Nallified

There comes that moment in every man's life, when he is forced to go to Nalli Chinnaswamy Chetty Cloth Store in T.Nagar. The stronger individuals of the species, tend to fight this inevitability with excuses like work, “urgent calls” and so on, but the more intelligent variety have the broader understanding that, it is better to get it over with, not fight it. Eventually every human has to go there and endure the unspeakable suffering.

My visit to the Nalli proved that I belonged to neither the strong variety nor the intelligent one. On the contrary, I had thought I was very smart, and leapt at the opportunity to go there, when my uncle and his family had landed here. I had it all planned out. We would drive to Nalli, I would hover at the entrance till everyone got out, and then my cousin and I would say that we would park the car and be with the bloodlings in a jiffy. And then we would park the car, and walk out through the nearest exit to the nearest coffee shop, have a detailed espresso and some Bhakshanam, and walk back at tooth-picking pace to the dreaded Nalli. If questioned, we would use the ubiquitous “great difficulty finding a parking spot” line, and do a high-five out of eyesight.

This plan looked so perfect on paper that even the “high-five out of eyesight” rhymed. But one small factor that was ignored was that the rest of T.Nagar makes the Nalli look deserted.

I have had a taste of (or should I say a whiff of) my brothers of India in the recent Aruvathi Movers, but this was different. There were more people in the streets of T.Nagar, and this was unlike the Aruvathi Movers in every way.

The key structural differences between Aruvathi Movers (AM) and T.Nagar (TN) can be surmised in the following points, distinguished by two seperate colours.

(1) At the AM, people are there to chill. They hang with their extended family, eat delicious food prepared on the sidewalk, and generally scream in joy. But in TN, people are not there to chill. They are there with a purpose. They are there to shop, and to save money, which they have to spend on feeding their relatives, and on travel back home.

(2) At the AM, everybody is screaming, but the screams were of joy and festive fervour. The middle aged adults crack clever jokes about the ineptness, greed, appearance etc. of their wives, to whom they have done a great favour by bringing them out in the open. The youngsters scream at each other using specially chosen foul words while looking at the young girls that are parked in tight hand-held clusters. The kids scream in exponentially increasing intensity for cotton candy. At TN, there is uniform screaming, nothing festive about it. Just two types viz. the shopkeepers, and the bargainers.

(3) At the AM, everybody moves with the Gods, and so when you need to come up for air, all you have to do is swim in the direction opposite to that of the Gods and you will arrive at a clearing in no time. In TN, though, nobody is moving with anything. You can swim in any direction you want, there is no chance you will arrive at any clearing, until you reach Anna Salai. If you find a clearing between say a Jewellery shop and a public lavatory, and dive into that clearing, a dude wearing a wicked lungi will materialize out of nowhere within 2 centimetres of your face and will gently scream, “Jettee Vaenumaa sir? Banian Vaenumaa sir?”

(4) At the AM, you get back home without your footwear, with your clothing torn at strategic points. At TN, you get back home without your money.

My cousin and I walked up to a restaurant that called itself Atchaya Bhavan and placed a request for a cold beverage. The main reason for choosing that restaurant was that we were at a point where we could not take one step forward, or go back without food. The number of people who pulled us into their sidewalk shops to sell us undergarments was staggering. In our short ambulatory adventure we'd had more people colliding on us than electrons in a nearby Electron-positron collider. I was sapped of essential life-juice, and no bloodhound on earth could follow my trail, as I was carrying the scent of half of Tamilnadu.

The waiter at the restaurant, had worked in a mortuary before joining this place. He had been in charge of removing the dentures and the displaced organs on the autopsy table. He served food and water, in exactly the same way. But thankfully, the food did not encourage molecular disintegration, something that I assumed was going to happen.

We came back to the Nalli, through some form of short cut, as I couldn't bring myself to witness the blokes standing outside of Pothys wearing unwashed clothing recreated meticulously in the style of the Pandya dynasty, and that would remind me of the old actor who plays the role of Pandya King in the commercial, and that would remind me of the phrase where he says MEEN-AACHEE Amman koil. And that always induced spasmodic shuddering, lkie is't dniog to me rgiht now.

The situation inside Nalli was no better. I saw the all too familiar transluescent white Khadi shirt and white khadi vaeshtee old blokes with airs of ownership delivering faintly disturbing welcome smiles at everyone who walked in. There was that odd contraption that sprayed some form of water laced with something that smelled of rose. And there were the gazillions of women scanning sarees and screaming at their husbands at the same time. And those husbands. There were so many soul-less empty voids in their eyes that there was a risk of a black hole forming there.

I didn't even have the presence of mind to deploy the parking lie, but instead told the wife the whole truth. She then expressed her observation that I bore a shocking resemblence to the corpulent even toed ungulates from the suidae family, which I didn't contest. The very fact that I was alive was thanks to several years of intense survival training called living in Mylapore.

I just double-checked that my cousin was breathing when I delivered him to my uncle and aunt, lugged the huge cloth bags back to the car and headed back home.