August 2026

I watch the traffic policeman cross our car and berate a bus driver for obstructing a traffic junction while parked at the red light. We’re at the Anna flyover. Chennai is where I was born and grew up, first in Purasawalkam and then Thiruvanmiyur.

I am out on a drive. My parents don’t get out much, and we do this each time I show up in the city. We drive around astonished at how far she has come, and how formidable this great city of Chennai is. “Wow, I can’t believe that Ega theatre is still around.” I exclaim as the car rolls down the Chetpet bridge towards the Poonamallee high road. I used to pedal down in my cycle on this very bridge decades ago on the way home. The bridge hasn’t changed at all. And yet everything around it has. My old school, Madras Christian College Higher Secondary School, on Harrington Road now looks like an English prep school with imposing archways at the entrance. I take in the sight in silence. My desire to catch moments on the camera has steadily receded over the years but I feel compelled to capture a video of the school entrance. I honestly do not what I will do with this video even a few months down the road. The fact it’ll be there for the rare moment when I feel drawn to it is perhaps the point of this exercise.

We cap off our drive with tiffin at the New Woodlands restaurant on the way back home. The food is stunningly mediocre. The pooris are not done well. They are larger than we expected. A double whammy of having to eat a larger portion of an unsatisfactory preparation. The onion rava-dosai and the sambar are okay but the coconut chutney has clearly given up its ghost earlier in the afternoon, long before our arrival. The waiter asks, “Coffee.. strong or medium,” a question that must never be asked in Chennai of Chennaiites. Strong obviously. As it turns out, the question was one that we ignored at our own peril. What arrived in silver tumblers was stronger than Samson in his heyday. We head home caffeinated and undernourished.

The cooks are not Tamilians. The waiters aren’t Tamilians. The guys working on the Metro Rail project and constructing the apartment towers are not Tamilians. The girl who seats us at the coffee place on ECR is from Manipur (“But I’m really Mizo.”) It’s been two years since she moved here. She thinks Chennai is too hot, and the mosquitoes too aggressive and too many.

The city is like the Ship of Theseus. All of its parts have been replaced over the years, and yet it is the Ship that Theseus once built with his own hands and owned. Theseus is long gone. But the Ship lives on, as it must.

What really makes a city? I wonder. Is it the people? Is it the sights? Is it the culture, the language? Or is it just the memories of it? Especially if it’s the city you were born in and struggled through its rainy streets during the monsoons and the searing heat of its summers. It’s all of it, and yet none of it.

She’s like an old flame who holds the secrets of my youthful indiscretions, but I I can’t recognize her at times these days. She went her way, and I went mine. We’ve met a few times over the years, but today, as I sit at the Gemini Circle, I feel like the days of intimate conversations are over, replaced by a cordial warmth. It’s the way of all things eventually. The intimacy and the warmth has quietly sublimated into the grief of a vague heartache that one does not speak of anymore. We used to be soul mates once. Now we wish each other well, and smile when we cross paths at a wedding. Be well, Chennai. I will always have a place for you in my heart.

PS: For the record, I do not have old flames. I am a writer and I use metaphors. Any resemblance to anyone or anything is purely coincidental and entirely manufactured.