If you would have walked down Eldams Road in Chennai, very near the traffic signal and junction with Mount Road (or Anna Salai, as they call it nowadays), you would have seen Chandramma. And if you have seen her, even once, you cannot forget her. She would sit near the traffic signal, just a bit away from the vegetarian udupi hotel at the corner. Thin, tall, dark, black hair, terene sarees with large floral designs, oiled up and totally hyper, Chandramma, was a phenomenon, all by herself. She would sell marine and freshwater fishes, prawns, crabs and eels. Somedays, she would also have sea snakes, or something like that, and would exhibit them proudly.
She would usually be screaming out, advertising the fish, prawns and shrimp. Her voice was loud enough to be heard from above the sound of the traffic on Mount Road. I remember the road as Mount Road, though the name 'Anna Salai' has been around for more than two decades I think. But, most localites also remember the name and use it in regular conversation. Chandramma had a great location to sell the fish, because she was at the junction of Eldams Road and Mount Road, and the opposite street went down to Panagal Park and Mambalam. Most people walking down any of these streets knew about Chandramma and knew her by her loud voice and smell.
Uniquely, the people inside the vegetarian udupi hotel at the corner did not mind her at all. Most people who ate at this stall were totally against non-veg food and would hate fish and the smell if it would have been any other town. But, this was Madras (of course, of course, Chennai...) and the smell of fish was around everywhere, including the smell of the sea, and sand, and the smell of rain on sand. And, then, especially at this corner of Eldams Road and Mount Road, and if you would go to a wierd street-lane called Mudaliyandan Garden, you would not miss the smell of urine and human faeces all around. So, in short, for those few people who braved it out at the vegetarian place in the corner, the smell of fish was the least of their problems that affected their nasal efficiency.
Chandramma had found a small corner wedged in between two buildings to set up her shop. Her establishment comprised two large fish baskets, filled with fish and prawns and shrimp and crabs, kept fresh with salted-polluted-dirty-stinking ice slabs. Two enamel-type large trays were placed above these open fish baskets, to serve as the display platform. On these trays, she arranged the fish of the day, fish of yesterday and the fish of day-before-yesterday. Similar strategies were in place for the prawns and shrimp and crabs. She sat on a huge stone boulder that she had found nearby. Her two sons had dragged the stone boulder for her and pushed it into the small corner between the two buildings.
And, when she would not be screaming out about her fish and sales, she would continue screaming in her regular conversation. It seemed that it was her normal voice and tenor, and she spoke to everyone in that loud, hissing-like, nasal voice. There was one problem that stood out amongst the many other problems that were very apparent. This was a major problem. She would never stop talking. She would be talking all the time. I mean it... she would talk all the time, all the time, all the time. Even if there were nobody listening to her. She would keep talking to herself, or to some imaginary people around her, in the same loud voice. It seemed like she could see people around her, sitting at her fish-stall, chatting with her.
There is another aspect that I should share about Chandramma before I go any further. She had no continuity in her conversation. She could talk to a customer about her fish, and suddenly include a totally different aspect of life and take the customer by surprise. She would include movies, the local superstars, Chiranjeevi and Rajinikant, and would go on to how the Mahabharata serial on B&W TV was actually better than seeing it on colour TV. Sometimes, she would go on chatting in this manner with her imaginary friends around her shop, and keep changing the subject. Once, the udupi restaurant owner confided in me, that once, she fought with one of her imaginary friends, over several days, and since she could not get her imaginary friend to agree with her, she gave up and came inside the restaurant and sat quietly, not speaking, and kept drinking coffee.
The owner of the udupi restaurant, Yenn Rao, seemed totally frightened of Chandramma, since she would always come inside the restaurant with her large fish-cutting knife. She did this because she was afraid that someone would probably steal it from her 'one-man-fish-market', as she referred to about herself. A random customer sitting next to her, a couple of years earlier, as Yenn Rao told me, had struck up a conversation with Chandramma and introduced himself to her as a poultry-farm owner somewhere north of Nellore, in coastal Andhra Pradesh. They had chatted together for more than three hours, with her fish-like smells being very comfortable to the poultry-farm owner. Yenn Rao recollected the poultry-farm owner, as Kodi Mama, (Kodi = Poultry, Mama = Uncle) because that is how Chandramma would refer to him, even after all these years, after a random meeting.
