The Whirlwind Tour Pt.1

Day 1

Filter Coffee and Manuscripts

It was 6 in the morning, and our train, Chennai Express, stopped at the Chennai Central Station in Tamil Nadu. It was full of bustling crowds, as is usual in India. We were on platform number 9 and were searching for one of those footbridges to take us to the entrance of the station and had to ask a Tamilian in English, who pointed us in the right direction. As we went to the right, my mind made the connection to the Kings Cross Station in London, UK. It was a very pleasant surprise because the station was just a very brown version of the Kings’ Cross station. The first four platforms were halfway in the station, giving way for the passengers to walk in front of them, and there was a wall with spaces in the front and at its end for us to walk to the other platforms. We walked out, already excited with this little discovery, and ready to uncover more. 

We found our driver, Shanmugam, who, fortunately, knew some broken Telugu, so we didn’t have to embarrass ourselves. As he took us in his car to the guest house we were gonna stay the next day in, I was treated to a sleepy Chennapatnam. There was a bit of construction work going on right in front of the station, but other than that, it was a mixture of the old English buildings, and with wide, cool roads with trees and vegetation on either side. We reached the guest house pretty soon and got ready for the day’s ‘adventures’. The driver decided to take us to the local temples before we set out sightseeing. 

The first temple was a temple of Lord Muruga, also known as Kumaraswamy. There were 18 steps leading up to the temple, which, Nanna said, was the Keralite style of building temples. There was Lord Vinayaga at the beginning, because he is the God of beginnings, and then we went to the main deity’s temple and were given flowers and some ‘Vibhoodi’, an ashy substance that you apply to your forehead, and chest if you’re a man. After that, we were taken to another temple dedicated to the same God. And finally, we stopped at the Ashtalakshmi temple, which has all the 8 forms of Goddess Lakshmi (the Goddess of wealth and prosperity). It was right next to the ocean, and it was huge, with dizzying, narrow stairways leading to each form of the goddess. I got more flowers and Nanna got some vermilion to take home.  

We got out of the temple by 10 am, and decided to stop for coffee before going to the museum, and the driver stopped at a place called ‘Sangeetha’ Restaurant. We ordered 3 filter coffees for us three. Now, the Tamilians have this Indianised concept of a cup and saucer. They have a bowl-like vessel under the glass, which has coffee in it till the brim. You pour some of the coffee into the little bowl and drink from the glass and refill it with more coffee from the bowl. And every coffee addict will agree when I say that Chennai has the best filter coffee in all of India, and these cups were no exception. After getting a fix of caffeine, we hit the road with renewed vigour. 

The famous Filter Coffee

 We got to the museum by 11 am. It was a vast campus, with huge red brick buildings. We got tickets for us and for my camera. Our first visit was to the anthropology section, which had all the artefacts and things used by the tribes of the time. There were spears, vessels, jewellery, and musical instruments used by the tribes of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. The ones used by the Kerala people were a bit different from the ones of the other states. There were also writing instruments and bamboo shoots, which were first used for scribing. But Nanna was wanted to see the manuscripts that the people of yonder wrote on palm leaves. We couldn’t find any of that in the exhibits. 

I was inclined on just carrying on with our normal tour, but Nanna was insistent. So we went to the inscriptions buildings, in the hope that there would be some manuscripts. We tried asking at the reception, but they had no idea what we were talking about and were repeatedly pointing to the map of the campus. So we went to the section anyway and noticed that the language the people used was similar to the present day Telugu or Tamil. We could almost read the matter on the inscriptions which were in Telugu. We saw large ‘books’, which were copper plates, which were all bound by a large metallic bangle with a seal, marking the beginning of the inscription. 

But Nanna didn’t want any of this. He wanted to see the manuscripts. So we went back to the reception and asked them again. They fidgeted and pointed to an old man at an office outside. He didn’t look like he would even understand the word ‘manuscripts’, but we tried anyway. He simply told us to go to the office, which was a dilapidated little building nestled in trees. We decided to give it a try. A woman in the office heard me and Nanna talking in Telugu and asked if we were from Andhra Pradesh. We gratefully said yes, and she spoke to us in Telugu, and took us into a small lane on the side and pointed to another little building, which had a little scooter parked in front of it. She said that there would be a woman called Gandhimathi, who would help us with the manuscripts. We were excited at finally getting somewhere and went to the building. 

