Day 2 – Sirkazhi.
After a quick and excellent breakfast of thosai and the best tea I have ever had, we set out for Sirkazhi, the town my great grandfather came from. I was supposed to meet my dad’s friend, Rajendran who lives there. He in turn helped me to find all the possible connections to my dad’s family. If not for him, I would probably still be there, looking for my roots.
We went to the house of this old priest of the local temple, who was said to remember my great grandfather. This man was 95 years old, and still had a memory that was sharp as a knife. He is retired from his priestly duties, but lives with his daughter’s family in the same house he had lived in since he was born.
I was excited to visit the house, because 1) it would be my first visit into a village house, and 2) my first visit to a orthodox Brahmin house. I tried to remember all the “rules” of orthodoxy regarding visiting a Brahmin household. I am glad to say none of them were true. They welcomed us with kindness, offered us a place to sit on a bench, and some ice cold water to drink.
(A short note on drinking water in India. I was told NEVER to drink the tap water. The crew bought many bottles of mineral water and an ice cooler, so we were well watered throughout the journey. But, when you go to someone’s house, and all they have is water, from the tap, how to say no without being rude? The last thing I want is to be remembered as the uppity Singapore girl who won’t even wet her lips in our house. So I drank their water when it was offered. I said a blessing over it, and drank whole heartedly. And didn’t suffer so much as a stomach ache from it. )
The house looked exactly like the kind you see in Tamil movies. A U shaped covered house with a small open air courtyard in the middle, where they had the Tulasi tree and the water pump. In the back, there is a well and a general washing area. These people were considered affluent because they had electricity, running water, and a fridge. The floors were cement and the walls brick. The roof was wood and attap, and kept the house cool and comfortable. 6 people lived in that house, which is the size of my living room. Amazing. With no separate rooms for married couples, how on earth did they make 2 children. The mind boggles.
The next house I visited was the one my great grandfather built. It has been around for about 100 years and is based on the same U shaped with courtyard plan. My uncle and aunty who still live there have electricity, but no fridge, and no running water. And my uncle works in a bank!
Meeting my relatives was an experience in itself and I will leave it to the show to tell the story. But walking into the house that I could have been born in was overwhelming. I can describe it adequately, and won’t even try.
2nd Night – Chidambaram
Since Sirkazhi is such a small town, they don’t have any hotels that will fulfil the creature comforts stipulated by the crew. So we spent the night in Chidambaram, a slightly larger temple town that was a 2 hour drive away. I was so exhausted – drained physically by the 8 hour shoot in the broiling sun and emotionally by meeting my relatives – that I took a shower and went straight to bed. It’s only the next morning that I realized that the hotel we stayed at was called the Raffles Hotel! The irony was not lost on me. I’m not complaining because it had a clean bed and aircon, which is all I needed, but they were little short on the marble flooring and jazz quarter, what.
The hotel also did not have room service, so the guys had to go out to get some take away food. One of the things I really enjoyed about this trip was that I was with a bunch of people who were serious meat eaters like me. Which is really good because India has very good non-vegetarian cusine offer. The meat is usually fresh, not frozen, so it tastes different and absorbs the flavours of the spices better.
Now, I know a lot of you are frowning because you think I did something stupid and dangerous, but for the record, I did not get any digestive disorders while I was in India. No Delhi belly, nothing. 2 out of 3 meals were non-vegetarian. For breakfast, we went to a veg restaurant, but only because breakfast foods like thosai and idly are much better there.
If I have any complains about India, it’s this. The sun rises really early in the morning. By about 5:45 a.m., it is peeking into my room. Being used to waking at dawn in Singapore (6:30a.m.), I was like WTH when I found myself rising at 5:30 or so. So from then till my actual wake up call (8:00), it was my time with the wonders of Indian television. I was pleasantly surprised to find a TV channel dedicated to Christian programming – songs, sermons and services – in both Tamil and English. Belonging to a secular state like Singapore, it came as quite a treat, really.
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