Having tasted success with his Chai Chai, a picaresque adventure with the Indian Railways and all the lonely people living at those atmospheric railway junctions and small towns along the line, Bishwanath Ghosh has stepped forth with a jaunty flourish to present a whole city on his plate.
He chews upon Chennai with all the juicy relish that, as a young boy, he used to eat the sour-sweet fruit of the tamarind, and spits out the stories of the people he meets along the way. He calls it Tamarind City, though he admits right up front that this is somewhat atypical, but that’s the flavour he associates with the place he has called home for the last ten years.
If this were all that Ghosh were to do, that is bring a City to life through the people living within its ambit, there would be no reason to carp. He does this with a certain laid-back charm that hides the brilliance with which he engages the smaller people he encounters. He travels across to North Chennai and interviews the station master at Royapuram, that gets billed as the first major railway station in the country; he chats up the owner of the Rathna Cafe in Triplicane, a fellow north Indian, and cadges the recipe for its legendary sambar, drooling all the way.
He describes how to distinguish the right-handed Brahmins from the left-handed ones by pointing out the various caste marks worn by Brahmin affiliates to the gods Vishnu or Shiva and drools discreetly over the beauty of the women said to belong to the most dominant of these. Since he is, after all, just a young fellow who’s been brought up in Kanpur and a Bengali to boot, as he reminds us often enough, he misses out on a well-known schoolboy rhyme that, in translation, reads: “Goats and cattle have two horns, the venerable Iyengar has three”.
The downside to some of this love for all things dark and Dravidian is that he feels obliged to throw in great gobs of canned history to prove his second point—that Chennai is “where modern India began”. The information that he has cobbled together in his first two chapters has been done better by others, one of them being S. Muthiah, a writer who has written several books on the city. None of the facts Ghosh parades is entirely convincing. No matter how many firsts the city might lay a claim to, by virtue of it being “the first city of Empire”, Chennai, despite its boasts to being the seat of culture, class and now e-commerce, is still a one-main-thoroughfare-town. Ghosh may say: “It’s the marriage between tradition and transformation that makes Chennai unique”. His stories prove that tradition wins every time.
The well-meaning Ghosh is too much the guest who stayed on for dinner and breakfast to be anything but polite. He never takes sides, whether on the subject of the two political leaders who Sumo-wrestle each other for attention during an election year, on the moral policing on campuses, arranged marriages with electronically matched horoscopes, or whether the yesteryear heart-throb Gemini Ganesan’s taking on multiple wives wasn’t a good thing altogether, given that he produced a daughter like Rekha.
