A Street Symphony
A quick note: This piece is based on my personal experience of spending a few days in Chennai. As with any travel story, this is just my perspective of a moment in time, just some thoughts and observations during a quick, chaotic visit. It is not an accurate portrayal of everything the city has to offer.
Towns inch closer to home and it is in the yards of strangers that life unfolds here. The streets of Chennai are loud, palpable and the stench of rotting organic matter is visceral. Yet somehow, once the sun sets and the day breathes more life into this already bustling town — beauty like no other, steps foot in this city where cows and dogs are pedestrians too.
We’re stupid tourists for the day, lost, tired and trusting the sketchy routes Google Maps offers without question. We are so lost that some squatting residents feel sorry for us and tell us we’re walking to a dead end. They tell us they’ve saved many tourists like ourselves who trust Google Maps and we believe them too.
Life is loud, and our senses are overwhelmed. The streetlights are blinding, as are the headlights, the roads are loud and the people talk in even louder voices to be heard over the city roar and when throngs of people talk, scream and shout — the resulting debacle is not beautiful, exciting or part of the city aesthetic. It is noise, raw and unfiltered, it is humans at their best and worst, an undesirable amalgamation of joy and grief.
We’ve stopped on the pavement where versatile sellers advertise diverse products. Fresh flowers, bottles with fairy lights held captive, paper lanterns, more flowers, roasted peanuts, pineapples in cups and painted glass bottles. We wait and soak in Chennai’s pain and glory and witness lives we cannot count, strangers we cannot see and things we cannot afford.
The traffic policeman on duty strikes up a conversation because we’ve been sitting on the rails for too long and he tells us how his job has no set time. He tells us it’s the toughest job in the world and in the next minute, we witness a crash at the signal, an almost-disaster and we see him in action, diffusing the situation before the light turns green. And he is back telling us about places to visit in this city he calls home.
Men with balloons tied to sticks walk past us and for a fleeting moment, these pavements are the most magical and whimsical. The sheer ingenuity and creativity we witness turns bittersweet as we recognise the desperation in their gait, the realisation that our ‘magical’ is their livelihood. We begin walking again and with every step, it feels as if we are tapping out rich, long and intricate history from these tiles. Tap, tap, tap and on we go.
These vendors have seen much. Their hands move as they prepare fast food and their eyes glass over and they talk like machines, they smile automatically and it is praises of Chennai that come flooding. The land of many, the city of flyovers and it is here, in this wondrous and yet scandalous landscape, they write their never-ending stories of plenty, soaked in history and tradition.
Image by Rasnaboy on Wikipedia.
Sculpted by Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury and installed in 1959, it shows four men toiling to move a rock, depicting the hard work of the labouring class.
Image by Rasnaboy on Wikipedia.
It is close to midnight when we finally reach the railway station. We have walked far and it is a graveyard that stings my mind. A cemetery next to a church, next to a home. A real home, with babies and grandparents and happy giggles. It was close to midnight but the home was alive, the adults and the children, up on the roof singing and laughing. It was simultaneously a morbid sight and a sweet one to observe life right next to where it’s fated to rest one day.
We have walked far. We have talked so little and yet it feels as though we have been chatting with every thought this stunning city heralds. The noise reverberates in our minds and as exhausted as we are, this city doesn’t sleep and for today, neither do we. At the railway station, we exist in a state of limbo — half-awake, never asleep, wanting to hold onto this symphony of the streets of Chennai.
The Chennai Central railway station first opened in 1873–151 years ago.
Originally published on https://myrandomspecificthoughts.wordpress.com/2024/10/06/a-street-symphony/
