Flower children

Madurai, 8^th January 2011

WM: I’m lying on a double bed under the pumping air-con (impossible to avoid it seems in ‘tourist’ Madurai), feeling a bit weighed down after a lunch time ‘meal’ (banana leaf rice/veg slop/papad/sambar and curd).  Things are remarkably quiet from the children’s room. Yes, finally (hurrah!) we’ve found a ‘suite’ where the children are not actually sharing our room and bed – reason enough for WolfDad to suggest a second night here and actually they also seemed quite pleased too – some privacy for midnight snacks from the minibar (mouldy and empty in reality), illicit TV watching (hindi cartoons, cricket and soap operas), mosquito bite scab picking and bundling?  In the last shared room in Kumily, it had got to the stage the WolfDad and I were sleeping on the children’s mattresses on the floor with the 3 children in our bed as we had got so tired of sharing with one of them (W kicks and punches all night long and grinds his teeth, L is cuddly but invades your private space big time and M just takes up the entire bed) and left them to fight it out. I am sure that they have multiple complaints about sharing with us, but I don’t think I’ll ask.

School started today – shhh, don’t tell the children it’s a Saturday!  Somehow the days of the week have all merged and lost any real meaning but we do have to anticipate Pongal (Tamil ‘Christmas’) as that and other holidays may mess up our travel plans if we’re not careful.  Today, we did some research about crops of South India (having seen so many growing over the last few weeks – rice, tapioca, coconuts, cashew nuts, bananas, cardamoms, tamarind, tea, coffee, rubber…) and the girls have chosen one to make an information poster about.  M’s doing about how the tea gets from the bush to her cup (of chai).  W did colouring and lego. I’m looking for some free, ‘educational’ pre-school computer games for him - so keen is he on Comfy Cakes and now Bounce on my mobile phone...Any suggestions, please let me know.

The children have come to join me.

W's Temple Kingfisher

W: We went to a temple.  It’s special to Dad because he’s worked in it.* We sawed a temple elephant who was blessing people.  Do you know how he blessed them? He put his trunk on their heads.  I sawed a kingfisher.  There wasn’t just a temple elephant, there was a temple kingfisher too.  It was on a wire.  The kingfisher wanted water in the tank. I were sad too. There should of.  M and WM and L had bindis and they had flowers in their hair.  But I didn’t because I’m not a girl of course.  I like Madurai because of the temple kingfisher.

*Before anyone gets the idea that WD is one of the bare-chested Minakshi temple priests, he did the research for Chapter 3 of his PhD here, living in a single room on the rooftop of New College House (the room now sadly demolished), a different sort of ascetic endeavour.  I’ll let him discuss the strange pleasure of bringing his family to ‘his’ temple town.  Such is his long association with this place that people recognise him in the street, ‘you know me?’ (often he doesn’t)  and he feels cross about changes: the queues to go through security, new charges to get in and ‘gentrification’ of the place. 

Whilst I’m not a big temple buff, I like the cold of the stone on my feet, the beautiful lady sculptures, the clamour (all life is here – children, people prostrating themselves before their gods, giving butter offerings to Kali, shops, flowers, oil lamps – WD says imagine Greek temples alive like this!) and the hanging out, chatting to people on the steps of the water tanks (“what is your native place?”). 

At the Sri Meenakshi-Sundareshwarar temple, Madurai

WD: I have indeed been here rather a lot over the past twenty years, since my first visit in July 1991. The longest period was during my PhD fieldwork in 1996 when I stayed a month, studying the temples in the city and in the countryside around. I got to know quite a few people then and returning find many still here but now grandmothers (at my age) or the owners of big a/c shops selling Australian alcohol-free wine, Toblerone and Gulf olives. I’ve returned regularly to follow up earlier work. Bringing WM here ten years ago (in April – very hot) was good and wonderful now to be back with the children, sitting by the Golden Lily pool looking at the golden domes of the shrines and the huge, soaring pyramidal entrance towers (gopuras) with their profusion of brightly-painted gods and goddesses on every surface. I keep writing bits about Madurai but need to get it out of my system and do something else.

What has changed? Little in real substance; the changes are those that have taken place across India as the consumer economy has taken grip. The shops sell MP3 players and mobile phones, and there’s a three-storey supermarket where L & I bought Cornflakes and cans of DietCoke. But the New Century Bookstore near the temple still has the same stock of Mein Kampf, Dickens, John Grisham, engineering textbooks, Tamil comics, and ‘Critical Readings in Canadian Feminist Fiction’ by R.K. Rajapalayam. The Minaksi-Sundaresvara temple isn’t as easy to get into as it used to be (queues through security, foreigners’ entrance fees) and the streets around are now pedestrianized with a few electric golf carts, but it’s much as ever: the wall-paintings round the tank still haven’t been finished, the elephant looks bored, and it’s as busy as ever with throngs of devotees and bemused tourists.

L: im lying on a bed in maduri. The ladie who gave us flowers and bindis was really nice. It turned out that she was the sister of dads freand who told him tamal  fifteen years ago.

M: Madurai is a dusty and hot (32 degrees) place to start Tamil Nadu off with.  Dad assures us that it will get better when we reach the Tamil countryside.  Yesterday we went to the big temple in the middle of the city. 

Minakshi was born to the rulers of Madurai.  Her parents wanted a boy and were disappointed that they had had a girl, especially as she had 3 breasts.  A sage told her parents that though she was a girl, she would grow up to conquer the world.  Also the rumour went that her third breast would disappear when she met her future husband.  True to his word, when Minakshi grew up, she started to conquer all the known regions of India.  When she got to the Himalayan mountains of North India, she came across Shiva in his mountain lair.  Instantly her third breast disappeared.  She shouted in joy, “You are my husband!, oh mighty Lord!”  Shiva looked around and instantly fell in love with Minakshi.  “Though I must ask one thing,” said Minakshi, “ Will you come and live at my place of birth?” Shiva could do nothing less than agree.  That is how Shiva (or Sundaresvara, as he is known in Tamil Nadu) came to live in Madurai and the temple stands dedicated to their love.  Every year there is a huge 14 day long festival where they get married again.  You can identify Minakshi in pictures as she has green skin and holds a green parakeet in her right hand.

WM:  The children’s knowledge of Hindu gods and mythology has outstripped mine by a long way, as they soak up WD’s undergraduate lectures and cartoon-books.

Talking of cartoons, W has persuaded me to let him watch cartoons on the telly –Tom and Jerry and Young Ganesh on Cartoon Network.  He’s got a hacking cough and is tired – keeping up wears him out.  As does fighting with L – they have an interlocked sibling dance of mean looks, pokey fingers and strange but effective insults (‘Toasty Boaster!’)-  but can equally well be caught playing involved games together, L reading Horrid Henry to him or instructing him in his ‘school work’or simply curled up in a heap..

WD is now reading a map and train timetables and worrying about Pongal….L wants to go out and eat a dosa; the rest of us can’t quite be bothered.  It has a surreal quality being here – fatigue, big-time heat (and I do know there’s more to come), planning the maximum possible hit rate for temples with kids in tow, stepping out of AC cold and TV commercials (a guide to middle class aspiration here – disposable nappies, face cream, convenience foods and idli steamers) into a wall of noise and intense city.  It’s a long way from the quiet of rural Oxfordshire...