A Well Spent Sunday

 Sundays are meant for making very optimistic, extravagant plans and then lying in and lazing the day away. At least that is my routine more often than not. However this Sunday was very different.

To start with I attended a class over the internet (a webinar) that started late Saturday night and ended at 3 am on Sunday. And, after a few hours of sleep we went on a long planned family sketchcrawl. My wife and daughter are very fond of sketching and painting, and this interest is also shared by quite a few in our extended family. We have driven out of Chennai on a few weekend  sketching trips in the past but this was the first time that we were doing this within the city. And this time my niece was also with us.

We had a fun time on Saturday deciding where to go and finally settled on the Marundeeswarar Koil at Thiruvanmiyur, a very old and famous temple very close to our house.We decided to spend around an hour at this venue and then drive down to a cafe for some much needed refreshments and a different type of sketching opportunity.

One of the problems with South Indian temples is that we cannot wear any footwear inside the temple precincts. The paving is usually in granite and this can sometimes be blistering hot. The four of us broke up and quickly went in search of something sketchworthy, and more importantly a convenient location to do the sketching from.

I ended up locating something that would not have been my first choice as a subject, but it had the advantage of a really quiet and shaded spot from which I could view it. In fact this spot was so secluded that many people went by without even realising that I was sitting there under some heavy foliage. 

My niece Ranjani plonked herself right along the main walkway and was soon immersed in her sketching quite oblivious to the passersby who paused and  gathered behind her to watch her at work. You can see Ranjani's sketch here.

My daughter Kalpana found a place with shade and a backrest too. It was also a spot that was rather difficult to approach and certainly not convenient for anyone to peer over her shoulder. I am sure that this must have been high on her criteria for a suitable sketching spot. Kalpana's sketch can be seen here. 

Nithi, my wife, was not to be seen anywhere. But she is a restless soul and we were sure that she would have finished several sketches in the time that the rest of us take to do even one, and that proved to be the case.

After we were done at Marundeeswarar Koil we drove a few miles South from the temple to a small but nice cafe called Tryst on the East coast Road. Unfortunately the view from our table did not offer any great sketching opportunities. But we did have a nice time there comparing sketches and having some nice stuff to eat and drink. Between gulps I managed to do this quick sketch of Nithi.

 I am adding this bit on Friday 9th Dec, a couple of  days after I had posted my sketches and photos. I finally managed to get Nithi's consent to put up her sketches too. One of her sketches is of a mandapam (shelter)  facing the Amman (lady deity) shrine. Her second sketch is of two fruitsellers engaged in conversation. Nithi does these in no time at all and then moves on to other things that catch her attention.

The House On Pillars

In the 1970s, after having lived as caretaker tenants for a few months in the quiet and unspoilt seaside neighborhood of Thiruvanmiyur, my wife and I made up our minds to put down our roots there. In those days Thiruvanmiyur was a suburb of Madras (as Chennai was then known) and most people thought that we were very daring and unwise to live in such a "remote" place. Although there were very few proper houses around, and an enormous amount of vacant land, it took us almost a year to find somebody willing to sell us a small plot. Land was not expensive then. In fact we paid only around US$ 350 for our plot. But the cost of construction was relatively high.

Although money, or more precisely our lack of it, was an important factor, there were a few other bigger hurdles. There were a number of permits and service connections to be obtained and, even in those relatively less corrupt days, it was a severe ordeal to deal with a very large number of minor and major bureaucrats. To add to our problems, those were the days of cement and steel shortages. In fact the cement scarcity was so severe that its supply was controlled by the Indian Government and rationed to consumers. And this of course brought a whole new set of bureaucrats into play. The shortage of materials and the consequent delays in the delivery of the materials made it very difficult to keep to construction schedules and stay within budgets.

Since steel and cement were the two major "problem" materials we decided to minimise their use in the house construction. We went in for a variety of roofing techniques, such as sloped clay tiled roofing, and hollow clay tile roofing, left our walls unplastered on one side, and went in for clay tile flooring. In addition to this we also decided to use pivot hinges for our doors and do away with door frames, had smaller but strategically placed windows, and reduced the floor to ceiling height, all in a bid to reduce costs. As a result we were able to keep to both the construction schedule and our budget. It also allowed us the luxury of building the entire house on stilts.

Since there were very few built houses around, our house was now visible from quite some distance in every direction. And unlike other houses which rested solidly on the ground the first level of our house was left entirely vacant. As a result our house came to be known in the neighbourhood as the "thoon veedu" or " house on pillars".

Some years later, when we had a few more neighbours, Chennai experienced particularly severe flooding, and the locality where we lived was also flooded. Although we had water in our plot, under the house, and all around us, we were unaffected by it. A number of people thought that we had been very wise to have anticipated this event and planned for it. Actually it had never occurred to us that the area could be flooded since that had never happened within living memory. We had built our house on stilts because it was located a little further away from the sea than what we would have liked, and we wanted to ensure that we had a good view of the water.