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Bionote

The poem Bionote, K.Srilata says, was written on a sort of impulse. “It was triggered by a comment I heard from a friend of mine – quite a culture-vulture himself – about another writer based in Bombay. My friend said that this writer was “so Bombay”, meaning so typically a Bombayite or a Mumbaikar. It got me thinking about how he or others might see me and so this poem got written. At the core of it, of course, lies my own love for the older version of this metro now called Chennai with all its malls – an older version which is thankfully still alive in certain pockets of the city – in Triplicane or Mylapore or Saidapet, for instance. This older Chennai that is not Chennai at all, but the Madras of my memories.“

An interview with writer-academic K.Srilata of IIT, Madras. Read it in the recent issue of Madras Musings. html. pdf.

BIONOTE

Very briefly then,
I am middle class
and very Madras.
Born and raised in
West Mambalam –
the other side of the railway tracks
where fabled mosquitoes turn people into
elephants.

Went to college in
Khushboo sarees stripped
right off the absurdly voluptuous mannequins at
Saravana stores T.Nagar Chennai 17.

To weddings I wore,
in deference to my mother,
silk kanjeevarams with temple borders.
Every other girl
was a designer-sequined shimmer.

I thought nothing of
throwing away
my dreaming hours on
MTC’s 47 A,
sitting beside women who ruined my
view,
leaning casually across to
spit or
chuck
through the grime of windows
spinach stems they didn’t fancy
in their evening Kuzambu,
hurling motherly advice at
young men who dared death by
swinging,
two-fingered,
from other women’s windows.

My idea of a holiday
was rolling down the hillsides
of Ooty,
dressed in white
like Sridevi.

Objects of love-hate:
the auto annas.

And of course it is coffee that defines
the limits of my imagination.
I never could think of it as
cappuccino or mocha or
anything other than
decoction coffee,
deep brown like my own Dravidian skin.

Lunch:
10.30 sharp: sambhar rasam curry

Tiffin:
5 sharp: idli dosa vada

My idea of arctic winter:
twenty-six degree centigrade.

And so on and so forth
as they don’t say in Tamil.

Never mind this new upstart Chennai.
Madras, my dear, here I come!
About me, rest assured,
there is
no Bombay, no Delhi, no London
and certainly no New York.
I am all yours,
Madras, my dear,
wrap and filling!

ARRIVING SHORTLY

When Amma came
to New York City,
she wore unfashionably cut
salwar kurtas,
mostly in beige,
so as to blend in,
her body
a puzzle that was missing a piece –
the many sarees
she had left behind:
that peacock blue
Kanjeevaram,
that nondescript nylon in which she had raised
and survived me,
the stiff chikan saree
that had once held her up at work.

When amma came to
New York City,
an Indian friend
who swore by black
and leather,
remarked in a stage whisper,

“This is New York, you know –
not Madras.
Does she realise?”

Ten years later,
transiting through L.A. airport
I find amma
all over again
in the uncles and aunties
who shuffle past the Air India counter
in their uneasily worn, unisex Bata sneakers,
suddenly brown in a white space,
louder than ever in their linguistic unease
as they look for quarters and payphones.
I catch the edge of Amma’s saree
sticking out
like a malnourished fox’s tail
from underneath
some other woman’s sweater
meant really for Madras’ gentle Decembers.

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