This piece is in response two very standard questions I am often asked, but the answer to which I find complex and confusing at times -Where are you from? And where is your home?
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It was during the month of April right after my class 12th board exams, when my parents packed me off to my hometown for a long vacation. I spent the majority of that time at my Tatha’s home in Cuddalore, a small town near Puducherry. In the evenings, we had a routine. At 4 pm, after my aunt came home from work, tatha would wash his face, freshen up and get ready for the evening. He would emerge out of his room in either the blue check shirt or the brown t-shirt and his trademark white lungi, with the sweet fragrance of gokul santol talcum powder wafting off him.
Two cups of filter coffee later, we would move out to the veranda. Of the many conversations we had during that one hour, there is one I remember distinctly. He had asked me if I was planning to spend the rest of my life in Delhi. “Is that your home?” he had asked. I had told him yes, of course. I was born and brought up there so naturally, it was my home. “Do you not feel lonely there? Without anyone to speak Tamil with?” I did. I told him I did, but we had Tamil friends in Delhi, and then there were our regular temple visits. “It’s at the Tamil movie screenings though, packed full of Tamil audience, that I feel close to our community.” I had told him.
As I answered him, I realised how my sense of home at that time, of belonging, was closely associated with a specific community united by one language. I told my grandfather this, to which he promptly said, “but you went to a Telugu school! You do not even know how to read and write Tamil.” In Tamil, there is a word- Nadodi, meaning nomad. My tatha called me one, “you know too much Tamil to be living in Delhi, but you are too fair skinned to live with us here in Pondicherry” he had said to me when I asked him why he thought I was a nadodi. His logic may have been off charts, but it gave birth to new questions which I couldn’t articulate or answer.
My parents lay claim to Puducherry as their home, but when I had asked them if they would move back their answer was a prompt no. My father’s response was to say “family is home now. Besides things have changed so much there, I barely recognise it sometimes.” Appa may not return to Pondy, but if you were to ask him, was Delhi home then? there would be an even stronger NO. “I came to this city to survive, to give you a better future. But this is not where I belong. I live here because I have spent thirty-four years here. I may not belong here, but it is more familiar to me today than my native land.”
When I asked Amma the same question, she shared appa’s sentiments. “I can manage here, but if it gets too unsafe and dangerous here, I would move somewhere cleaner, without all this pollution.” Why not Pondy then, I ask her- “because people there meddle a lot in each other’s affairs.” she tells me. “The bottom line is, I do not have the will or energy to move back there or even anywhere else. I did that thirty-one years ago. If we move back to our native land again, we will again have to make friends, new neighbours, another community. Like appa said, Delhi is not home. I will always love ghee roast dosa and my affinity to it will never change, but the Chole Bhature is also not that bad! You just learn to adapt and eventually what we adapt to becomes home as well.”
My parents aren’t the only ones who feel this way. When families migrate from one part of the country to another, cultures clash and we often try to retain our identities and mobilise ourselves. There is a dual tendency to assimilate and adopt the dominant culture, but also at the same time replicate their natal culture as far as possible in the new environment. The next person who I spoke to is someone who moved to Delhi as a young lad in the eighties, whose association with Delhi is just like my parents’- bittersweet.
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Armed with the address of a Tamil family living in Delhi, Chandra Sekar uncle or Santro uncle as we used to call him back in the day due to his obsession with that particular car, left his home Tiruchirapalli on 16th February 1982. “When I boarded the Tamil Nadu express that day, my heart was heavy. I still remember feeling terrified about leaving my aged mother behind. A sense of guilt accompanied me till Itarsi junction. When my co-passenger informed me that we were at Madhya Pradesh, I suddenly realised how far away from home I really was. I couldn’t sleep that night out of nervous excitement, as I was a young lad, who was going against the grain in his family by crossing the Tamil Nadu borders. I was the first one in our family to do so, the brave one” uncle tells me proudly.
I listen to him, thinking what swirl of emotions he must have been feeling- sad and guilty, then excited and finally shocked. “The first shock, when the enormity of my decision actually sunk in, was when I called for auto” uncle tells me. “That guy didn’t know English and I didn’t know a word of Hindi.” The entire way, from Nayi Dilli to Malviya Nagar, he did not speak a word to the autowallah, fearing that the guy would charge him extra thinking he is new to the city. “Communication was the biggest problem I encountered in Delhi. The trouble I went through to reach Shram Shakti Bhawan on my joining day . . . my god . . . if it were you, you’d have given up the job itself. DTC bus was in fewer those days, and I couldn’t read or understand any Hindi.”
I ask about the city, what did he think of the Delhi when he arrived? “It looked like a jungle, mostly underdeveloped back then. What you see today, half of it was developed during the 1982 Asian Games. It was a very important catalyst in Delhi’s development- new roads, five star hotels, even flyovers were constructed for the first time in Delhi. I have seen this city develop horizontally and now vertically as high rise buildings pop up due to lack of space. Delhi was a jungle then, and a jungle even now- a concrete jungle.”
“I thought it was still a jungle when I came here” Nalini aunty buts in, his wife. 21 years old and newly married, she came to Delhi in April 1985. “We changed 10 houses from 1985-1995 until uncle got a government quarter allotted in Pushp Vihar. But the only solace was, wherever we shifted to, we made sure there were Tamil neighbours. Because I knew neither Hindi nor English, I didn’t even go out of the house initially. I began making friends at the Temple, as there were many young women like me who had come to Delhi after marriage. I would eagerly look forward to our Sunday visits to Kamakshi Amman temple. That’s where your mother and I became friends. ”
Speaking of changing homes, uncle tells me how as a bachelor nobody was ready to rent him rooms. He was a foreigner in Delhi, a “second class” citizen as he calls it, and all landlords wanted some guarantee before leasing rooms back in the day. “I had no relatives or friends who could give guarantee for me here. The friends I had in office were also bachelors.” Once he found a home in RK Puram sector three, the rent was 200rs while his total salary was 450rs.“In Tamil Nadu, we had a system of hotel mess, but here there was nothing of such sort. My Idli was being replaced by Roti. My default diet of rice-based food was abruptly changed to wheat-based one.”
