Tulsi
Badrinath

Text for Blog

The earliest friends my father Chaturvedi Badrinath made, when he came to Madras as a bachelor, were M. Krishnan, India’s most eminent naturalist and his wife Indumati Krishnan. Their home, Perunkulam House or PH, was a second home to me. In a city where we had no relatives, theirs was the closest I had to a grandparent’s home.

Excerpt from the Book

All one saw of the cottage was the roof and the small triangular peak that framed the front door. There was no face to the building, just the mouth of the door alone through which one reached a magical world.

The cottage was low, its roof low and even on the verandah nothing was visible inside except the open door and the dimness inside. In the evening though, the light from Indu’s room shone like the heart of the house glowing deep inside.
On either side of the double-door of the cottage was that architectural feature so essential to Tamil homes, the thinnai.

Placed near the threshold they allow one to offer hospitality to any caller without having to take them inside. Bored with the interior of the house, one can always loll on the thinnai, watching wayfarers. When neighbours or friends gather on the thinnai, it provides the necessary stimulus for gossip.

In PH, they provided expandable and ready seating for all the many guests who came to call on Krishnan, these solid blocks of cement along the length of the wall, with a metal-coloured glaze on top.

It was the best place to lie in summer, the length of cement cool against the spine and sea breeze like a garment of air billowing around one’s body, reading issues of the Junior Statesman with Krishnan’s grand-daughter Asha. It was here that Romulus Whitaker the snake expert brought an innocuous cloth bag that seemed to alter shape every few minutes.

When he dipped his hand in and brought out a snake, the crowd on the thinnai dispersed fast. It was here that the neighbour’s dog Johnny bit Indu’s wrist and blood spread all over the porch. It was seated here that we exclaimed over fine cotton saris brought in tall bundles by itinerant salesmen from Bengal. And when Krishnan was free for a while of his work, he would fold his long limbs into a cane chair and we were in for a wonderful session with the terrific raconteur that he was.

One of the busiest roads in Madras lay outside the gate. The traffic was constant, unrelenting. Sirens sounding when the Chief Minister’s car and cavalcade whizzed by.

Buses, scooters, autorickshaws, cars, hand-hauled carts — all sorts of vehicles, they represented the world of commerce, self-interest and grim intent. Those other worlds that existed, so different in ambience from this house, ended with the road. Once inside the gate, all of the noise and the bustle receded. Safe on the thinnai, the eyes registered the cars and the buses, their to-and-fro movement as remote, beyond.

The doors, decades-old, were big and imposing, almost as tall as the wall. The left half of the door had a big slot for the post. At the back, an enormous box held all the post delivered to Krishnan. A long, slim bolt, like a gun, lay along the top edge of the door. One had to push the right door slightly in order to open the left, when the wood expanded in the rains.

Crossing the threshold of the cottage, one entered a long hall, partitioned into smaller rooms over which the tiled roof floated at a height giving a sense both of space and shelter from the burning light of summer. The first of these was the ‘drawing room’ though guests were free to tail Indu and Krishnan all over the house, and conversations took place in many different spots.

Tall, glass-fronted almirahs held hardbound volumes and stacks of old newspapers, The Hindu, The Statesman, half-read or waiting to be read, lined the shelves built into the wall. When television entered our lives in the Eighties, then one appeared here as well.

The room furthest inside and its ante-chambers formed Indu’s living quarters. A gap between the wall and the sloping roof allowed a ribbon of sky and green trees to run along one side of the room. Breeze, gusts of it from the Bay of Bengal, was as much a presence in the house as people.

Central to the room, and Indu’s life, was her puja. Among the many idols, the most precious item was a small naturally shaped stone shivalinga, whose contours matched that of Mount Everest. The tallest figure was a clay image of blue-skinned Krishna leaning against a white cow, a lovely expression on his face. When in time it broke, it proved irreplaceable.

Her bed topped by a mosquito net, mirror and dressing table with a silver-backed comb and brush set, two cupboards, a showcase with many different bric-a-brac and a rosewood bench completed the room. While her expensive silk saris or sentimentally precious ones were locked away in the squat almirah, her everyday cottons were piled neatly on the rocking chair. Indu never needed an iron for her saris. Folded, they were placed under the mattress and came out looking perfectly pressed.

Dimness and light were at constant play as one moved about the cottage. Depending on the vagaries of the sun, the house dimmed and brightened. If the sun played with the clouds, the house sank into gloom. If it dazzled, the house cheered up. Entering Indu’s room from the back door at noon, the eyes adjusted from the white heat outside to soothing coolness.

At, say, 5.30 p.m., the brightness outside was not as fierce as at noon and the cool grey light was framed by the door and smaller squares of the mesh covered windows above her bed. Light reflected on the black stone of the floor, the slabs gleaming dully. Sometimes, a spray of sunlight would ripple like water on a wall.

Indeed, there came a time when waters flowed right into the house during the monsoons because the main road outside had been tarred repeatedly, raising its height. Indu sloshed about quite calmly, though the water ruined the lower half of all the furniture.