Memorying at Visalam, Karaikudi
Rain doesn’t just fall here at visalam. It remembers. Thick boughs of neem, frangipani and bougainvillea, heavy with tears of yearning for a past that will never was or be again. The corridors that rang with the heavy treaded footfalls of a patriarch, now squeak to tourist sneakers. Thick teak wood pillars hold their arch, proud heads high and eternal. The muscle memory of being a tree, still as fresh after almost a century.
Across the neighbourhood, several lines of patriarchs and their faithful grooms, keep watch over their homesteads in parrot and starling voices. Ghost-mansions that keep their grimy, decaying faces turned away from the street, peering from curtains of vines and bramble. Not all lords obsessively haunt and fuss around the immediate vicinities of their erstwhile mansions. Some of them, perhaps making good an unrequited poetic streak (too vulgar for the dignified Chettiyars, maybe?) prance unabashedly in the fields as they rend their heart and the morning asunder with their unfulfilled, wistful poetry. Hysterical wails echoing from their jewelled iridescent peacock throats. Competing with voices that boom from loudspeakers, rich with that oratory quality that’s almost second nature to the Tamils. The fields shimmer in the growing heat, as if responding to a call for revolt.
Within the walls of Visalam, a woman’s hopes and dreams find sanctuary. A soft spectral incense hangs in the air. Perhaps the perfume that the resident goddess left in her wake, as she walked down the corridors. The courtyard that should have been full of straw trays of condiments for pickle and kondattam, ache from their bare spotlessness. There’s a sense of emotion, built into the architecture of the house. Bays and windows made for looking out of longingly, full of hope or full of hurt. Parapets and grand balconies, made for imperious chins and noses that don’t understand gravity. Filigreed window grills, made for chubby little fingers to wave out from. Corridors that whisper with the rustle of silks, cotton and laughter of dancing bangles and anklets on tireless wrists and feet. Or the more silent, more sluggish weight, less busy, more instructive heavy voiced clink of gold encrusted in diamonds.
A huge mango tree harumphs like a grumpy grandfather from the corner of a backyard. Remembering too much, feeling too much, ignored too much. Grumbling from his big chair, missing the days when clandestine childish feet tickled it into giving up stories and sweets. Now all it does is give a bit of context and throws a lot of shade. Envious of the ones who don’t have to sit it out and watch their world discover things like mobile phones, ungainly satellite dishes and a more democratic quality of wealth. “Traffic jams? Well I never!” In the good old days, only the thoroughbred, lineaged, wealthy had cars. Now it’s become too “common”.
The sun makes pretty talk to the wall - a daring suitor, hesitant, yet charming, putting on his most-velvet lover’s voice to charm his shy lady love (Who is she? His new bride? A new skivvy whose eyes and skin are a bit too much “come hither” for their own good) . A little routine that will include loving and leaving. And maybe a little disrepute. Not to mention, a lot of disappointment.
Visalam breathes with the restrained breath of a mother, who manages her own inhales and exhales to keep an aural audit of young child as it plays around her. It has the air of being completely preoccupied in its work but with the ears of a doe, pricking up at every change in the wind - ready to bolt to the rescue of her child, should danger betray its presence. A kindly heart that didn’t get to grow old or worry about good alliances for her daughter or fulfil her per lifetime quota of kolams or allow her the graces of a gradually growing girth and bosom as time and maternity played coloniser on the sovereign of her body. So she lives through the home of her wistful dreams. A matriarch that never was.
