Cross-belt Land

When Jinku and I first started to work for money, we shared a 1 bedroom house in the heart of a slum in Chennai. For weeks none of our colleagues knew where we lived. And then came the rains that flooded the whole of Chennai. Jinku would tuck his pants upto his knees and hold his shoes in his hands while I rode my motorcycle to drop him at the main road. This continued until my motorcycle's engine was filled with water. And then I had to go on my first overseas trip. Or atleast that was what we told our super sweet landlord's family to get out of the place.

We found yet another one bed room flat. But this time in the second floor so no flood would do anything to us. But unfortunately, we found a flat in the heart of cross-belt land - west mampalam.

West mampalam can be a great or a lousy place to live in; depending on your mind set. But the original inhabitants of that land had certain fixed notions. Such as - Unmarried men are evil (Unmarried non-cross-belts were more evil). Unmarried men eyed all women in the family that included daughters, wives and mothers - even if the wives were 55 year olds and the mothers 85 year olds. Unmarried men smoked cigarettes from the balconies and dropped ash on alpha male cross-belts' bald heads seriously pondering over a cure for cancer. Unmarried men drank beer and puked in other people's door mats.

We did not know all this background and were surprised for the first one month when everyone in the flat scattered like flies whereever and whenever we walked. It took a while to realise noone spoke to us either. No one used lifts when we used it.

But like I said, it can be a great place or a lousy place depending on what you wanted it to be. We wanted it to be a great place. And it was a great place. We felt like tigers in a herd of deer as everyone scampered for their lives as we walked around the place. We felt like Maharajas as people stuck to lift walls like lizards or sneaked out of lifts to let us ride up to our floor. We had our occasional fun as well as we walked as close as possible to our next door neighbour as he walked home from office. We could have added fuel to fire by striking a conversation with their wives, but we were concerned the husbands' heads would turn so hot that we could fry our eggs on top of it. Obviously, we didn't want eggs fried from used coconut oil.