Essay: My Cousin Chandru by Rukmini Srinivas and Lakshmi Srinivas
2 min read
In this captivating personal essay, authors Rukmini Srinivas and Lakshmi Srinivas take the readers down memory lane and capture the adolescence of the former and a time in India in the 1930s.
The authors would like to thank Tulasi Srinivas for all her help.
My father had two younger brothers—Ramaswamy and Natesan and three sisters, all younger to him: Kamalam, Mangalam, and Annam.
Kamalam and her husband Gopalswamy, lived in the mofussil town of Poonamallee on the outskirts of Madras. I would often visit them when I was a student at Queen Mary’s College. The bus journey from Parry’s Corner in Madras to Poonamallee was a memorable one,
a dreamy escape from the hubbub of the city. The road passed through green fields on either side, the rural idyll playing out as I looked out the bus windows: bullocks ploughing the land, drawing water, workers in the fields singing songs, and women picking flowers. Poonamallee or Poo Irunda Mallee (the village of flowers), supplied flowers, betel leaves, and some vegetables to markets in Madras. Large plots of varieties of jasmine, orange kanakambaram, marigold, tulsi, and so on were part of the fragrant landscape we travelled through. On my return journey to Madras, I often travelled with flower sellers, their large wicker baskets of blooms secured on top of the bus. Some passengers would weave flower garlands throughout the journey for sale in the big city.
