S.Muthiah (1930-2019)
One December, on a visit to my hometown, on a whim, I rang up the man who wrote these well-researched pieces about Madras institutions, personalities, and neighborhoods. Sitting at my desk in MIT, Boston, during lunch break, I’d read S. Muthiah’s Madras Miscellany. I loved this column in The Hindu because it dealt with every aspect of life in my hometown — mostly its past. It was like learning interesting details of your mother’s life before she became your mother and loving her all the more for it. I wanted to mumble my thanks to the man and hang up, but he asked me to drop in if I was free. It changed the very course of my life and for the better in every way.
I met this legendary chronicler of Madras in his home in a quiet cul-de-sac in T. Nagar. He welcomed me not as a fan or a visitor, but as a friend. I was not one of the people who came back to Madras for the Music Season, I hastened to tell him. I was just escaping the cold. He too had known the frigid winters of Boston as a student at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). His father, the Mayor of Colombo, had sent him abroad to become an engineer, but tinkering with machines never appealed to him.
Writing had saved the day back then. In the lab, three students were teamed up to run experiments. While the other two did the work, he observed the proceedings and wrote reports which his instructors praised. It won the team good grades. A flyer on campus caught his eye: the student newspaper was looking for recruits. He showed up at the office to be greeted with, “You can write in English?” W.T. Keble, author, founder and headmaster of the St. Thomas’ Preparatory School in Sri Lanka, had encouraged him to read widely, and also to write. So, he wrote for the college paper in the US, just as he had written for the school paper in Sri Lanka. Even in engineering school, with its machine shops and dreary labs, he found great stories.
He had a knack for making history personal. When I took my husband to meet him, he asked him, not me, “How is old Scollay Square?” From our blank stares, he realized we hadn’t heard of the place, but he didn’t explain. So, I had to dig up this fairly recent piece of Boston history on my own. Back in the day, the square had pulsed with nightlife — burlesque marquees and cafés ripe with impropriety, Susan Orlean writes in Red Sox, Blue Fish. Scollay Square, seedy and outdated, was razed to make way for the staid plaza, Government Center in the early 1960s. When I got to the city at the turn of the century, people had forgotten about this nightlife district where sailors on leave, college students, and working-class locals mingled in bars and theaters.
It is not just the history of Madras — he has made me curious about where I live, to dig into the forgotten corners of my city. And, of course, I was delighted Uncle Muthu had gone to Scollay Square as an undergraduate!
Be Alert, Be Alive
In a 2011 interview with The Hindu, he had said “Work keeps me going, so does good life. I still love my drink; I still love to gossip.” He mentioned that he always had a couple of drinks before dinner. “It’s a habit I got from my father,” he said. “The only difference is that while he drank only Scotch, I drink only Indian whisky. The best thing about Indian whisky is that no matter what brand you drink — it tastes the same.” The prudish in Madras can outdo the original Puritans of New England, and I wonder how some of the conservative readers processed this information.
“All my old girlfriends are still in Colombo,” he used to say. It was a line he repeated often, always with a twinkle. But one afternoon, he said something that haunts me: “I don’t have that many friends in Madras.” Of course, his best years were in Sri Lanka where he worked as a journalist after he got a graduate degree in International Relations from Columbia University in New York. He came to Madras only when he was 40. We make most of our best friends when we are young. But so many people in Madras were happy to be associated with him in any capacity. Wasn’t that enough? Conversely, can it ever be enough?
He had regaled us all with so many stories about Madras, my favorite was the one about Ice House, a landmark building, across from Marina Beach. In the 19th century, ships carried crystalline ice cut from frozen ponds around Boston to a few tropical ports. Chennai is the only city where the ice storage facility lives on, though it has been remodeled extensively. Unlike Scollay Square, the name Ice House lives in public memory. The frozen water trade is not mentioned in our history textbooks. To others, it may be nothing more than commerce, but the journey of ice appears extraordinary to me, connecting as it does my two hometowns, my two emotional co-ordinates. I believed he would always be there in Madras, whenever I visited from Boston. In some sense, of course, he still is. And he taught me, and countless other readers, to be curious and engaged wherever they find themselves, to find the stories in every street — to be alert and alive.