The commute - The Rickshaw Riders

I'm now stuck with a very long commute. 42 miles one way. Don't ask me how I ended up here but this is my situation till I figure out a convenient car pool or move.

KQED notwithstanding, it is a punishing drive what with the traffic, boredom and the thought that much of my time is spent behind wheels and not at work/home instead. This got me thinking of the various commutes that I have had over the years. The combination of the various homes and the various educational institutions and work places have called for interesting commutes.

So with nothing worthwhile to offer for your reading pleasure here, I'm kick starting a series on the various commutes that I have done. Anything to keep this blog running and cough up a few words every now and then.

Now this could be a bit interesting if blogger has an app that can take dictation (I'm patenting this idea now!) while I drive and publish a post by the time I reach my destination. But till that time, I regurgitate the thoughts while I drive and put them down after I get off.

Without further adieu, here is part 1.

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My earliest memories of commuting are of my father driving me to school on our trusted white and blue Lamby. Of holding my father’s hands and being firmly but gently shepherded from the school gate towards my LKG class room, to a waiting Mrs. Mallika Ramnath. The commute was a grand distance of about 4 kilometers that would take us from our home on South Usman Road through Burkit Road, taking a left on South Dhandapani street and onwards to Venkatanarayana Road. We would pass Panagal Park on the east side on to the green cover of G N Chetty Road. Appa would then turn left at Jeeva Park (Jeeva poonga) and drive straight down Arulambal street to our school. It was a journey of a few minutes that has stayed in my memory – my father reciting Adithya Hrudhayam and me standing the front and later hugging him from the rear seat when I was tall enough. I also remember transferring briefly to Sahadevan’s rickshaw at some point in time, perhaps coinciding with my brother’s arrival. For I remember Sahadevan pulling up in front of the nursing home, not too far from his rickshaw “stand”,  in the afternoon where our mother was in and me jumping off the rickshaw and racing to the upstairs room to meet my mother and my newly minted brother. Sahadevan, a gentle soul (compared to Muthu rickshaw-kaarar who will soon make an appearance) with a greying beard and a ready toothy grin, calling out from behind to not forget my bag. It was back to the father-son-Lamby-Adithya Hrudhayam routine in the years leading up to my brother joining me at the same school.

Having a working mother required a different style of functioning. She had to be at her work place much earlier than my father. Luckily, her office was midway between home and school. So the four of us would pile up on to the Lamby every morning. Once Appa dropped her off in front of her office, we would drive out to Jeeva poonga where Appa would give us our breakfast on a concrete park bench. A picnic style breakfast almost every weekday morning in a park in the heart of the city. To my father’s credit, he had to wrap up the picnic, drop us off at school and then head out to work across town, if he was in a hurry, which I’m sure he was on many days, he never showed it. While this continued for some length of time, given the logistic challenges that this routine posed, we migrated back to the classic middle-class mode of commuting to school: the rickshaw.

I’m not sure why Sahadevan was not hired when the two of us were rickshaw-ready. Perhaps he had retired or had an incompatible school route/schedule but Muthu rickshaw-kaarar was chosen as the charioteer. Mr. Muthu’s stand was just a few blocks down the road from our home which is where my father would have known him from, I’m guessing. He was already taking a few kids from our locality to our school which acted both as a reference and a convenience in choosing him. Muthu rickshawkaar was a character in every sense of the word. He always sported a week’s stubble: I don’t ever remember having seen him clean shaven. He had his towel tied around his head which offered some protection against the heat. His first few buttons were always undone and was always wearing a lungi that was in need of a wash. He was a rugged guy and somehow reminded me of Rajinikanth in the vasanta kaala nadigalile song from the movie moondru mudichu. He was a raging alcoholic and that is only putting it mildly. But considering that there were only very, very few days that he didn’t show up in the morning and thus putting us in a fix, he somehow managed his drinking and hangovers rather admirably. Till it killed him a few years later.

There were seven kids in the rickshaw: the two of us - yours truly and my brother, Rishi, Vijay, Manav, Kumar and Vasu. There was for some time Ashwin and his cousin Vishnu thrown in to the mix as well. Rishi was the only kid that came from the other side of the tracks from West Mambalam. He was a few years elder than us and was a real fast runner. I later learned that he had joined the Indian Army, was posted in Kashmir during the Kargil conflict in the late nineties and had lost a leg in action. Vijay, my class mate, was the charmer of the group with his good looks and the ability, even as a kid, to engage adults in adult-like conversations. I remember once when Muthu was smoking a rolled cigarette without a filter instead of his usual beedi, Vijay queried “Enna rickshaw-kaar, cigarette ellam pidikkareenga? Neraya panam vechirukkeengala?” (How come you have moved on to cigarettes? Have you become rich now?) He was from a musical family and roped me into learning the mridangam at his place and also Hindi classes later. He used to live somewhere off Madley street behind the R1 Mambalam police station before moving to a house on Burkit road and then later to Mangesh street. Don’t ask me how but he took the commerce stream in class XI, completed his B Com and ended up in Accenture doing project management. I’m still in touch with him and he is now in Chennai after a stint in Bangalore. Manav, in the same class as Rishi, was the Settu – a Marwari kid that had a home on Ranganathan street. Yes, people used to live on that street! He was a hothead and would always pick up fights with other kids and sometimes with Muthu himself. During one such fight he yelled that he would ask his father to not pay Muthu, jumped off the moving rickshaw and ran back the few blocks to his home. Muthu waited to see that he reached home, let lose a few choice expletives and carried on. Kumar and Vasu, the other set of brothers. Vasu was my classmate and Kumar was Rishi’s. They used to live on Govindan street, before moving to a house on G N Chetty Road and later to Tilak street. Vasu, whose father I met many many years later, had failed to clear the class XII exams and Kumar had developed some mental problems. Ashwin and Vishnu were cousins and were Kannadigas. Ashwin, the quiet spoken kid was my brother’s classmate and Vishnu was fresh from Karnataka and had a strong accent. But that is not why he was everybody’s whipping boy on the rickshaw with Rishi leading the roast every evening. When things got out of hand, which was more often than not, Muthu would turn around and land a blow on whoever’s leg, thigh was within his reach.

Muthu rickshaw-kaarar was loud, smoked beedis non-stop, drank every night, took salary advances from nearly everyone’s parents. But he was also responsible enough to not lose a kid, not molest anyone, drive the rickshaw without any accidents and kept it running till he died.

I must take a moment to talk about the simple times. When a parent could hire a rickshaw guy without elaborate background checks, trust him with their kids to be dropped off at school and brought back home every single day. And the bloody system worked. Neither the non-alcoholic Sahadevan or the raging alcoholic Muthu ever misbehaved with any one of us. We were safe in their hands. And I don’t remember there being any untoward incident reported from our school that involved an erring rickshaw man during our years there.