Not many born after the early 90s remember Madras, but more accurately remember the rush of the technological age in the city, and the dawn of Chennai. “Madras is an emotion,” they say, with citizens using the name with a reverence, with memory made sacred by a perseverance that comes from suffering and rebuilding.

Madras, for those of us who never saw it lived out in front of our eyes, now exists and thrives in those sensual and exotic experiences within the twists and turns of the ever-changing roads, in the myths and stories of parents and grandparents, in the seemingly elusive whisper, and in the spices and sensations of the food of this culturally exquisite port city.

My childhood was rich and immersed in all that Madras was and Chennai could be, somewhere mid-way between the treasures of heritage and the promise of the liberal future. Father and all of his family grew up in Tirupattur, a town located near the foot of the Yelagiri hills, both in the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu. Our hundreds of trips to this ‘hometown’ were divergences from the rebellious and new Chennai that was then already thriving, and were reminders of what tradition truly meant.

No memory of such tradition was ever possible without the idea of a fraternity that was clear even to that 5 year old Chennai-kid, who was on his way to being the spoilt city-kid caught in every consumerist trap conceivable. Fraternity, that wasn’t elitist social interaction or fine-dining, but the single ever-full banana leaf – the one motif that characterized Madras, not simply the usual Bollywood pop-culture views on the South, but rather a simple exotic that is never spoken of.

The banana leaf was the palette, the consumer being the artist and the ones serving the food being the diligent assistants setting up the paints to the perfect consistency and requirement. The perfect use of space, with each part of the meal carefully allotted an area, breathes a recollection of a serene lifestyle in the past that was in some currently inaccessible way, much more ordered and nuanced.

The community that is the spirit of Madras is, for me, in every festival tradition, every quiet yet beautiful morning, and every major cricket match that was watched with every human that was a part of life. It was here that one sees the importance of preserving memory that isn’t pledged to text but rather persists in the inventiveness of orality and nostalgia.

The parent and the grandparent, the uncle and aunt, the distant relative, each possess an age that reminds us that experiences are different for us all. It is a reminder that when living with those who have the weight of the years on their shoulders, every spice and every taste in each meal is a memory of a mistake, a time long past, or a memory that isn’t written or otherwise recorded, except in the quiet silence that denotes a meal in progress.

India is a very curious place. It is a place where its inhabitants believe that diversity is somehow in opposition to order, that nationalism is rooted in homogeneity, except that from every city to every town, there’s a new homogeneity that is truly ‘Indian’. Truly, it is perhaps one of the few places in the world that exotifies people within its own territory, with a kind of sub-Orientalism that exists between inhabitants all believing that “Indian” is what they truly are, and in a way “mor”e Indian than the rest around them. Or perhaps it isn’t as negative as that, and is rather a kind of competition to be the truly traditional, the ordered, or the most cultural.

It doesn’t take too long to realize that the most sensational heritages of this nation don’t compete, but rather persist in a universe where India is that hospitality which accepts and incorporates new cultures, languages, identities, and ideas. Witness the wondrous society that is formed, when the banana leaves are laid out with the lovingly cooked chakkara pongal, upma, semiya payasam, and hot bisi bele baath, a society which forms immediately between employees, employers, the old, the young, with a concept of family that is first-nature to all the people.

As a boy I witnessed this at every cricket World-Cup which India played, where my parents hosted all the employees from their company, all of them sitting cross-legged around my home’s modest living-room, with my family and I eating along with them, cheering for the Indian team together, and bidding farewell to all of them, right after. For a kid like me immersed in my books and video games, who neither understood the rules of cricket and nor enjoyed sitting cross-legged, those days were the epitome of the beautiful exotic that created memory and my identity.

The most impressive of all lived experiences was that it carried the same spirit with every festival. Ganesh Chathurthi, Tamil New Year, Krishna Jayanti, Deepavali, and many more – Madras, to me, was somewhere in transit between Tirupattur and Chennai, where the past lived in my elders teaching me to scoop the food with all my fingers from the leaf, showing me how to systematically finish the meal, and how if not, there was always a family member to finish it for me. It was simplicity, yet, with traditions being revered and celebrated equally with religious festivals and with commercialized and westernized sporting events.

It is this hospitality, that Madras will always be – warm, welcoming, the home in the 600 square-ft. living room with the television playing the festival Pattimandram (talk-show/debate), and the mornings, that, in my mind, will never end.

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