Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh and Chennai, Tamil Nadu
In February 2008, I spent a week working from the Chennai office of my NGO, and wrote about the trip in the form of five ‘photographs’ – below are five moments captured in the same spirit, from a trip I took to work in the southern offices of the same NGO during April 2009.
1. Home, again.
‘My girlfriend says that I can be a chauvinist pig sometimes.’ This was the first thing I heard about Deepthi. A year and a half later, after a plane flight and a twelve-hour work day, I stumbled in to the home she was building with her new fiancé. The basic structure is classic upper middle class Indian – smooth plaster walls, stone floor, high ceilings, windows leading to balconies, built-in bedroom cabinets, a two-burner gas stove and industrial sized bottles of filtered water in the kitchen. Wicker furniture – holding books, ashtrays, wine bottles filled with filtered water – was spread around the room, accented with beds-as-couches and bright, thickly woven cotton drapes. The place felt like a canvas, one that had been stretched and prepped, where the sketches had been drawn but the colors were just being added.
2. Excess
I was giddy all the way home from work, lifted automatically to my toes as I poured a bucket of cool water over my head, giggled and fidgeted my way in to make-up and tight black clothes with a friend. I ignored the empty expanses we passed on the way to the club, and tried to let the grotesque concrete skeletons of half-completed office parks and walled apartment complexes flick quickly by on the edge of my vision. Excess, the momentary hotspot of the mercurial and yet numbingly consistent Hyderabadi nightlife, was inside a hotel that I’d heard about from wealthy friends who used to brunch there, swim there – past the edge of the city, where even a hint of metropolitan poverty, of congestion or the unmet needs of millions, could not disturb the full first-world fantasy. The club itself came in two layers, with stylized dens for lounging, and a porch from which to view the miles of surrounding construction while leaning on glass tables with white podiums lit from below.
3. Planes
I’ve always felt at home on an airplane, suspended in between, scanned for intentions, packaged for delivery – I pick up when I walk through the door, tugging or shouldering my pile of clothes a little closer, standing up, stepping briskly ahead. I enjoy flying in India for the air-conditioned luxury it affords, and for the higher standards of customer service, in that sickeningly entitled American sense of expecting to be seen as an individual and valuable consumer. I read somewhere that the Indian skies are filled with more private than commercial jets – I’m not sure if that is still true, but the culture of the skies is both elite and quickly changing. The air hostess on my first flight to India wore a saree; every air hostess I’ve encountered since has worn a tight, short skirt or hip-hugging pants, with matching eye shadow and lipstick. The airports – which mostly seem to have been built in the seventies, all square concrete and fluorescents, with some strange angles serving as decoration – are quickly being renovated into glass-wave-topped steel-gridded shimmering temples set outside the cities they service. At the Hyderabad airport, I had a dosa and a giant cup of steamed chai, both at easily ten times the street price, and at the other end, in Chennai, the steamy air of the waterfront city hit me as soon as I stepped out of the cabin and on to the royal rolling steps descending from the side of the plane.
4. Konchipuram: Blessings from Ganesha
His skin was soft and warm against my hand, fuzzy and wrinkled. I set the coin on top of the previous child’s donation, and ducked down; he dutifully lifted his trunk, and placed it lightly on the crown of my head. It was over quickly, and as he dropped the two coins in a waiting priest’s lap, we stepped out and back into the milling crowds of temple goers. The architecture, now familiar, of layers of gods and demons scrambling in extensive detail up semi-pyramidal roofs, of compounds and sanctums and footpaths for clockwise circumambulation, was augmented with hundreds of offerings, crimson threads and soft pink lotus flowers, strings of jasmine and votive candles flickering in the heat of summer. The colors were peeling, and we all agreed that we liked the plain stone better, in any case, that it communicated something calmer, internal, familiar.
5. Amethyst
We were arguing with the auto driver – a common occupation in Chennai, and one of my least favorite things about this particularly flat, humid, and centerless city – when we finally pulled off the right road, and in to paradise. Stone basins of water lilies linked the curving path to our right, and white lights, small strings of them and sweet muslin-shaded living room lamps glinted from the trees and railings ahead. The entrance to Amethyst is the portico of a mansion, and the room immediately inside is tiled in black and white, with ceilings at least twenty feet high and a sweeping staircase leading away. The room is open, with grass screens rolled at the top of doorways and sweeping fans hanging with comforting regularity from the ceiling; tables spill from it into the garden, and diners lean in, over western delicacies, flaky pastries, fresh salads. There are days when the famed food of south India – fermented rice and lentil flour steamed, pan-fried, deep-fried, half-fried, stewed (idly, dosa, vada, uttapam, upma) – seems heaven-sent… and then there are days when I dream of returning to Amethyst.
