Sivaramapuram

On the highway from Kumbakonam to Mayiladuthurai (Mayavaram), near Kadiramangalam, lies a quaint little village on the banks of the Cauvery. It has been my grandmother's dream that I visit this place, her native village, at least once in her lifetime. Last year, after years of talking and dreaming about it, I did just that.

Our driver almost missed Sivaramapuram. He had never heard of it and he had been driving in those parts for quite some time. We managed to find it and our car couldn't get into the one-street village. We went on foot. It wasn't a big deal because the entire village consists of just one street.. :) The entrance to the village was dotted with a Siva temple.We were accosted by an old maami in madisaar clearly excited at the prospect of some new comers! I left my parents to banter with the madisaar maami and walked down the length of the street to the Cauvery.

It was an intensely personal journey for me filled with memories of my grandmother and her childhood tales. Narrated over afternoon siestas or lazy evenings in the thinnai of her house, her stories were always colorful and entertaining. To me, she and her village stories belonged to a magical, idyllic world that I could never personally experience! She is a good storyteller, that one..:)

Most of the houses in Sivaramapuram are dilapidated.I heard the madisaar maami say that most of the owners are in the US with their sons/daughters. Ha! The reach of the US even in these old parts. I reached the Rama temple at the end of the street on the banks of the Cauvery. It was always as my grandmother had told me! The padithurai where she and her siblings bathed every day was now dilapidated. I was a bit disappointed. People don't use rivers when there are bathrooms, I told myself. A couple of ancient banyan trees were hanging over the river, their branches lazily touching the Cauvery. My grandmother had told me that her boisterous brothers would swing from Banyan trees and jump with a splash into the river while the women were going about their chores. Could these trees be the one from her stories?!

We visited the erstwhile house of my grandmother. It had now become a Raghavendra Madam. The person next door was a distant-relative of my grandmother and she was maintaining the madam. She showed us inside the madam and gave us a tour. This place was once a 4-kattu house..This was where my grandmother grew up..I was lost in imagination until the maami invited us home to coffee. And what a coffee it was! The cow in the backyard had just been freshly milked. The smell of fresh boiling milk and decoction in the filter was simply intoxicating. I have to say that coffee was from Heaven! No Starbucks can beat that taste ever.

Some of these old places in the Tanjore district still maintain their old lifestyle. They are self-sufficient. Almost every house has a cow that feeds the family. Some of these families still manage agricultural lands and live off that produce like my grandmother's family once used to. They know where their food comes from and how it was grown. They know that their milk doesn't have anti-biotics, pesticides and artificial growth hormones. It is not that they do not know the joys of city life. A lot of them have well to-do sons/daughters in Chennai or abroad. But they choose to live there..

Today, there is talk of world famine and food shortage and everyone is encouraged to go "local". In the US, there's talk of encouraging people to have their own farms. That's how India used to be! That's the lifestyle we so vigorously rejected a few decades back! Now, its back in fashion but I am not sure that the knowledge still exists...Life's a Circle.

As Sivaramapuram faded away into the distance, I found myself thinking, "What have we done..God, what have we done?"