On a clear night, you can lie back on the warm sands of the Marina Beach at Chennai and imagine that you are on a slow boat to China. It’s the second longest sandy beach in the world and so wide in some stretches that you can feel the immensity of the universe. On such a night if you look at the stars long enough you can find yourself transported to the Andromeda Galaxy.
That is, if you want to. Most people just stretch out on Marina Beach and reach for another handful of crunchy thenga-manga-pattani sundal, or boiled chickpeas flavoured with shards of raw mango and coconut that everyone eats on the beach.
Like with everything else, there’s a tradition that underlines the etiquette of behaviour at the Marina Beach. One of these is that sooner or later, you will buy a packet of sundal. Or that you will pick up a hank of sweet smelling jasmines that have been flown in from the jasmine fields of Madurai just that morning. Or that you will pucker your mouth eating the strips of raw mango that are sliced into thin ivory teeth that grin at you as the vendor dips them into a readymade mix of red chilli powder. Or that a beachcombing palmist will read your fortune — “Very good fortune madam, you going foreign soon, marrying very rich man!”
Just across the road from the main section of the Marina Beach, where a statue of a Dandi-marching Gandhi has been placed, is a curiously shaped building. It’s known as the ‘Ice-House’. It occupies a place of venerable tourist interest as a museum devoted to promoting the life and works of Swami Vivekananda. As its name suggests, the Ice-House is a reminder of the most romantic enterprise of the late 19th century, when ships from North America unloaded great blocks of ice sawed out of the frozen surface of the Great Lakes and despatched them to India covered in burlap and sawdust in the holds of ships. It’s probably as a result of this that even today, no visit to the Marina Beach is complete without some form of iced drink being had, either surreptitiously behind the vigilant eye of a parent slurped from glasses filled from a mobile handcart or in great scoops and dollops from a mobile ice-cream van.
The road fronting the Ice-House was built as far back as 1846. It occupies the stretch that starts from the War Memorial at the Fort St George end, still the seat of the Tamil Nadu government, and goes all the way to the new Lighthouse, a rather utilitarian building that resembles in its red-and-white striped exterior nothing as much as a footballer’s sock. It was a most exhilarating experience to ride the elevator to the top and look out on all sides to the way that the city has grown. Due to security reasons, these rides are no longer possible.
The Marina Beach is now cut into small sandy bays punctuated by colonies of fisherfolk, who spread their gear across the beach. As you look towards the south where the city is advancing you may spy the beaches at Besant Nagar, known as Elliots Beach, and the newer ones such as the Thiruvanmiyur beach and so on, maybe all the way up to Mahabalipuram! In the early morning it is a magnificent sight.
Just before the sun rises on the horizon, all the places of worship along the coast are busy waking up their gods with songs, chants, bells and wake-up calls in different tongues. The boats are just coming in from a pre-dawn catch and, on the Marina Beach, the women are waiting to take the fish to the market and the gulls fly low hoping for their share of the day’s take. Many of the fishermen still use the ancient log girt rafts, or catamarans, and seem to skim the surface of the waves like black dolphins. If they are in a happy frame of mind, they give you a free ride back into the sea for a swim in the calmer waters beyond the current.
And yet, it was at just such a time, not long ago, that the Marina Beach witnessed an epic event. It has transformed the image of a sleepy town by the sea. In the early hours of December 26, 2004, the sea crashed over the sands of the Marina in a wave that no one could remember seeing before. It was the tsunami. As though in shock, the sea itself receded. As the fisherfolk told us, “Suddenly, we could see the bottom of the sea as clearly as if it were our home. We ran for our lives.”
Today, this is one more story that people tell as they lie on the warm sands of the Marina Beach. It is a tale written in by wind and water by crabs and men tracked by the blink of the Lighthouse and, who knows, perhaps even by a lone watcher from a distant galaxy called Andromeda.