The changing face of T.Nagar, Chennai

T.Nagar of yore was a good old bastion of middle and upper middle class folk that represented everything that was quintessentially Madras. Giving an address in T.Nagar meant that you would invariably spot a look of envy in fellow Chennaites. And for good reason.

The grand old tamil-style houses that were in their own way elegant, the shady avenues, wonderful public places like somasundaram ground and jeeva park, the interesting neighbours and the highly infective atmosphere of lazy luxury. Could there possibly be a more fairy-tale like setting for a family? In rural areas, maybe, but I don’t think it would have been possible in too many other places in cities. And needless to say, If life ever became too mundane, one only had to take a small walk to Ranganathan street and Pondy Bazaar and presto, you would have enough adrenaline pumping action (ofc i’m exaggerating) to last a week. The above places were crowded even in those early days I hear, though probably not as filled with toxic fumes as they are now.

My father grew up along with his seven siblings in a grand old house in R road with a huge garden and shady and climb-worthy sapotta and mango trees. There was a large space where the entire neighbourhood boys used to gather for a game of cricket in the evenings. Relatives, young and old, were swarming the place and it was simply unmatched fun just to be in the place. Atleast whatever I can remember of it.

When I was an 8 year old, my family decided to split the land between the male siblings and each build their own houses. For 2 years, we shifted to a flat in Rangarajapuram, which no self respecting T.Nagarite at that time would have done, but we had to do owing to our not so healthy economic condition. Life for the 2 years there was complete fun but considering this post is not about Rangarajapuram, i will refrain from talking about it.

When I was ten, we returned to T.Nagar, to live in our newly built house. My uncles had their houses built next to ours. All the houses were pretty nice, but much to my chagrin, all were painted a pale brown. It smacked of a lack of creativity on my family’s part. My own house was by far the best and was built with a lot of thought by my parents themselves (they are in the construction industry). We stayed for a year in the house. Unfortunately I can recall very little about my time in the house. Things were so idyllic that time passed unfathomably quickly. All i can remember was a single sapotta tree, which was the lone survivor of my grandparents’ house and a really pretty garden, in which I would spend entire days (primarily because I did not have any friends in the new house. T.Nagar was already changing) planting all sorts of fruits and vegetables. Nothing made me more satisfied than having my mother cook vegetables that I grew in the garden. It tasted as if the dishes were made of something more than just the ordinary vendakkai, murungakai or kathirikkai that I was so used to eating and so intensely disliked.

Although this is a personal experience, I would imagine that a lot of other old families in T.Nagar too had similar experiences. Most families settled in T.Nagar were quite wealthy and could afford to support quite a large family. Considering there were no such things as contraceptives back then and assuming that our old men had the same drive for sex as modern day Indians, it is only natural that families with an average of 7-8 kids would emerge. (My neighbours were 13 siblings.) It must have been such a show back then that other old geezers would have sniggered at someone if they stopped with anything less than four children (I have a vision of my grandpa sitting on the compound wall looking at his neighbour and saying stuff like “Dey Subramani. Go back to the Thar desert where you came from you infertile little prick!”). And when these sons and daughters of the old geezers grew up and eventually had sons and daughters of their own, they would obviously have demanded some space for themselves. (In today’s mega-thodars, we see how even single maamiyaars and marumagals are enough to kill all the menfolk and bring the house down. One can hardly imagine the situation with ten such marumagals and maamiyars. I suspect Napoleon would have been better prepared for Russia if he had spent a few days in such a home.) So, in the 80s and 90s, a lot of these grand old houses were pulled apart and gave way to smaller, more modern, but nevertheless pleasant houses. However, the loss of the gardens and large open spaces meant less frequent social get-togethers/majaa-with-friends-times depending on your gender. This I thought sad, but understandable.

