Bonus post: Homes
Hello readers, Ilari here. This week, I wanted to share some pictures and videos from the trip we did with Maheswari to southern Tamil Nadu back in 2018, and a couple of older family photos.
We were received hospitably by Maheswari’s extended family members in Kulathur, the village where her parents were born and married. Maheswari’s home for the first three years of her life (pictured above) was empty but still standing, a tiny shack with clay walls that housed seven people. “But it was a very happy house,” as Maheswari described it in Chapter 1.
In the jungled mountains of Bodinayakanur, the bungalow Maheswari’s father built — with real cement and bricks — was also still there, to her surprise. You might recognize this photo from Maheswari’s profile picture:
Here, Maheswari recounts some of her memories:
(That’s Shekda-mama in the background who graciously showed us around Bodi. His brother was the shopkeeper who gave Maheswari her first sandals.)
After moving to Chennai and relocating from Thiruvanmiyur to Besant Nagar, Maheswari’s first home there burned down, alongside hundreds of other. The slum around the Our Lady of Velankanni Church was in fact called Didir Nagar, or “Suddenly Nagar,” because it was “always catching fire when you didn’t expect it.” The homes there were like haystacks, built right up against each other, and people would burn wood inside. In the upcoming chapter, the Jornlin family visits Maheswari in their second Didir Nagar house, in 1995. This home would burn down too, in the next big fire in 2000.
In the front from the left: Maheswari, Caitlin, and Andrew; behind them, Chinna-Patti with Nandhini and Malini; outside, a neighbor with her child.
Besant Nagar is still an area with a lot of slum dwellings in the middle of the city’s poshest neighborhood. This is where many foreign visitors would stay, including the Jornlins. “Every day, when it was time for work, I ran over to their house,” Maheswari says in Chapter 13. “It felt more like a home than my own house.” Here’s a picture from the birthday party the family arranged for her:
“I never said anything like ‘thank you’ to them; that’s just not how we talk or how we show appreciation. It was years later that I learned how foreigners can get upset if you don’t thank them, and I’ve even become a bit like that myself. But with the Jornlin family, there’s no doubt in my mind they knew how much it meant to me.”