Friends

The friends you make during childhood, boyhood and adolescence are the best, and those friendships are the longest lasting. Right? I must be a particularly lucky bloke, because friendship keeps coming my way even in my dotage. In the recent past, not only did I make a new friend, I also renewed contact with one who had been my mate back in 1960, all within a couple of days.

The moment I learnt that the Asian College of Journalism—where I teach Language and Style—was sending one batch of students to Thoothukudi as part of the Covering Deprivation project under which ACJ’s students travel to different parts of the country in some five or six batches, I eagerly volunteered to go there with the students as faculty supervisor. I had been a student of Subbiah Vidyalayam there in the year Flying Sikh Milkha Singh ran a brilliant 400m race at the Rome Olympics, with my father posted there as Agent of the Indian Overseas Bank. That is when I spent my idyll in the sun—literally—with our neighbours’ kids Subash, Nargunam and Ravi. The first two were brothers and Ravi was their cousin, and they were my and my brothers’ constant playmates.

Subash Hall Sargunaraj, for that was his full name, was a somewhat squat, solidly built athlete, around my age, which made him 13 or 14 that year. I came from a cricket family, with father, uncles, cousins and brothers as seriously interested and talented in the game as I was, most of them more gifted than I, though in the long run, I perhaps made better use of my resources.

Subash introduced me to the joys of track and field. For that golden year I learnt to long-jump, high-jump and triple-jump longer and higher than I could ever have imagined. I was still a distant second to Subash, but my distances/ heights were fast becoming respectable. Our house was within walking distance of the famous VOC College, though it was a really long walk, and we spent a vigorous couple of hours every evening on the sands bordering the college’s grounds. We followed the Rome Olympics with passionate interest, and were sorely disappointed when Milkha Singh so narrowly missed a medal at the Games.

The idyll came to a premature end when my father moved to Delhi to start a new job there and all of us went with him. I had to say goodbye to all my friends in Thoothukudi, including Ganesh, my classmate, his brothers and sisters, his parents Delhi Mama and Delhi Mami, Uday Shankar, son of sub-judge Bhavanishankar, another classmate NS Radhakrishnan, and most important of all Subash, his brother and cousins. Radhakrishnan moved to Madras soon afterwards and we remained in touch for a number of years, but I met Subash only once afterwards. It was probably in 1965 or so, when I was playing a match for Presidency College on the Marina grounds. He was in the city on a brief visit and he ran up to me fielding near the boundary and we exchanged a few words. I have yet to meet him since then, but I was able to trace him and he called me from Coimbatore where he lives when I was at Thoothukudi. It was quite easily the high point of the trip.

I also managed to locate the two houses at Chidambaranagar where we lived during our brief Thoothukudi sojourn in 1960-61, stare at Delhi Mami’s house, actually go to Subbiah Vidyalayam’s present school premises and meet the Headmaster and APC Shanmugham, Correspondent of the School—the latter a son of APC Veerabahu who had been my father’s friend—and even catch a glimpse of the old Indian Overseas Bank building on whose first floor my family spent a few days and nights before we moved to our residence at Chidambaranagar back in 1960.

All this was made possible by my new friend—Sriram, perhaps the most successful auditor in Thoothukudi, whose incredible affection and hospitality it was my privilege to enjoy during my visit to the pearl city.I have been in touch with Sriram through email over the past few years—ever since his daughter and my former student Harini told me in class that she was from Thoothukudi. Sriram has a phenomenal memory and appetite for making connections with people, digging into their family histories and bringing people together. Over the years I have known him, he has become an expert on my own family history, with probably a deeper knowledge of the various branches of my family than I have.

Even before I met Sriram—whom I telephoned on the first morning of my weeklong stay at Thoothukudi—he started sending goodies tro my hotel. On that first day, it was two large cakes, which I shared with the whole tour party. The next day, it was an enormous quantity of Tirunelveli halwa, followed on the morrow by some special Thoothukudi mixture, and then by some deilicous macaroons another pearl city special, so on and so forth. On top of all this I also had coffee and snacks at his place and lunch at a nearby mami’s mess as his guest. Thank you, Sriram for an unforgettable experience.

The Thoothukudi trip was also made memorable by a visit to my ancestral village Perunkulam, which happened to be right in our path, as we set out to study the problems faced by farmers depending on Tamraparani water for their irrigation, as a result of diversion to big industries and damage caused by effluents. My students were able to interact with Mr Ramanujam, who was once caretaker of our property, now gone, at Perunkulam and learn about his own experience as a farmer looking to the Tamraprani for water. But Perunkulam is quite another story, for another day.