form anywhere since, was the 'Sevai'. Not the loose, restaurant variety — this was Sevai made the slow way, with soaked rice and lentil dough pressed through a hand-operated cylindrical device mounted on a tripod, extruded in fine noodles by the steady push between one's palm and the fingers on the press. Eaten with more-kuzhambu — buttermilk tempered with mustard, ginger, green chillies, a splash of hot oil — it was a combination so specific to that kitchen, that time of day, that particular light slanting through the back window, that I am not sure it would taste the same anywhere else even if the recipe were identical.

Ponnammal made all these possible. She came from Puliyoorkurichi, the village nearby, and she was built for work — tall, capable, unhurried, always either drawing water from the backyard well or bent over the stone pestle, working the rice and lentil batter to its correct viscous thickness for the next morning's dosas. The stone grinder in that kitchen was not a machine. It was a relationship between a woman's arms and a heavy stone pestle (Olakkai), turning slow circles in the wet dough. Ponnammal's arms knew exactly how much longer it needed to make the batter with the optimum viscosity.

❧

The backyard was reached through the timber room and up a dozen stone steps that rose sharply from the back of the house. At the top of those steps, the property exhaled.

A large well served the household's bathing needs, and bathing here was nothing like a bathroom — it was an outdoor event, with Ponnammal drawing bucket after bucket, the cold water catching the early morning light, the sound of it hitting the cement surround. Beyond the well and to the right were the half-open enclosures for the women of the house during their days of monthly rest — roofed with thatch, private, set apart.

Further up the slope, the garden took over. Jackfruit trees, guava, mango, jamun, cashew, banana, neem, badam — the full inventory of a Tamil ancestral garden, each tree fulfilling its function in the household economy. The guavas and mangoes and jamuns and cashew fruit we ate straight from the branch, wiping them on our shirts before biting in. The jackfruit was a more serious affair, requiring the women to lay newspaper on the floor, oil their hands against the latex, split the great green fortresses open and excavate the amber pods within, handing them to us one by one while we stood waiting, sticky-fingered and impatient.

About three hundred feet from the back steps stood the far compound wall — the far boundary of everything. The property felt endless as a child. As a grown man looking back, I understand it was simply generous.

In the middle of the garden stood the outhouse — four walls open to the sky, no roof, a squarish pedestal four feet above terra firma. On monsoon mornings, you went with an umbrella. It was not unusual. It was, in fact, quite logical. The times, the place and circumstances warranted such what we would now deem as queer necessities.

❧

Nana ruled this world from his easy chair, and his walking stick was the sceptre.

He was a tall man, close to six feet, with a fair, sturdy frame that age had not diminished much. He wore a white 'Veshti' at home, always, and a white shirt only when venturing beyond the gate. His head carried very little hair, his eyes a pair of spectacles with large plastic rims, the kind that announced themselves from across a room. The walking stick went everywhere with him. It was a multipurpose instrument: a warning waved above us children when our mischief required a red alert, an improvised back-scratcher deployed at the edge, a hook to open doors and windows left ajar, a stick to move inconvenient stones from his path to the outhouse. Nana carried it the way some men carry authority — not loudly, but constantly, and everyone around him was aware of it.

The neighbours made the locality. To our right was a family with twins — Raman and Lakshman — without whom no cricket match in the area was considered complete. Further along were Brahmanayagam and his brothers, perpetually on the move with bat and ball, treating the lane between the houses as their permanent ground. Summer afternoons in Kollenvilai had a texture: the thwack of rubber on wood, boys shouting, the occasional scolding from a window, and underneath it all, the patient, continuous sound of the highway.

❧

We came from the East by train — the long haul to Tirunelveli, then a bus to Nagercoil, eighty kilometres of Tamil Nadu passing at bus-window speed. From Nagercoil, any local bus heading towards Colachel, Thingal Sandhai, Kaliakkavilai or Trivandrum would deliver us to the Kollenvilai stop. Most visits were for summer holidays, weddings, bereavements, the cycle of occasions that make up a family's life. My maternal uncles married in 1975 and 1977. My grandmother, Valliammai — Nani — had passed in 1974, the year before the first of those weddings.

Kalyan was my constant companion in and around the house. For smaller crimes — the moringa tree, the marbles hidden in Subramoni's room, the whistling at buses — Kalyan sufficed. For crimes of larger ambition and greater complexity, his elder brother, Ganesan was my natural accomplice. My brother Swami, it must be said, was constitutionally unsuited to any of this. He was a man of the rule book from an early age. The rest of us operated in the margins.

❧

My last visit was sometime in 1986. I came from Chennai alone, a grown man by then, and my uncles were speaking in the quiet, practical tones that families use when they have already decided something and are only working out the timing. The property was sold in 1987.

For some years after, the house stood as it was — the Rezhi intact, the Mitham open to the sky, the moringa tree presumably still producing its long green fingers above the compound wall. By the early 2000s, it was gone. Pulled down. The land subdivided into smaller plots. (Alas, if only I then had the wherewithal to retain the property!)

And then, in one of those small, quietly devastating ironies that time specializes in, the entire property was converted into a road. A connector between the national highway and the government school at Kollenvilai. Where the coconut grove stood, where Murugan climbed and the soil was black and loamy, where the silver gate opened onto the pathway — there is now a road. People walk over it daily without knowing what lies beneath.

I do not think Nana would have minded. He spent his life by a highway. He understood, I think, that movement was the nature of things.

❧

But I mind, a little. The sweet kind of minding that you allow yourself only when enough time has passed.

I mind for the moringa tree and its canopy of summer afternoons. I mind for the smell of Sevai steam drifting from the kitchen. I mind for the sound of Ponnammal's pestle humming away on most afternoons with the batter, for the morrow's breakfast. I mind for the well in the backyard and the cold water caught in afternoon light. I mind for the jackfruit on newspaper, and the guavas we never wiped clean enough, and the outhouse open to the monsoon sky. And I mind — perhaps most unexpectedly — for a song carried on a mountain breeze across a paddy field at six in the evening, arriving just as the murukkus hit the oil, as if the whole world had quietly conspired to make one moment perfect.

And most of all — always most of all — I mind for that window, and the man in the easy chair behind it, and the other man squatting in the veranda below, and the highway moving between them and the horizon, carrying everything away. 

∎

The Oonjal has stopped swinging. But if you stand very still, on a quiet evening, with the right breeze — you can still hear the song.

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The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram where he travels back in time on most weekend evenings that refuse to die out!