More than anything, it was the emotional challenge of not knowing Hindi and lack of communication that Chandra Sekar uncle emphasizes the most. “I had no one to speak with. I would write letters to my mother every Tuesday and that was my only intimate communication with a person for a long while. Then I found the Malai Mandir in RK Puram sector 8. I went there solely for the purpose of meeting Tamil people and finding someone to speak with. I finally found friends, Tamizh speaking friends in Tamil Sangam.” With a smile on his face, he recounts the first time he had gone to watch a movie in Delhi. “At the Regal cinema, once a week they would run some old Tamil movie. It was a morning show of M.G.Ramachandran’s Manthiri Kumari. The movie began with the second half, as they had mistakenly put the wrong reel. The entire theatre had erupted as it was an M.G.R film.”
“Tell her about the climate change also. Remember how much I struggled after giving birth to Selva during peak winters in November?” Nalini aunty once again interjects from the Veranda. I turn around to look at her. Knowing she has got my attention, she continues. “I had no idea Veni ma . . . nobody told me they were sending me off to a land of such extreme weather. I had never worn a sweater in my life, and there I was knitting caps and socks for my baby. I only had sarson ka tel to moisturise cracked and dry skin. And you know how hard it is to wash the oil smell of clothes, that too in ice cold water. Unlike now, winters in those days were very cold.” She visibly shudders at the memory of having her first child in such frigid temperatures.
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| Chandra Sekar uncle and Nalini aunty |
Uncle abruptly pulls me back into our previous conversation “you should know though, this communication problem was solely reserved for us Tamilians. Unlike other states, Hindi was not at all taught in Tamil Nadu.” He is referring to the anti-Hindi movement that erupted in TN during the sixties, following Periyar’s opposition to make Hindi compulsory in the region in 1937. Even today, Tamil Nadu state syllabus does not teach Hindi. “I was informed about the Central Hindi Directorate by one of my colleagues. I went there and I was told that Hindi could be learned even though my mother tongue. You see I had to learn the language at any cost for survival sake. I was losing money at shops because I didn’t know what a tees or a chaalis was.”
He surprises me with what he tells me next. “Do you know what actually led to a stronger bond among us Tamilians living in RK Puram? It was the 1984 Sikh riots.” He tells me how he was on his way to office when somebody on the bus he was travelling told him that Indira Gandhi had been killed. Outside AIIMS there were thousands of people waiting in line to donate blood for Gandhi. “Nobody knew who had killed her until noon. I saw so many people standing outside AIIMS, and I thought Gandhi might survive after all. At half-day, we were asked to return home at the office, as news broke out that Gandhi had been assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards.”
On his way back home, things appeared normal as violence hadn’t broken out yet. “It all began after some Sikh’s in Nanakpura started distributing sweets, celebrating the demise of Indira Gandhi. Two sardaar’s were burned to death by the mob there, and that was one of the first in a series of such killings. I had never seen anything quite like it, the nation’s capital burning for three days.” But what does it have to do with the Tamil people coming together, I ask him. “Everybody knew that RK Puram was predominantly south Indian colony back then. It was 2nd November and the army was deployed to control the situation, but it was useless as mobs continued to attack them and nobody stopped it. My house owner first brought two Sikh men and hid them in his bathroom.” With a strange sense of excitement, he continues “I was taken along at night for patrolling to prevent any untoward incident in our locality, as many of us were hiding our Sikh brothers in our own homes. We even scared the mob away that was pelting stones at the Gurudwara in RK Puram sector three. It was strange to see my Tamil brothers uniting in times of dire need and saving other’s lives. In Tamil Nadu, they fought and killed amongst themselves.”
About six months or so after the riots, the Sikh brothers thanked their Tamil brethren by organising a langar in front of Tamil Sangam at RK Puram. Uncle even credits them for returning the favour by saving their lives after Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated at Sriperumbathur in 1991. “I am sure these north Indians would have gladly taken up arms against us in 1991 also, even though it was not our fault but the LTTE’s. During those days, riots were in fashion and mobs were always in waiting. I would like to believe that the Sikh brothers prevented such a situation from arriving, more than the government. They even helped us with food, shelter and clothing by travelling all the way to Tamil Nadu during the 2004 Tsunami.”
I end our discussion by asking him the same question I had asked my parents, where does he think his home is? “I may have a home in Delhi, but my sense of belonging will always belong to Tamil Nadu. I feel at home only among our Tamil speaking people.” Once again, I ask, why not move back to his native place then? “Even though it is a concrete jungle, I would prefer to stay back in Delhi. You see, previously there were two choices- convenience of the city and the calmness of my village. But it’s all the same for me; my native place Trichy has also become cosmopolitan now. Now, wherever I go I will again have to rebuild a life. Why should I? I have formed a community here; it is true when they say friends are like family. So I will always choose to stay back here in Delhi.”
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south Indian style, decorating our homes with
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| Ashtami and Navami celebration at friends home. |
In fact, I had met and spoken to our family friends on the last day of Navratri, Dashami. It is the day when everyone annually meets at the Kamakshi Temple for the Chandi Homam. As I sat there listening to their stories of hardships and triumphs after migration to Delhi, the common thread that runs between them all is the shared sense of belonging with each other.
On Dasami, at the Kamakshi Temple
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