Registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India under R.N.I 53640/91

Vol. XXV No. 17, December 16-31, 2015

Short N Snappy

After the flood

Years from now, when the grandchildren cluster around The Man from Madras Musings and ask him what he did during the great flood, he will have to look inscrutable and say that he was involved in matters of strategic importance. MMM, it must be admitted, was nowhere in the picture. He was away travelling down south and could only get to know second-hand about the horror that unfolded in his favourite city. Things had to be quite bad if even the Chief had to shift out of his home, though, rather like Casabianca, he held out till it was almost too late. Having spurned boats and catamarans, he opted to stay on until a relative or two threatened him with dire consequences and he set out in a car to dry land, safety and at last take his daughters’ frantic calls that turned into angry lectures on his stubbornness. Chez MMM, which is almost as old as he is, was affected too but not as badly as several other areas. MMM’s car, which does not even share an alphabet with the new status symbols, too survived the ordeal very well unlike vehicles such as Beaten & Mauled by Water and Most Battered.

Post the flood, however, our civic agencies swung into action. And they did so in the most artistic fashion possible. The various pits, potholes and chasms had to be marked, and this was no easy task mind you – they were all underwater and it was impossible to identify which was hill and which was dale. But undeterred they went ahead.

In any other city this would have been done by a red flag planted at the danger spots. But ours is the cultural capital and so things had to be different. Or perhaps because most political parties in our State have red in their flags, the colour may have been in short supply. Inspiration was sought from nature, modern art, sculpture and the cubists. The picture below shows two thriving potted plants placed in the middle of the road, even as traffic weaves along on both sides. It was a wonder that nobody had knocked these down. But that was not all. In a spot not very far from this display was a wooden cage that housed many plants. Borrowed from a neighbouring home, this was used to mark a rather large crater. In a fairly upmarket road in the southern part of our city, the services of a stone quern were availed of. It was planted firmly into the ground and in a way it was a most apt choice, for anything lighter would have been carried away. Yet another place in the city had a plastic bath stool with a flowering plant on it. MMM, as they say in our metropolis, simply could not able to understand it.

Those that owned upmarket cars too did their bit. Several had to abandon their vehicles at places where they had stalled and these served as markers too. Some of these vehicles were towed away after days and so did their duty for long and well. Truly the floods have spared none, and have equalised all strata of our city.

Noah’s Ark & other tales

”It rained and rained for forty daysy daysy,’ sang The Man from Madras Musings, during the days when he was a cherubic child of Chennai. The last two words in that line no doubt were a gruesome mutilation to rhyme with the earlier line that went – The Lord said to Noah there’s going to be a floody floody. This was the song that came to MMM’s mind as he read all the reports about the rising waters in Chennai.

There were other reminders about Noah’s Ark, for if you believed the rumours, animals were on the prowl, or at least on the swim, as the city flooded. First was the story that crocodiles had escaped from the farm just outside the metropolis and were swimming arm in arm up the Adyar River. The number of crocodiles kept varying depending upon the level of water stagnation in the locality. Thus, in Mylapore they spoke in hushed whispers of just one massive crocodile, but in Kotturpuram they were worrying about a full score of them. The farm kept putting out denials, but to no effect. It was only when the waters receded that the people in the affected areas got to know the real crocodiles – the politicians who were trying to make publicity hay while it rained.

Then came the turn of the snakes. Several poisonous varieties were spoken of – Russell’s Viper, Krait, the Hamadryads and Cobras. People claimed to have sighted them everywhere and one security guard told MMM and a friend of his of a six-foot long reptile that killed eight people in one bite. MMM could not help reflect that the snake in question must have had fangs shaped like a gearwheel to achieve that feat.

Rumours soon followed about wild animals having escaped from Vandalur Zoo. It was then that MMM had visions of creatures wandering about in twos (the elephant and the kangaroo), threes (the wasp, the ant and the bumblebee) and so on. But fortunately this too did not materialise.

If all this was not enough, there were other wild stories circulating – lakes were supposed to breach (those that did not have houses, hospitals and hotels built on their beds, that is) at short notice thereby inundating the whole city, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of USA had suddenly decided to relocate to our city and was sending out one dire weather report after the other, and lastly, a local almanac had apparently predicted the deluge all along, only nobody had noticed it till the rains actually came. It is now reliably learnt by MMM that NASA has ordered copies of the almanac.

Tailpiece

A dear cousin of The Man from Madras Musings was washed out of her residence in the floods. Being a Wodehouse fan, she described her house as being at the bottom of the river. Having spent a week and more at an expensive hotel (and the place kept raising its prices in proportion to the rising water levels) she returned home to find no power, plenty of garbage and lots of damage. But, she informs MMM, there was one bright spot. Sitting on top of the post box, and completely dry at that, was the latest (December 1st) issue of Madras Musings. We, Chief, have clearly delivered as a team, and so has Lokavani and the postal department. It reminded MMM of the old man who bore the strange device Excelsior ’mid snow and ice in Longfellow’s poem.

-MMM

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