One December, back in Madras to see my parents and to thaw out from a Cambridge winter, I dialed the number of a man I had never met but whose writerly voice I knew well. For years, at my desk at MIT, I had eaten lunch over S. Muthiah’s Madras Miscellany column in The Hindu. His pieces were small, exacting excavations of the city I had left behind—tramlines buried under asphalt, how neighborhoods emerged and the many institutions that had shaped previous generations. Reading him felt like discovering a story from my mother’s girlhood and loving her all the more for it. I meant only to mumble my thanks and hang up. Instead, he asked me to drop by if I was free. It was an invitation offered lightly, but it changed my life.
His house sat in a quiet cul‑de‑sac in T. Nagar. He greeted me not with the polite distance owed to a stranger but with the warmth of someone who had been expecting company. I had not come to Madras for the Music Season like most returning expatriates did — I did not care about Carnatic music, and I don’t think he did either. I was simply escaping the cold. He understood that impulse; he had known the frigid winters of Massachusetts as a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His father—the Mayor of Colombo—had sent him abroad to become an engineer. Machines, he told me, never held his attention. Words did.
My father Fali S Mehta studied in Boston in 1948 and went back to India as a dentist. I inherited his autograph book which had this autograph by Subbiah Muthiah.
Writing had saved the day back then. In the lab, where three students were assigned to each experiment, he let the other two handle the apparatus while he observed and wrote the reports. The instructor loved the reports and told him so. A campus flyer recruiting for the student newspaper caught his eye. When he showed up, the editor asked, “You can write in English?” Of course, he could, W. T. Keble, the British headmaster had insisted his students read widely and write often. So, he wrote for the college paper in America, just as he had written for the school paper in Sri Lanka. Even in engineering school, amid machine shops and dreary labs, he found stories.
He had a way of making the past feel inhabited. When I took my husband to meet him, he turned to him—not me—and asked, “How is old Scollay Square?” Our blank looks amused him, but he didn’t explain. I had to excavate that piece of Boston’s past myself: the burlesque marquees, the sailors on leave, the cafés with their air of impropriety. Scollay Square had been razed in the early 1960s to make way for Government Center, a plaza so austere it seemed designed to erase memory. By the time I arrived in Boston at the turn of the century, the old nightlife district had vanished from civic consciousness.
It delighted me that Uncle Muthu—by then I had begun calling him that—had wandered through Scollay Square as an undergraduate. He had made me curious not only about Madras but about the city where I now lived. And the truth is, he gave me more of Madras than all my older relatives ever had. He could tell me about the city—its industrialists, its vanished cinema halls, its half‑remembered scandals and the downtown buildings. He taught me to look for the stories hiding in plain sight.
In a 2011 interview with The Hindu, he 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 often wondered how some of his more conservative readers processed this information.
Often, he would say with a twinkle, “All my old girlfriends are still in Colombo.” But one afternoon, he said something that has stayed with me: “I don’t have that many friends in Madras.” His best years had been in Sri Lanka, where he worked as a journalist after earning a graduate degree in International Relations from Columbia University. He came to Madras at age forty, by which time most people have already made all their lifelong friends. But so many in the city were eager to be associated with him in any capacity. Wasn’t that enough? And conversely—can it ever be enough?
Of all his stories, my favorite was about Ice House, the landmark across from Marina Beach. In the nineteenth 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 still stands, though remodeled beyond recognition. Unlike Scollay Square, the name Ice House has survived in public memory. The frozen‑water trade does not appear in our history textbooks. To others, it may be nothing more than commerce, but to me the journey of ice feels extraordinary — connecting my two hometowns, my two emotional coordinates. It was the kind of detail he loved: a fact that, once known, rearranged the map of your mind.
I believed he would always be there in Madras for me, ready with a story. What remains instead is the habit he left me with: to be curious, to look for the overlooked, to listen for the faint echo of the past in the present. It is a way of moving through the world that feels natural to me now, almost instinctive, but I know clearly that it was his gift to me.
