The night is dangerous my friend. It is when the soul and mind are at the weakest. When you hear the arresting melody of Ithu Oru Kathal Mayakkam or when Ilayaraja turns his amrithavarshini (the raaga of Varuna, the rain god) magic on you, memory goes into a hyper drive mode that simply sucks you in. Like you just took a blue pill from Morpheus and for a while at least, you'd like to not snap back to reality. If you stay awake in the night for more than necessary, on a weekend night and play around with musicindiaonline.com - you set yourself up for feeling really sad and wretched. The thoughts wander into arbitrary directions and you ponder the irrational, compare apples and oranges and end up feeling despondent that you are unable to change the wheels of time that seems to be cranking fast and hard. It is incredible how the opium of nostalgia has relativity so implicit in it. If nostalgia is rational then, does your life gets progressively horrible as you grow old? If we feel that the past was so great then does that mean our present is dire? Does that mean the future will continue to go down the drain? You wonder if the past's favorable comparison with the present is really true. Was the past really that great or has our memory approximated our old pains into some sort of a romantic struggle, that we apportion as part of the grand scheme of life? Are we struggling to accept change and seek refuge in the comfort zone of the well-known past?
Although I started with music for the ears, my focus was really the nose. Music is a cliched or more traditional nostalgia trigger. It is incredible how a taste or smell takes you back many years into the past. The smell of sand just before rain fall is usually a popular choice. But let me humor you with some not so common things. We know that Sandal wood and Jasmine incense sticks (agarbathis) stirs memories through smell. 'Dasangam' is an other splendid invention with an enchanting smell. Some people like sambrani, but my favorite is Dasangam. When I get up on a Sunday morning, He-Man, dasangam, my grandfather singing 'Sitram Siru Kaalai' and saffron-flavored water is a memory package that is stunning in its ability to make me travel time. Somehow the smell of Masala dosai takes me to a different place. Maybe it is because MD is my favorite food item, ever, by quite a distance. Walking back from school with a heavy bag, I could smell Masala Dosai at beginning of my street and immediately recognized that my mom was surprising me with something from the restaurant. With a 15 year record of having ordered Masala Dosai everytime I walked into a restaurant, surprise was more in the timing than in content. The few times that I've had false positives, I've been so crushed (and cursed my neighbors too).
School (photo above) has its own set of intoxicating aromas. Let me focus again on the unusual. I remember the aroma of various hair oils in Thirunelveli. On aroma and school people focus on lunch. The smell of lunch is prevalent everywhere. When people open their tiffin boxes, a curious smell of korma, sambhar, egg, and dosai, fills the school. The smell of lunch is certainly a treasured smell. But the morning aroma takes a different dimension. My memories of those uneasy 10 minutes in the morning, before classes began is colored with the smell of Hair oil, Cutticura powder and sacred ash. I was in a time and place, where an empty forehead was rarely visible. All students had either kumkum, sandal or scared ash and at least 3 litres of oil in their hair. The hair was pressed down and combed to perfection. For a Madras guy this was too disciplined and odd.
Since the government of India passed an order in 1987 renaming all Math teachers as Srinivasan, there was some chaos in the opposition party of Rajagoplan math teachers. Maybe, due to being in school during the great war of Srinivasan Vs Rajagopalan, I have memories of the chalk filled hands of Rajagopalan math sir as he left the class after an hour full of intense shouting and beating. The memory of the moment when he grabbed the back of my collar and pushed my face down, is terrifying in its clarity. Freeze that moment. You are waiting for impact and you don't know if the pain will crush you or kill you. Quite terrible. But focus on the olfactory senses here. The smell of the desk wood remains in memory. That and the smell of chalk in his hand is actually remembered later as aroma. Even the name carved on the desk with compass and blade is vivid in all its sepia tone glory. After impact, the pain radiates in your back like those glowing Eastman Color red spots they show in medicine advertisements. The smell of chalk and the feel of a virgin unused chalk piece was so stimulating to the senses. This time I visited my school and photographed the class. It was surreal.
Standing near the kitchen and watching your mom/grandma cook those extravagant dishes for a festival had its own set of smells. The Murukku, Thamizh Nadu's gift to the world, had a smell that was quite distinct from Omapodi. The smell of decoction when the filter is opened hits you like a two-ton brick. Laddu and Rava laddu had two distinct aromas. Memories of the distinction usually hits you in the middle of a design meeting several years later and make you cough on your status reports. The best smell to me was that of 'vadam/vetthal'. The vetthal koozh has a smell and taste that is incredible. To me, nirvana is the half-dried-vetthal. After your grandma puts the vetthal in the terrace to let it dry, you sneak up there a few hours later and tear the vethal out from the funky white sheet. It is half dried and half semi-solid koozh. Taste it and you'll know what I am talking about. It still makes my hand go to my head and brings out a silly smile. Someday I'll build a monument bigger than the Taj Mahal for the half-dried Vetthal.
Talking with friends late into the evening is an unforgettable album in the memory archives. The parapet wall, cricket bat, and wet tennis ball all have a smell that is as good as Ilayaraja's music. Recollections of chatting with friends sitting on a parapet wall at 7:30'ish in the evening is an incredible emotion of sadness and serenity. If you arrive late after the group has finished playing cricket then you ask someone to toss you the ball in the dark evening, until the ball is no more visible. Slowly the talk floats to every topic under the sun. You keep throwing and spinning the ball against each other in some random way and talk incessantly. Some people look at the watch and say "I'll leave in 5 minutes". They do that for 2 hours. The smell of evening grass grows on you. The incredible conversations about crushes, gossip and irrational fears about career on those parapet wall and St. Thomas Mt railway station makes you think about the conversation every time you cross that station.
On the topic of stations, don't you think Thirusulam is a more pleasant station than any other station? There is something about its cleanliness and empty spaces that makes it more special. This brings me to Madras and its beauty. Madras is so beautiful when it rains that you can write a Jekyll and Hyde story based on its summer and monsoon seasons. Travelling in an auto or suburban train when it rains is particularly awesome. In an auto you position yourself in the center of the seat to avoid getting wet and watch the wind beat the hell out of the blanket like protectors, the auto-karan has unrolled for you. Feeling cold in Madras needs to be treasured as a monument. Thank god! for the cross ventilation and the wind chill factor that the auto provides. It is sometimes a pleasure to watch the small wheels hit the puddles and the pedestrians jump to avoid the splash. In the train, especially when the train stops in Thirusulam, rain looks beautiful like never before. If you are travelling in train overnight, the water dropping on the bars of the window, early morning, is like god's little musical rhythm. The mood sweeps are acute when it rains the day before the exam. You are cramming and you have the nagging feeling that it is raining outside. There seems to be flicker of a vision, of some pleasantness that you promise you will experience when it rains after the exams. But you never get around to doing that.
Finally, walking in Venkat Narayana road with a head phones playing the immortal "Ithu oru pon maalai pozhuthu" and staring from the terrace, staring into the sunset with a transistor (541) playing the mesmerizing and probably one of the best songs I have ever heard, "Anthi Mazhai pozhigirathu" is all you can do to re-live nostalgia. But even that feeling will never match the feeling you get when you think about it a few years later, probably while sitting in some office cubicle or waiting in the car for the traffic to move. No matter how many times people write about it and no matter how eloquently the words slither through the neurons of your memory firing thoughts in unpredictable directions. It is an inescapable reality that you will never get it back. That is why nostalgia is some form of necessary masochist behavior where you take pleasure in some loss or sadness.