In me, a brand new gaze finds a brand new Chennai

Once I ask it for the Madras I grew up in, Chennai foregrounds softy cones melt-dripping bright-white into seaside sand; tamarinds stone-struck off branches and cracked open, tang on tongue; flute-song wafting on sea breeze, lullabies drifting into tuition lecture rooms; school-bus daydreaming previous peepal, previous palm.

In my twenties, after years of working and finding out on different shores, I got here again to Chennai newly interested in collectivities, politics, energy. Chennai gives, then, Periyar Thidal, the place stone slabs below banyans announce, “There isn’t any god” — sacred blasphemy serenely nestled within the leafy coronary heart of a temple city. It gives me protests at Valluvar Kottam — memorial to a poet activist — the place a whole lot collect, banners proclaiming: “Cease bull-dozing democracy” and “No place for hate.”

Then, in a troublesome soul season, once I ask Chennai for a therapeutic quiet, it lays, in my path, Tholkappia Poonga — an estuary surrounded by mangrove inexperienced, frequented by solely a handful of walkers and plush with different life. I am going each day. I study, there, phrases like “cormorant” and “egret” and “wagtail”; study to stroll attentively to spare domino roaches, pink bugs and beetles. I study, from considerate rock-slab signage, how effortfully restored and conserved that outdated, fragile ecosystem is.

One night, one other walker pauses to ask: “Have you ever heard? They’re going to place concrete in all places. They’re going to chop down the timber.” Coronary heart-sink. Every week later, I’m within the Chennai River Restoration Belief workplace, throughout from an irritated bureaucrat telling me that they might not concretise the paths, they might not reduce the timber. However after all: Concrete has been carried in, timber reduce, the estuary closed for renovations for the previous 12 months. In me, a brand new gaze finds a brand new Chennai: that is, above all else, a waterscape in relentless negotiation with urbanity’s impulse to beat, to need.

In Odiyur, a lagoon resists a freeway. In Kattupalli, a coast resists a megaport. In Ennore, a river and a creek stand the place industries and energy crops spill poison upon poison. Urbanity wins small battles. In annual floods and relentless erosion, water has its say. The casualties, regardless, are the identical: Weak communities, displaced or put out of labor; marine and avian and bug life, rendered breathless, habitat-less; a metropolis at massive, flood-prone, conscience heavy.

I ask Chennai: Is it attainable in any respect? For human impulses to coexist with the remainder of life? It gives, a brief drive away, Vedanthangal, the place for hundreds of years farmer people have protected the waterbirds, grateful for his or her fertilising guano. It suggests a peek on the Theosophical Nice Banyan, stored effortfully secure and alive for a whole lot of years, allowed an acre of its personal. I believe too of the frangipanis and copperpods I climbed as a baby, the gulmohar buds we wore as nail paint, the rosary pea seeds we collected like gems. Our truest impulse, Chennai recollections remind me, is to playmate and co-create with non-humanness. Sometime, we’ll bear in mind.

In my current Chennai, I drink two coffees slowly throughout the eating desk from my accomplice and we chitchat, late into the morning, about essays we’ve each learn in quiet. It’s a clear-skied Sunday. We realise we need to be outdoors. We discuss over a prawn curry lunch about the place to go. Kotturpuram City Forest, to see the flying foxes within the cluster of fig timber? Or Croc Financial institution, to the gharials and muggers and komodos? Or Pallikaranai or Sholinganallur or Damaged Bridge, to satisfy the storks and pelicans and herons and terns? We decide on a well-liked seaside cafe — a 3rd espresso can be good — however after we get there, the music is simply too loud to listen to the ocean so we set off shore-walking as an alternative.

We’re on a little bit of Panaiyur Seaside I haven’t seen earlier than, in 16 years right here. Egrets are selecting at fish drying on sheets. Crows are diving for clams. Barnacles have made houses of deserted chappals, bottles, driftwood. {Couples} canoodle, toddlers chase waves, ice-cream and balloon and juice distributors gaze sea-ward. That is acquainted, attractive stuff. That is house. Then, by the tide line, we see an Olive Ridley sea turtle, shell dented by trawler. Then one other, eyes bulged open from trawl-net suffocation. Mirrored in these eyes, I see its Chennai for the primary time: Treacherous, drowning, blue.

Jha is an essayist within the politics of the on a regular basis