Slow day

In the background, the Pallavaram hills look on; they have seen several days in their time, and this is no different from the many they have seen. They must be very old hills, for they have been worn down to almost sea level. This is also the area where traces of a palaeolithic settlement have been found.

The slowness is seen in the parking lot of the Chennai airport in the foreground. Usually a mess of vehicles trying to go every which way, the lot seems quite sleepy - but this was last week, before the long weekend, when almost everyone had probably got to where they wanted to go!

Old world

No, this is not from the English countryside, even if the names of the houses in this part of Chennai try to fool you into thinking so. "East View". "Suffolk Lodge". "Starbrena". Even "Whitehall". Tucked away behind the old English Electric (now Areva) factory at Pallavaram is this street, and a few others like it, together making up the Veteran Lines - one of the last few enclaves of the Anglo-Indian community in Chennai.

Veteran Lines started off simply as what it claimed to be. Outside the military cantonment of Pallavaram, but close enough to remind them of the army life, it was a designed as a residential area for military personnel, especially retired ones. The majority of them who moved into the houses were Anglo-Indians, who put their cultural stamp on the area through their dance and music - not to mention their particular turn of speech. I suddenly find myself unable to reproduce it, not having heard it for many many years. It was all around me once, even into the early 1990s. But now it is gone, as have many of the young Anglo-Indians of Madras. They are all away, England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada....

....leaving the Veteran Lines to those who are truly veterans. It appears to be rather difficult to find a resident of this area who is younger than 60, but surely, there must be quite a few of them!

No washing

One of the city buses to school had a route that took it from the very British 'Sterling Road' bus-stop to the rather Anglo-Indian sounding 'Dobby Kana', which was its next halt. Having to get down at the former (if I wanted to go to school, that is), the latter was an enduring mystery. 'Kana' sounded rather like 'khana' (Hindi for 'food') that I used to imagine a huge crowd of dhobis (washermen) sitting down for lunch or something.

Although I've heard tell of how crowded the 'Dobby kana' at Chetpet used to be, I never had a chance to see it. For the Chetpet laundry had shut down even by the early '70s and today, even the bus-stop is called something else. Even the recent movie 'Madrasapattinam', with its washerman hero, seems to be set in the dhobi ghat of Guindy, rather than Chetpet. Even that has disappeared, now.

The last outpost of the Madras washerman seems to be this enclosed area at Pallavaram. I was told that the mornings are when it is a buzz of activity, with the wet clothes swishing through the air in arcs to have the dirt beaten out of them, wrung and then hung out to dry. In the evening, it is almost completely deserted; looks like the few people inside are those washing their own clothes!