One evening, this January, I ventured up to the mottai-madi, the terrace, to welcome the onset of darkness. The sun was still an orange-red ball. Flocks of rose-ringed parakeets, whizzed towards their nightly roosts, squawking loudly. Lone flying foxes were setting out silently for the “day”– they would be out till dawn. Alone, I waited for the nightly sky show to start.
In the distance, I saw a building, which looked like an abandoned parking garage. A theatre, owned by T.R. Rajakumari, a star of her times, had once stood in that spot. As a child, I watched the film Chandralekha, in which Rajakumari had played a dancer. This was on a Sunday evening, on television — which is how most of us watched movies back then. Now, if you ever saw that 1948 classic, chances are, you still remember that spectacular drum dance. You may also recall Ranjan, who played the swashbuckling villain, and that interminable sword fight after the drum dance.
As I reminisced, the celestial stars came out on that clear Chennai night. I saw a distinct pair of stars, like the eyes of a smiley emoji. The yellow star, I learned was Castor, the slightly brighter one was Pollux. They were the main stars in the constellation of Gemini (the word means twins in Latin). Most of us know these twins, from the logo of Gemini Studios – two little boys with bugles who used to play a signature tune on screen. Suddenly, I recalled that Chandralekha, the hit movie, was produced by Gemini Studios of Madras. Seeing the Gemini constellation in the skies above, with the forgotten Rajakumari Theater in the background, was such a quintessential Madras moment for me.
Growing up in Chennai, I rarely looked heavenward. Consequently, as an adult, I could not identify any celestial object in the night sky except for the moon and I never gave the matter much thought. But earlier this year, I read a research article in the journal Science, which reported that light pollution has been skyrocketing planet-wide in the last decade. Excessive artificial lighting disrupts entire ecosystems and impacts human health. Light pollution also obscures a stargazer’s view of the night skies. Suddenly, my indifference vanished.
So, what did I do? I googled furiously. Apparently, the iconic Milky Way, home to our solar system, can no longer be seen by one thirds of humanity. Before light pollution, this accessible, breathtaking view had inspired artists, songwriters, and story tellers for millennia.
As a boy, Mumbai-born Salman Rushdie, the author of Midnight’s Children and a dozen other novels, recalls looking up at the night sky to see “the thick stripe of the galaxy there.” In a delightful essay for the New York Times, he wrote, how in his childhood, he had heard a tale from the Mahabharata about how the god Indra churned the Milky Way with Mount Mandara, to force “the giant ocean of milk in the sky” to yield the nectar of immortality. “Maybe if I opened my mouth, a drop might fall in and then I would be immortal, too,” he wrote.