1. Home, again.
‘My girlfriend says that I can be a chauvinist pig sometimes.’ This was the first thing I heard about Deepthi. A year and a half later, after a plane flight and a twelve-hour work day, I stumbled in to the home she was building with her new fiancé. The basic structure is classic upper middle class Indian – smooth plaster walls, stone floor, high ceilings, windows leading to balconies, built-in bedroom cabinets, a two-burner gas stove and industrial sized bottles of filtered water in the kitchen. Wicker furniture – holding books, ashtrays, wine bottles filled with filtered water – was spread around the room, accented with beds-as-couches and bright, thickly woven cotton drapes. The place felt like a canvas, one that had been stretched and prepped, where the sketches had been drawn but the colors were just being added.
2. Excess
I was giddy all the way home from work, lifted automatically to my toes as I poured a bucket of cool water over my head, giggled and fidgeted my way in to make-up and tight black clothes with a friend. I ignored the empty expanses we passed on the way to the club, and tried to let the grotesque concrete skeletons of half-completed office parks and walled apartment complexes flick quickly by on the edge of my vision. Excess, the momentary hotspot of the mercurial and yet numbingly consistent Hyderabadi nightlife, was inside a hotel that I’d heard about from wealthy friends who used to brunch there, swim there – past the edge of the city, where even a hint of metropolitan poverty, of congestion or the unmet needs of millions, could not disturb the full first-world fantasy. The club itself came in two layers, with stylized dens for lounging, and a porch from which to view the miles of surrounding construction while leaning on glass tables with white podiums lit from below.
3. Planes
I’ve always felt at home on an airplane, suspended in between, scanned for intentions, packaged for delivery – I pick up when I walk through the door, tugging or shouldering my pile of clothes a little closer, standing up, stepping briskly ahead. I enjoy flying in India for the air-conditioned luxury it affords, and for the higher standards of customer service, in that sickeningly entitled American sense of expecting to be seen as an individual and valuable consumer. I read somewhere that the Indian skies are filled with more private than commercial jets – I’m not sure if that is still true, but the culture of the skies is both elite and quickly changing. The air hostess on my first flight to India wore a saree; every air hostess I’ve encountered since has worn a tight, short skirt or hip-hugging pants, with matching eye shadow and lipstick. The airports – which mostly seem to have been built in the seventies, all square concrete and fluorescents, with some strange angles serving as decoration – are quickly being renovated into glass-wave-topped steel-gridded shimmering temples set outside the cities they service. At the Hyderabad airport, I had a dosa and a giant cup of steamed chai, both at easily ten times the street price, and at the other end, in Chennai, the steamy air of the waterfront city hit me as soon as I stepped out of the cabin and on to the royal rolling steps descending from the side of the plane.
4. Konchipuram: Blessings from Ganesha
His skin was soft and warm against my hand, fuzzy and wrinkled. I set the coin on top of the previous child’s donation, and ducked down; he dutifully lifted his trunk, and placed it lightly on the crown of my head. It was over quickly, and as he dropped the two coins in a waiting priest’s lap, we stepped out and back into the milling crowds of temple goers. The architecture, now familiar, of layers of gods and demons scrambling in extensive detail up semi-pyramidal roofs, of compounds and sanctums and footpaths for clockwise circumambulation, was augmented with hundreds of offerings, crimson threads and soft pink lotus flowers, strings of jasmine and votive candles flickering in the heat of summer. The colors were peeling, and we all agreed that we liked the plain stone better, in any case, that it communicated something calmer, internal, familiar.
5. Amethyst
We were arguing with the auto driver – a common occupation in Chennai, and one of my least favorite things about this particularly flat, humid, and centerless city – when we finally pulled off the right road, and in to paradise. Stone basins of water lilies linked the curving path to our right, and white lights, small strings of them and sweet muslin-shaded living room lamps glinted from the trees and railings ahead. The entrance to Amethyst is the portico of a mansion, and the room immediately inside is tiled in black and white, with ceilings at least twenty feet high and a sweeping staircase leading away. The room is open, with grass screens rolled at the top of doorways and sweeping fans hanging with comforting regularity from the ceiling; tables spill from it into the garden, and diners lean in, over western delicacies, flaky pastries, fresh salads. There are days when the famed food of south India – fermented rice and lentil flour steamed, pan-fried, deep-fried, half-fried, stewed (idly, dosa, vada, uttapam, upma) – seems heaven-sent… and then there are days when I dream of returning to Amethyst.
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