we arrived in chennai at noontime; the slow ride thru knotted traffic past billboards for the latest movies in tamil hindi and english as well as for political purposes of some kind or another, boasting towering and terrifying images of sonia gandhi, jayalalitha, others... at length arriving at our hotel hidden down some side street in triplicane. quiet and airy and simple if smudgy and flaking and rough around the edges, tho the presence of a film crew throughout the bottom floor, overflowing from the courtyard, wires snaking out around a tumble of tables and chairs, meant that at night as they shot some seedy cabaret scene we would awake listening to loud tamil voices and bangs, cracks, stompings down the length of the hallway.
whatever the disturbance of these doings in the hotel, it was a welcome refuge from the city, which from what i could tell seemed mostly made for cars, walking almost impossible. the only real nice walk we had was down the edge of the beach, past all the thatched huts of fisherman, past the huddle of their boats on the beach, past women pounding away at their laundry, past fish spread out on the pavement to dry in the sun.
what else? a dance-drama about manipur with dancing and incredible staging, all the time each moment looking like a picture, at the music academy with roopa, tapas at a too-cool-to-be-true restaurant down the street afterwards... our first south indian thalis, yumyum... the supposed resting place of st. thomas in a modern, brightly lit, antiseptic and marble-lined crypt... the most adamant auto-rickshaw-wallahs i have ever encountered, insulted and in fact closed by any attempt at bargaining down to a fair price...
other than this, there some temples, some churches, some malls, some museums, all were fine and nice but i felt like i didn’t know how to make it all coherent, i couldn’t draw connections and figure out what chennai was really. maybe partially because it isn’t a walking city, things felt like they didn’t coalesce into something i could see as unique or even really identifiable in some way as being chennai rather than being some other city. maybe it is a city that takes more time to know. maybe its the kind city that hides away in people’s homes, and other un-public places. or maybe we were just missing something.
in the midst of all this dust and congestion tho we didn’t feel much like sticking around to wait for chennai’s heart n soul to reveal itself, so we set off ahead of schedule for mamallapuram aka mahabalipuram, down the coast.
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