Around this time, another big social restructuring was occurring in the good old place. This was the invasion of saettu people. Not the interesting kind of north Indian folk who were already a part of the landscape, but the moolah-power-ulla saettu folks who had come to Chennai (probably Sowcarpet) for business, done exceedingly well, and decided to settle down in the city for good in one of its more prestigious areas. They had maal, bought lands in large swathes displacing the locals to rubbish places like Adyar and Anna Nagar, and built massive homes which could have housed an army of elephants but only supported the old man, his sons and one elephant in the form of the saettu lady (just kidding). These perumpullis were completely engrossed in their own world and never interacted with the locals in any way. They probably only travelled in imported cars or jets and hobnobbed with vellaikara people and other snobbish north indians. Not that anyone missed the company of these saettu people, but i am just saying that they never added anything to the landscape except palatial houses and zeroes at the end of land prices. This is probably one of the biggest factors that contributed to the destruction of T.Nagar’s character.

Moving on, my parents soon decided that our current house was too good for us considering our economic condition. They decided to build a much more simpler dwelling in the first floor and rent out the ground floor. Land prices were already increasing and it turned out to be quite a good move. Our first floor house was simple and nice and the ground floor house fetched us much needed revenue. The only disappointing thing was that the garden could not survive the onslaught of cement and other construction materials that fell on it from the first floor and it was damaged beyond recogniction. From then on, we only had a set of hibiscus and a few small fruit and vegetable trees. Life, however went on, and with school increasingly occupying my time, I had less free time to waste anyway and had to spend more time on my books. I even had to make regrettable decisions such as stopping karate and swimming lessons. We also got a new dog. It was a mongrel and the only person who ever liked it was me. Everyone else in the family were neutral to it or disliked it. However it became an integral part of the ecosphere of the house for the next decade. (I did not look after it very well, and in the end it had a disease and lost its memory. It left the house when I was in the middle of my board exam frenzy and I did not have time to tend to it. I have no idea what happened to it after that. I really do regret the way I treated my dog, but I was not only to blame. There were other extraneous circumstances.) However, in the next 3 years, T.Nagar changed quite a lot. Land prices kept rising and increasingly old houses were torn down to make way for not only smaller houses, but also large apartments. One could see many more apartments dotting the landscape. This was again regrettable, but atleast the people in the flats added something to the social milieu of T.Nagar. Not like the snobbish saettu people I mean. The first few flats at least had a soothingly Indian flavour to them with the quintessential watchman mama who also doubled up as the odd jobs man, and also neat gardens on the sides of the walls which the residents themselves looked after. But the arrival of the appartment complexes meant that all the large shady trees and gardens were more or less gone and even the few that were there in the old houses were left untended.

Then came the next big thing to affect the somewhat premature equilibrium that had been established in our first floor house. As you may well have guessed, my parents decided to build a 2nd floor. (What else could possibly have happened?) They considered the fact that land prices were pretty much soaring, considering the city was just starting to witness the IT boom, and also said that it was lucky we got a plan approval to construct a 2nd floor which is quite rare for an individual house. What they did not take into consideration was the fact that we had very little free cash, certainly not enough to build a new house. So, if we ever were to reap the benefits of having a new house, it would have to be after many years of complete toil. The house, despite all the hiccups in finding funds, was completed extremely fast. Or at least it felt that way because I was having school and hardly spent much time at home. I think my parents took this into consideration before embarking on the project. Also, by this time, I had grown too old to fully enjoy the atmosphere of construction activity.

Considering that my father is a builder, I was on site for many of the houses he built, and let me tell you, there could be nothing more fun for a pre-teen boy. All the equipment lying around made for convenient weapons such as sabres (rods), bazookas (crowbars) and ak-47s (drilling machines) with which one could terrorize the maesthris and sithaals into submission. The greatest fun was of course playing on the sandpile. Getting sand onto your head and picking out the grains is a far better timepass than eating popcorn. I stopped this extremely fun activity only when my father warned me i would get sarangu punnu. I had no idea what it was (and still dont), but the name sounded quite ominous, and from then, I did not play in the sand with as much relish. But I am digressing..

