Internal Monologues

I went out today to pay the half-yearly water tax to the challengingly acronymed CMWSSB. When the city was called Madras it was the MMWSSB, but now it is the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewage Board.

As I drove, listening to Pandit Shivkumar Shankar play the santoor on the CD player, I was remembering a conversation that took place at home yesterday. It was quite interesting and wide-ranging, and one of the topics was death. I mentioned the T*e*r*r*y S*c*h*i*a*v*o case, and said that we Americans just don’t seem to be able to handle death (vast generalisation, I know). I cannot imagine that such a thing could happen here, where death is acknowledged as what it is: part of nature, part of life. Our guest suggested that the reason is that Christians, (and other People of the Book), believe that there is only one life, and that makes them terrified of its ending. Hindus, Buddhists, etc. believe in many lives – it makes things seem more relaxed. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this, of course, but it is an interesting thought. We talked about it, and then Ramesh joked that this janam-janam (life after life) business is the reason for Indians’ tendency to postpone everything: “There’s plenty of time, in the next janam we’ll see.” We laughed and moved on.

I also remembered, as I have many times, that when my father died, my mother refused to look at his body in the coffin – she had seen him for the last time being wheeled into the operating room – because she ‘didn’t want to remember him that way.’ But then she had to send my brother-in-law to look, before they closed the coffin, to make sure that it was really his body: otherwise she would have wondered, she said, whether they had mistakenly put someone else inside. How difficult, I thought, how different from the way death is handled here.

And then, waiting for the light to change, it suddenly struck me, for the first time in all these years, that I hadn’t looked at my father’s body either. I had also left it to my brother-in-law (though it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be anyone else in the coffin). I was so amazed – how had this never occurred to me before? -- that I missed the turning to Spurtank Road, and had to go all the way over the Chetpet Bridge, and a long way down Poonamallee High Road before I could turn around and come back. And then one stretch of the road was full of flower petals, mostly crushed into the pavement by the traffic, because a funeral procession (in which the body is carried on a kind of stretcher, decked with flowers, and with its face visible) had recently passed by. Which seemed charged, significant to me, although it wasn’t. And for several hours after that I would be doing my work, when a large exclamation point would pop up in my head: !!How?? and go away again.


When you pay the water tax you have to stand in line at the counter where someone looks into the computer to see what you owe. He writes it on a slip of paper, which you carry to the cashier’s window, where there is another line for payment. As I was waiting in the second, cashier’s line, three women walked into the office together, went up to the counter, and began shouting all at once. They went on and on, and everyone craned their necks to see. After a few minutes, from the official side of the counter, a Lady Officer moved forward and began gesticulating and shouting back. She was large and had an ugly face, and looked powerful – she had a smaller lady minion hovering behind her – but the three women did not stop their angry tirades. I thought snobbishly, That’s how uneducated women speak, so loudly... And then as I was going out, a well-dressed woman, whom I had heard speaking good English inside, was shrieking into her cellphone in the echo-chamber of the stairwell, so that I had to put my hands over my ears in order to get down the stairs and out.

Coonoor II

Coonoor II

(When I began writing about Coonoor, someone said, But I thought you were going to Ooty. So, to clarify, Ooty is the District Headquarters of Nilgiri District - like an American county seat - and Coonoor is a smaller, nearby town.)

I got up at 8:00 and went for a walk. The weather was variable, like spring: cool, breezy, then washed with warm sunlight, then with dark shadows. Tried to look hard at everything, picked up leaves and cones to draw. Later, after lots of breakfast, we sat at a white wrought-iron table on the lawn, and I painted what I had collected.


At dinner I warmed my hands around a hot toddy. I was busy pretending that it was colder than it actually was, with the fire every night and the hot water bottles and all. A piano player stumbled through old Hindi film songs in an almost-empty dining room (because the 'season' was over). At another table the waiter asked someone, "You are full vegetarian?" and she answered, "Not even mushrooms!"


The next day, after breakfast, the really, really good Chef Ramalingam showed me his herb garden: mint, lemongrass, basil, thyme, tarragon, rosemary, celery. I admired all of them and asked if he grew parsley. He said, "Parsley, monkeys take it. Monkeys my enemy."

Then we sat outside again, and two monkeys passed by, large and small, and paused, but not long enough for me to draw them properly. Growling and coughing. Then one male, three females with babies clinging under their bellies.

R watched the young Indian tennis player Sania Mirza lose in the second round of Wimbledon -- on the national TV channel, Doordarshan, with commentary in Chinese -- why?? I think that if Doordarshan ever modernised we'd miss its reliable weirdness. But not very much.

The day is punctuated by sirens from the tea gardens: the beginning and end of the work day, and the lunch break. Then there is the whistle and the chuff ... chuff ... of the so-called toy train, coming up from Mettupalayam on the plains to Ooty. And the grinding of trucks labouring up the hills, loaded with petrol; firewood; sacks of tea; everything that from outside comes by truck up the hairpin roads.


I stood looking up at a huge fir tree and tried to see it as light and shadow, but each mass of light had its own shadows. I would have to draw every needle. Then it stopped looking like a tree at all. Shadows within shadows.