A Trip to Creating New Nostalgia ...
... and, effacing the old nostalgia
The
ostensible reason to visit Thiruvannamalai was to pray and pay obeisance (in
hard currency) to Lord Arunachaleswarar and His cohort.
I
knew from my reading of the daily newspaper, that the town has grown at a
tremendous rate, mostly because the area surrounding it was industrializing. Lord
Arunachaleswarar felt the perhaps unexpected multiplier effect – many more
devotees and multiplying legends and myths.
Of
course, the mythology created a holy track just outside of the temple but
encompassing a hill (one of the scattered one of the Eastern Ghats). It was
said that if you went around it, you would be relieved of the misery of many
more births. Lord Siva’s boon? Perhaps. Also, along the hill circumambulatory,
there was the refuge of a recluse (Ashram of a saint). I remember, it
was too bucolic even for the town and not much of any activity was going on.
There
it was, my chance to erase my nostalgia for the then small town; in the mid– to
late sixties, when my father’s youngest sister had set up her household with
her husband in that town, that was spread hardly a mile (it was mile, in those
days, not a kilometer) from the temple. The railway station was hardly a mile
away and was mostly a place of inactivity except when a passenger train went through
it, four times daily.
I
was a regular summer visitor, like a migratory bird, to the town almost every
year, accompanied by my parents and brother, and other elderly members of my
extended family as their security (!) and guide as the occasions arose, one at
a time.
My
aunt’s younger brothers-in-law also visited their brother a few times
concurrently. It was with them, I cavorted inside the temple, no barricaded
queue lines, no directional boards, no nothing except the shrines. I saw it was
good.
I
understood how age does not allow the mind to accept change, even one such as
mine (almost) fully tuned to taking life at the current moment. I did not like
the commercial paraphernalia surrounding the temple, not a bit. It is ugly. I
did not mind the over complicated street-layout that did not make my head spin
compared to the simple ones I encountered half-a-century earlier; but, the
badly directed maze within the temple to reach Lord Arunachaleswarar or His
consort did indeed.
Yes,
that is today’s way of crowd control, but why the crowd at all? Because people
are individually seeking to go to Heaven, not caring about his or her neighbors.
“I am not confident that you would pray for my well-being,” I say to my neighbour.
Yet, the ringing Vedic/Upanishidic chants extol the oneness of everything. And,
we are the proud inheritors of this legacy! Go figure!
Then,
whence the felt differences? The response is explained only through sophistry. Yes, the queue barricades took me into a
philosophical query mode (and, I feel this in every such queue)!
My
wife insisted on taking a faux circumambulatory trip around the sacred
hill, even if in an air-conditioned car (ambulation sitting in a car?). So be
it. On the way, while I was sitting in the car, my wife and her sister went
into one of those famous Ashrams, to buy peace of mind. Sure, they failed!
They searched for peace of mind in all the places except the one where it could
be found, each in her own mind, as per a popular Tamil song in a film of the
1960s. When queried about their failure, they said that there was one other Ashram
that they skipped and that is why. Excuses are all around us!
There
were also a number of shrines (each named differently) of Lord Siva on the
circumambulatory. Well, they visited three or four of them while I chewed on my
fingernails sitting in my car.
Now,
to Mandakolathur. I had spent a few summers there, a bucolic place that sounded
fun, even with the scorching sun and the mud streets. Children love dirt and I
was a child of those times. My mother’s eldest sister was married to a family
of priests and agriculturists, and was widowed almost immediately after the
wedding. She was not or she did not feel welcome in her husband’s family house.
She did stay there for a few months of the year, and for the rest, she stayed
with the family of her five siblings, two elder brothers and three younger
sisters. While she was welcome everywhere, she did not feel at home at any of
these homes, understandably. Somehow, she became attached to me, and I her.
Seeing
the temple, my ancestral village through my mother’s line, did not create a
longing for me for the old times. Just the opposite, a sort of a sigh of relief
that I escaped the clutches of those benighted days.
Of
course, my recent ancestors had done the job for me – escaping from the
village. And, my aunt had died long ago and there was none there I could relate
to. No skin for me in that nostalgia game for me.
Check
that, not the “no skin” in the immediately preceding sentence, but the “relate
to” in the one preceding it. My eldest uncle after serving in UNESCO for a few
years in Lagos, Nigeria and receiving a princely sum as pension, and having no
direct progeny, did one good thing: he bought land in the village and started a
school, elementary school for the children for his ancestral village and
neighboring ones. We visited that school and were treated like royalty. The
current head of the school, now associated with a mission of one Hindu Guru,
is a distant (truly like the Andromeda and our Milky Way Galaxies, belonging to
the same cluster, are) family relation of ours! Yet, that rang a distant emotional
bell, however feebly it was heard, for me. On the way to the school, which is
slightly off the road we went by, we asked a number of students who were
returning home and that made me a little satisfied with my heritage, though
fully ashamed.
I
wish to emphasise one more aspect of my current visit. In the a960s, we visited
my aunt perhaps a few times in her village, in which her husband’s brother was
managing the fields. I had fun and how! Walking through the fields, going to
the little stream running a short distance away for taking a bath or at the
pump house in the field, playing with the children of my age in the host’s
house, and of course, visiting the temple at the edge of the village, now being
grandiosely called, “Protector of the Town”, when there is no town to protect,
only a village! At the end of the “Brahmin Street” (Agraharam), there
was a temple for Lord Vishnu and I did not like it. My immature brain asked, “Why
not a temple for Lord Siva?”
The
“Protector of the Town” was, in the 1960s, a single shine about ten feet by ten
feet with only one shrine. My mother’s sister, when she was there and we
visited her, would have the pathway around cleared off the bushes around. Now,
there is a compound wall, measuring perhaps sixty feet by sixty feet, with four
additional shrines inside. What more, when we were there, another family was
also visiting, and I learned that this was their “Heritage Deity”!
Well,
well, the village has indeed grown, because the deity has grown in
importance. This “because” sticks in my craw, as no one could show me
the cause-effect connection. This was made fun of in the Hindi movie (based on a
Gujarati story, I understand), Oh, My God! (OMG!). Paresh Rawal owned
the movie through his performance.
Hence,
our one-day-trip. How successful was I in my mission that headlines this post?
I
think more than 50%. It is not that I erased those memories, only that the new memories
of my trip would not romanticize those days.
The
trip reminded me of the movie The Trip To Bountiful. Yet, there is a huge difference. In the movie,
the lead character, played by Geraldine Paige (who won the Best Actress Award
at the Oscar and other awards), wanted to relive the old times; I, on the other
hand, wanted to efface those memories by reliving them today and feeling sorry
for others whom my ancestors have wronged and I am enjoying the fruits.
How
far I succeeded only time will tell.
Raghuram
Ekambaram
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