When Rahul, who lives in Toronto, said he wanted to visit his ancestral village and worship at the temple where his ancestors had worshipped, I was pleasantly surprised. ‘There is something to be said for exile,’ I thought, remembering R. Parthasarathy. ‘You learn roots are deep.’
We set out for Kayarambedu on the penultimate Saturday of the holy month of Purattasi. With me were Shanthi, Rahul, and his family consisting of his wife, Sripriya, and his six-year-old daughter, Srishti. None of them had seen the village before; in fact, I was visiting the village myself after about fifty years.
The car pulled up at a square where there was a crowd of villagers. The surroundings were dotted with shanties and awful-looking roadside eats with a rough narrow road with crumbling edges meandering behind an Ambedkar in a blue coat. Behind us, horns honked impatiently.
I lowered the window and was hit by voices, music, horns, sirens and tobacco smoke. ‘Kayarambedu…’ I shouted, ‘Can you tell me the way to Kayarambedu?’
‘Kayarambedu?’ queried an old man after blowing a puff of smoke into the air. ‘Go this way,’ he said, pointing to the rough road behind the Ambedkar statue, ‘and turn right where the road forks.’
From the fork, the path wobbled above, up on an old embankment from which a herd of buffaloes was climbing down. The sense of déjà vu was overwhelming. I said, ‘Certain things don’t change.’
‘What doesn’t change, Thatha?’ asked Srishti.
I pointed to the buffaloes and said, ‘A herd of buffaloes climbing down this tank bund after a nice bath. I used to watch this day after day through the classroom window when I was a child like you.’
‘So, there is a school here?’
‘On your right.’
‘You studied here, Thatha?’
‘Sort of. I spent a couple of years here. There were only two teachers for the whole school, and they were busy chatting.’
‘And you were left to watch buffaloes.’
This evoked a peal of merry laughter.
We drove past the school and a Shiva temple. The car gingerly moved into a narrow street, slowed to a crawl and came to a halt in front of the remains of what must once have been a temple. ‘Google Map says this is Kariamanikka Perumal Temple,’ said the driver.
‘But it doesn’t look much like a temple,’ Shanthi complained. ‘It doesn’t even have a gopuram.’
‘This is the place,’ I reassured her. ‘Of course, it’s worse than it used to be in the past. But, even in the past, it never had a gopuram, but it didn’t seem to cause any unease to our ancestors who worshipped here.’ I twinkled and added, ‘And they were quite well-to-do.’ I chuckled at the astonishment on her face.
I turned my attention to the temple now. It looked much smaller than it was when I was a child, shrunken and pathetic. The dhvajastambham had disappeared, and so had the thirumadaipalli (sacred kitchen). But the balipeetam and the sacred well remained intact. So did the pradakshina patha which, to my surprise, was well laid out.
We went into the temple. Moolavar thirumanjanam was going on, and the “priest” performing it was a young man (who later told me that he was the archaka’s son and a student of MBA in an engineering college in a neighbouring town). Milk, curd, turmeric water, and plain water were pouring in a steady stream over the stone idol unaccompanied by any kattiyam (‘Kattiyam? What’s that?’ the young man later asked me). Every now and then, the young man waved his hand, and the congregation outside the sanctum responded with a rousing chorus of ‘Govinda, Go-vinda!’ It was an unconventional way of performing an abhishekam, but quite impressive, and the Lord was smiling enigmatically as if amused by this new ritual. Whenever there was a Govinda gosham (roar), his eyelids flickered open and he looked at the crowd winsomely!
The archaka arrived now. It turned out he was a Telugu pantulu belonging to the smarta tradition and was unacquainted with Sri Vaishnava sampradayam. There was, therefore, no chanting of ‘Tadviṣṇoḥ paramaṁ padaṁ sadā paśyanti sūrayaḥ…’ at the time of the aarti; there was no ‘Pallaandu, pallaandu…’ either. There was only an invigorating chorus of ‘Govinda, Go-vinda!’ and the Lord listened to this namasmarana with an expression of pure rapture on his face. Karumanikka Perumal is an undemanding god; he knows that the key to happiness is being easily pleased. One of the villagers had brought some naivedyam cooked in her house, and the pantulu had no hesitation in offering it to the Lord. The temple didn’t seem to be captive to brahminical traditions any longer; it had become egalitarian!
I came out of the temple to explore the street. It looked small and shrunken with abandoned or neglected houses on both sides falling apart. Didn’t people live in this street anymore? Broken beams hung down from the tiled roof of Rangaswamy Ayyangar’s house. I looked wistfully at the raised platform adjacent to the entrance which had been reduced to rubble now. On this thinnai, Uncle Chinnappa, who was a gifted raconteur, used to regale us, children of the agraharam, with delightful tales, so full of adventure, emotion, adult content, and scatological humour, from Tamil folklore, especially Aaayiram Thalaivaangiya Apoorva Chintamani. The house I grew up in used to be just opposite this house. I turned back and found in the place of the house a bleak and desolate landscape.
Now a group of villagers came. They were curious to know who this old man was, and why he was surveying the agraharam. I introduced myself. None of them knew me, but my father’s name worked like magic. ‘I’m Natesan’s son, Sami,’ said a 75-year-old man. ‘Your father was a great person. We miss him.’
‘Sir, not swamy,’ I corrected him, but he shook his head.
More people came now, introducing themselves as Aiyaavu’s son, Veerabhadra Naicker’s younger son, Gopalu’s elder son, Ponnuswamy’s daughter, somebody else’s daughter-in-law, and so on. They all spoke about my father with affection.
‘Can you recognize me?’ a shaky voice asked. I shook my head.
‘I’m Kasi.’
‘Meenakshi’s son?’
His dark face beamed with delight when he nodded his head. ‘You remember my mother!’ His eyes grew moist with tears of joy. ‘I am 82 now.’
I gave him a hug and said, ‘But you don’t look so, Kasi.’
The crowd watched this scene with fascination. ‘It’s like being with your father again,’ said an old man. ‘It feels so good.’
An angry, raspy voice spoke from behind. ‘What your relatives did to your family was terrible. I was here when they came to sell the property. It was rough, aggressive… the action and the language. The Lord…’
‘Oh, no,’ I turned round and protested. ‘I don’t want to hear about it. I just wanted my granddaughter’s feet to touch this soil, and I’m glad they did so. Today, three generations of my family stood together and worshipped at the temple where several generations of the Asuri family had worshipped in the past. It’s a great feeling, and I want to savour it to the full.’
As the car wound around the tank bund, I said to Shanthi, ‘I’m glad I came here at least now. I owe it to Rahul. The visit gave me an opportunity to come to terms with my father with whom I had not been on speaking terms for over a decade until his death in 1986.’
