My father hailed from Thanjavur or Tanjore as the British anglicized it, and my memories of this ancient historic city from my childhood are both vivid and fading. My paternal grandparents lived in this city for most of their lives, and my father being their eldest son, we would dutifully visit them every summer, making the long-awaited trip by train from Madurai, down South. My father was an officer in the Indian Railways and this entitled our family to travel for free throughout the length and breadth of India, so needless to say, we availed of this privilege extensively, Thanjavur becoming one of our regular jaunts every year. The excitement in the children was palpable as the train neared the city, and almost always, we would take a horse-drawn carriage (kudhirai vandi) from the station to our ancestral house. We children would pile into the carriage, scrambling to be seated next to the driver and the horse. If that was taken, then we would vie with each other to sit at the back, with our legs hanging out of the carriage and swinging in unison to the motion of the carriage as the horse sped off.
My memory of the house in which my grandparents lived is of this huge, palatial building with an equally imposing flight of steps and massive columns or pillars that supported the vast verandah. As a child, it was one of my favorite pastimes to compete with my assorted cousins to see who could get their arms around these pillars and have their fingers touch. It was always impossible for me to do just that, and if my memory serves me right, the pillars were so huge that even the older children couldn't accomplish that. The house was sprawling, built in the colonial style of the day, and I would gaze up at the ceiling and marvel at the huge wooden rafters that ran along the entire length of the ceiling. The furniture too was typically British, and there was an armoire in the living room that occupied a pride of place and was always kept under lock and key. It contained a treasure trove of biscuits and cookies sent by my aunt who lived in Singapore, and we children would wait for my grandmother to open it and give us our treat of goodies for the day. And the child who pleased my grandmother by behaving well or helping her out would get something extra as well.
The dining room and the kitchen were sunken and we had to go down a set of steps to access these rooms. I used to love the smell of the woodfires in the kitchen, its cosy warmth, and the aroma of food wafting out of it the entire day. No electric stoves, no food processors, but elementary, basic ways of cooking that warm my heart to this day. I would sit next to Bommi, the maid, as she ground the spices for the masalas for the various dishes, and chat with her as she asked me about my school or the temple or some such thing in Madurai. Chopra, the farmhand, would feed and milk the cows in the side yard, and it was always fascinating to watch him at his chores as he occasionally allowed us to give him a helping hand. There was fresh milk aplenty from the cows and people in the neighborhood would come to buy milk from us, pausing to chat with my grandmother as she supervised the servants measuring out the milk. I also remember the hay being stacked in mountainous piles and we children would take enormous pleasure ascending and sliding down these mini mountains and combating the itch it gave us later on.
The best part of my visit to Thanjavur was the weekly visit to the sandhai, the local version of the farmer's market. My grandmother being a teacher at the local school, all the vendors knew her personally and would ask her about their children's performance at school as she stopped at their stalls. There was no bargaining for Grandma because she always got the best deals there. The vendors were all very respectful towards my grandmother and the kid who accompanied "Teacher Amma" would always get a handful of free stuff, like peanuts, gooseberries, achu vellam (small cubes of jaggery), porikadalai (fried, split channa dhal) and other eatables. Each grandchild got his or her turn to go with my grandmother to the market, and we were all eager to do so only because the trip always ended with her buying us a tall glass of "Gunakudi Dhasan", a local sherbet of sorts made out of roots and herbs such as nannaari and vettiver. With a specially concocted essence and large chunks of ice in it, the sherbet was heaven to us kids. Grandma was an expert at cooking fish and crab, and she would pick and choose the best that was for sale, only to return home and cook a veritable feast for all of us. She had a special clay pot to cook the fish curry in, and she always stated that fish tasted best cooked in a clay utensil rather than a metal one.
We would also make a visit to the family fields outside Thanjavur where rice was cultivated. To us city-bred children, the walk in the fields was delightful as we traipsed along on the mud pathways amidst the flowing green paddy fields, dipping our feet in the irrigation canals or watching wide-eyed the tiny field crabs scuttling away from our trampling feet. Harvest season is another vivid memory, the farmhands cutting and threshing the paddy, separating the rice kernels from the chaff and filling huge gunny sacks with the rich grain to be transported back home. There was a special room like a granary of sorts in my grandparents' house where all the sacks of rice were piled high up to the ceiling. My grandfather being asthmatic, he would relax on the verandah at nightfall in an easychair, as we children squealed and yelled, running around playing our childish games. Grandpa always had dosais (crispy rice and lentil crepes) for dinner while the rest of the family ate rice, and only the younger ones, myself included, would get the golden brown dosais as a special treat.
Thanjavur having been the seat of power of the Chozha dynasty, it had its own palaces, forts, temples and other historic structures. The Thanjai Periya Koil, one of the famous temples in Tamilnadu, boasts a huge nandhi or bull hewn from a single piece of rock, and I remember gazing at it with awe, myself so puny and insignificant beside its gargantuan size. I had such an idyllic time in Thanjavur which all came to an end after my grandfather passed away. My grandmother became too old to live there alone and eventually moved to Madurai to be with her children. Only my father's younger brother lived there, and he too moved to Madurai for good after his wife passed away. Visits to Thanjavur slowly became a thing of the past, only to remain alive in my memories. As the years have gone by, some of those memories are fading as well. If only I could relive those good old days again, how glorious it would be! How sad that my son has no idea of his mother's childhood spent in Thanjavur, except from a few paragraphs written by her and an occasional story or two recounted to him in the midst of our busy lives!
If only we could all be transported back to the past!
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