If It's Monday It Must Be Madurai: A Conducted Tour of India (English Edition) by Srinath Perur

Author:Srinath Perur [Perur, Srinath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789351185703
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2018-02-14T18:30:00+00:00

We walk through a maze of narrow lanes in a residential area, an activity akin to some sort of urban spelunking. The paths are barely wide enough for a person to walk through, and sometimes not even that, necessitating adroit twisting and sidling. (Part of the fault no doubt lies with our party—I am of fairly strapping build, and Ulrika may even be considered hefty.) Steps of houses, parked two-wheelers, and ad hoc electrical and water fixtures add a further level of navigational complexity. One section in particular is almost entirely dark, being between the rear-walls of houses, and one corner has a mass of water-pipes at ground level and a tangle of low-hanging electrical cables that take some tai chi style movements to get through.

It’s mid-morning and there are few men about. Women are cooking, or sitting on the steps of their houses talking to neighbours, or washing clothes and vessels at nearby taps. Through open doors I can see homes created in the space of a tiny room or two—patterned floor-tiles, TVs, steel utensils on wall-mounted shelves, beds, rolled up mattresses. There are children everywhere—on doorsteps, at the corners of lanes. They constantly crowd around us, proffering their hands with delight and great ceremony. Mothers and elder siblings sometimes push kids forward, saying to them, ‘What should you say?’ The kids say ‘hi’ or ‘hello’ and stick their hands out. The foreigners shake hands and reach for their bottles of hand-sanitizers.

Maybe it’s the concentrated quality of life here, but surrounded by these homes I’m reminded of my own. I grew up in a larger house with more amenities, but it’s a difference only of degree. These are middle-class homes, a world I know well: the steel vessels, the televisions, the clutter of odds and ends hoarded because they might come in use one day; the sounds of pressure cookers going off, pans being scraped with a piece of brick, clothes being rinsed by hand. These are part of my consciousness. In a sense that the foreigners on the tour cannot possibly share, I am among my own.

More precisely, I appear to be on some kind of safari among my own, an observer in the midst of spaces that feel private. Most of the women here are wearing the national dress of the middle-class homemaker: the baggy nightgown. When they squat to wash vessels or clothes, these gowns are rolled up to mid-thigh to avoid getting them wet. I feel as if I shouldn’t be here, but the women are oblivious of us as we pass. Two women sitting on steps across a lane continue their conversation as we walk between them. In one Muslim household there’s a group of women sitting on the floor, watching TV, who hardly glance at us as we crowd the doorway and peep in. This may be from the conditioning of living in a place as densely populated as Dharavi, but I suspect it has more to do with being inured to tour

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