But as we got closer, I noticed that it was locked, and there was no one at the window. It seemed a bit off because the bike was there, and not a single soul was in the building. And then out of nowhere, a man came through the trees from one side of the building. Come to think of it, it seemed like a scene in some mystery movie, where the villain would come out of the greens and kill someone with a sickle. But this was just a normal guy on a cycle, with a packet of buttermilk. We decided to ask him if he knew Gandhimathi, and as soon as we said her name, he perked up and told us in Tamil to look in the building. I returned that there was only the bike and no one else. He then led us to another man and told him to take us to some lady. It was all like a story out of a novel, each person leading us to something new. This other man took us to a small empty office which had a plump lady behind the desk. She asked us if we had Gandhimathi’s number, and we said no. 

And then she proceeded to give us her number, but only after confirming that we weren’t a pair of serial killers. We tried calling on the number, but the voice on the phone said the person was out of the coverage area. We decided to go for lunch and try again. 

The driver took us to a restaurant called Ashoka restaurant, where we had a south Indian Thali, or a full on meal, with about 9 different dishes, and rice. But Sambaar was the Rajinikanth of the meal and Rasam was the Kamal Hasan. We dug in and went back to the museum to seek Gandhimathi. We called her, and this time, she answered. She was fluent in English so we didn’t have a problem with the language front. But she did help us by telling us that all the manuscripts had been shifted to the Anna Centenary Library. 

We jumped back in the car and went to the Library. The library turned out to be a huge 7-storied building, which seemed very unlikely, especially in India, because we don’t give that much of priority to libraries, because the politicians are mostly focused on amassing wealth for themselves. We went to the reception and asked for the location of the manuscripts. The lady at the desk told us to go to the first floor. We went to the first floor and saw only magazines and a children-friendly library with all the animation movies and all. But there was no sign of any manuscripts. We came to the slow conclusion that the receptionist must have confused the word manuscripts to magazines. And then we found an article taped to one of the glasses and asked a passerby to read and translate for us and went to the 7th floor as he instructed, and lo behold. There were numerous cabinets filled with manuscripts written in all the four languages. We spotted a woman and a man at the receptionist’s table, taking photographs of a manuscript. 

We lingered around at the entrance, trying to come up with a legitimate excuse for asking about manuscripts, and finally made up our minds that I was here because I was researching for a good base on manuscripts for my next book. Fortunately, the staff working in the library knew Telugu, and they were more than happy to show us around. He took us in and told us that there were manuscripts ranging back around a thousand years. There were even manuscripts that had the Hindu epic ‘Ramayanam’ and ‘Mahabharatham’. The officer even told us how these manuscripts are preserved. They are coated in lemongrass oil and spirit. He invited us to select any manuscript and a personnel would get it for us. We even saw a scanning machine, which was used in scanning these documents and sending them across the world digitally. 

There was a European guy who was studying some Telugu documents. There was also a woman and her nephew poring over old scriptures, and when they heard us talking, introduced themselves as Telugu people too. The lady told us that she was studying PhD in Astrology or something Close to it. Nanna made me give her my visiting card that I had made when my book got published. She looked at the name and asked us if we were Kapulu or brahmins, which were both names of different castes. I felt the heat rushing into my face, and my mental image of her just reduced to that of a minuscule speck. I did not answer, hoping that she’ll just let it go, but she just made it worse, so I looked at Nanna for an answer. I could tell that he was clearly uncomfortable with the question. Its a very complex thing, this question, because the future of the whole conversation depends on whether she likes our answer. The lady persisted, saying that some of her relatives have the same last name, which was probably a lie, but now Nanna had to answer. But after this, if she said that she’d won the Padma Bhushan, I wouldn’t be impressed with her. 

Casteism is almost like apartheid or racism. Its like cannibalism in a way, meaning you discriminate amongst yourselves in your own religion.

And of course, a few of the castes are higher than the other, and hence decide to lay out all the rules of life, which are, of course, favourable to them. Its been a few decades since then, and most of the younger generation is indifferent to it all, casteism is still rooted deep in most of the adults, and if they don’t like your caste, you’re nothing to them, which is why I just don’t see the point of caste and get irritated if someone asks me which caste I belong to, because honestly, its nobody's business. 

She asked me why I was here looking for manuscripts, and I made up a story about how I was researching on manuscripts and how they were preserved for my book. She proceeded to explain that the manuscripts needed to be pressed down to be preserved and that even a little amount of dampness would destroy them. We got some manuscripts from the cabinets and tried to decipher the old Telugu script because most of these were handwritten because there were no printing machines yet, and if you wanted to preserve something, you had to copy it all word for word.

We spent an hour at this facility and got back, feeling like we went on an adventure. It was a great start to the whirlwind tour. 

Read the next Part here: Whirlwind Tour Pt.2