As I was saying, the house was completed within 5 months. We were spared the trouble of finding to people to stay in it as the ground floor tenants decided to occupy the new house as they found it to suitable to their tastes and their increased recently paycheck which was the reason they had wanted to move out in the first place. The house was really well constructed and reasonably classy. The only problem was, my parents did not accommodate a lift, and considering that the only people who could afford to stay in such a place were gentiles who preferred to drive a car to even Pondy Bazaar, we were quite lucky this time. The lack of a lift proved quite a problem subsequently. The most negative aspect of the new house was it resulted in us having to cut down the sapotta tree (my father felt almost like he had killed a family member) and having to convert what was left of the garden into a new carpark and a water tank. There was a mango tree in our house which had just borne a single fruit before construction of the 2nd floor began. After the construction the tree never grew or bore a fruit again. It effectively had a tree-version of vasectomy. In effect, while the interiors had been spruced up, the entire ecosystem of our house had been reduced to rubble and cement. This was something I sorely resented.

The next 3 years were quite staid. Life had once again settled into an equilibrium. T.Nagar continued to witness a construction boom in which a lot more apartments came up. The newer ones were far more irritating. There was nothing quirky about them. The exteriors and interiors were irritatingly and unimaginatively perfect. A newer breed of watchmen began to emerge. The new ones were younger, sometimes of Nepali origin, a lot with big moustaches, all wearing a brown or blue color uniform with even a thoppi on their heads. These people worked for some random security agencies and had little attachment towards the neighbourhood or its people. They were not very indulgent towards outsiders entering the flats and were strictly business-like. This new breed of watchmen perfectly represented what was happening to T.Nagar. From being a friendly, laid-back place, it was turning into a concrete jungle with people who had little time to spare apart from their work. A place where once walkers used to walk either to socialize or to suppress the effects of diabetes, to a place where people walked accompanied by a discman wanting to burn off the days calorific intake. I too became too busy with my school life to spare time or thought on T.Nagar and its denizens.

From here, everything I loved about my home started to disappear. Some of my neighbours had sold their houses to developers and fancy and totally irritating flats came up in their place. We ourselves had to move to the 2nd floor house, which I disliked by because I preferred the irrationality and frugality of the first floor house. The first floor house was renovated and let out for quite a staggering sum (at that time of course). I was entering the crucial years of 10th, 11th and 12th and was completely busy with academics. No thought to spare on T.Nagar or its surroundings. The only non-academic place I frequented in T.Nagar was Amutha Paal Depot. Die hard T.Nagarites may know it well. The place had something about it that reminded me of everything that used to be Madras. Frugal decor, very simple menu, a quirky and philosophical owner who seemed a permanent part of the landscape, it all reminded me of the Madras I loved.

My last 2 years were like a gale in which I feel I am still stuck in while at Uni. Life was all about IIT classes and more IIT classes. The only distractions were Amudha Paal and school. The only significant event was my dog left the house right in the middle of my board exams. I was quite helpless. T.Nagar was changing too darn rapidly. The main roads had changed beyond recognition. New, characterless buildings were springing up wherever you looked. New hotels, IT parks, apartments and swanky new houses (yes, they had to be swanky. Anyone who did not want a obscenely rich house could not afford to build one anyway) and what not. Also growing was a rising dislike inside me for the place that I once used to love. It was becoming increasingly unfamiliar and alien.

Before I knew, my school life was over (I do really miss it) and I had to leave India to embark on my university life. Leaving India is a decision about which I have really mixed feelings. But one thing is for sure, everytime I go back, I go wtf. Life has so completely changed in T.Nagar, nay all of Chennai. My sisters are enjoying an affluence that I could have only dreamt of when I was their age. And I am not sure such a pampered life will do them any good. I see new hotels with globalised menus popping up all over the place. I see new, western style shopping marts (read Spencer’s Daily/Reliance Fresh) replacing the annachi kadais that used to dot the landscape. Every time I return to Madras for vacation, I see new unwelcome changes that make me really disgruntled. The very night I reach home, I never fail to make a pilgrimage to the Somasundaram ground and Amudha Paal. It might sound a bit ludicrous, but for me these two places are symbols of a great heritage, a heritage that is disappearing with the dynamics of time.