The waiters and serving boys at the restaurant referred to her strange ways with much familiarity. Some said that she had come from a distant place in coastal Andhra Pradesh, and that would be the reason why she may be recollecting Kodi Mama, the poultry-farm owner. Her son, who had determined that he would not sell fish, was an undergraduate student in commerce, at a local college. He disclosed, one fine day, to Yenn Rao and the serving boys community, that Kodi Mama was actually Chandramma’s younger brother, and would only come to Eldams Road to borrow money for investing in some business or the other.
He had not returned for some years, and Chandramma worried for her brother, Kodi Mama. So, she would talk about her perpetually borrowing brother, Kodi Mama, to her customers, popping the subject suddenly into the bargaining that some hurrying office-returning home-going hassled middle-class housewife may have been doing to save some money. And, she would also talk about Kodi Mama, and this time around, she would make him sound wierd to her imaginery non-existant friends who sat around her at the stall on the footpath.
Chandramma seemed to have a number of relatives spread out in Chennai and Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Suddenly, on occasion, she would remember something that was to be discussed with some relative, somewhere. She would jump out of her fish shop, and rush in a very rapid walk, much like a long-distance competitive walker, and barge inside the payphone counter at the cooperative store nearby. The queue of people, waiting patiently for their turn, to use the payphone did not seem to bother her at all. In fact, it could also be possible that she may never have realised that all these people were actually waiting to use the payphone. She would just push aside the person near the phone, and place a ten rupee note on the table and start using the phone.
All customers, salespeople and anyone else loitering around in the 2-storey cooperative store would immediately know that Chandramma was at the payphone. She would practically scream inside the phone, speaking in a very high-pitched shrill tone, without any perceived need for punctuation marks or for coming up for oxygen. She would go on and on and on and on and on and it could also be possible that the person at the other end of the telephone may have gone off to have their dinner or whatever and rejoined the conversation after a considerable amount of time. But, as a result of her extended conversations, and since I used to visit the cooperative stores frequently during those years, long ago, I got to peer inside the small window of opportunity to see and witness the life of Chaapalamma (= fisherwoman) Chandramma.
It was rumoured that Yenn Rao, the owner of the udupi restaurant, was also loopy about Chandramma. He used to refer to her as his own personal magic, like Krishna’s Leela, and yet, he was totally frightened of her. He would wait for her to come inside his restaurant and would get totally upset if she did come inside. He would keep looking out at the street, and would be happy if he heard her shout at the rest of the world, which was quite frequent. And when she would come inside his restaurant and speak about her brother, the idiot fish-smelling Kodi Mama, it would make him want to retch, which he could not, for it was his own restaurant, and he would have to clean up afterwards. Chandramma would insist on paying for her food, and she would make a long speech about how she loved to pay for everything. She would describe her intent to pay in the loudest of voice, and she would explain it in detail, and her long speech would cover everything about her own wretched childhood, and her noble brother, Kodi Mama and some 10-20 other relatives about whom Yenn Rao had never heard anything about or seen any sign of.
She would usually be screaming out, advertising the fish, prawns and shrimp. Her voice was loud enough to be heard from above the sound of the traffic on Mount Road. I remember the road as Mount Road, though the name 'Anna Salai' has been around for more than two decades I think. But, most localites also remember the name and use it in regular conversation. Chandramma had a great location to sell the fish, because she was at the junction of Eldams Road and Mount Road, and the opposite street went down to Panagal Park and Mambalam. Most people walking down any of these streets knew about Chandramma and knew her by her loud voice and smell.
Uniquely, the people inside the vegetarian udupi hotel at the corner did not mind her at all. Most people who ate at this stall were totally against non-veg food and would hate fish and the smell if it would have been any other town. But, this was Madras (of course, of course, Chennai...) and the smell of fish was around everywhere, including the smell of the sea, and sand, and the smell of rain on sand. And, then, especially at this corner of Eldams Road and Mount Road, and if you would go to a wierd street-lane called Mudaliyandan Garden, you would not miss the smell of urine and human faeces all around. So, in short, for those few people who braved it out at the vegetarian place in the corner, the smell of fish was the least of their problems that affected their nasal efficiency.
Chandramma had found a small corner wedged in between two buildings to set up her shop. Her establishment comprised two large fish baskets, filled with fish and prawns and shrimp and crabs, kept fresh with salted-polluted-dirty-stinking ice slabs. Two enamel-type large trays were placed above these open fish baskets, to serve as the display platform. On these trays, she arranged the fish of the day, fish of yesterday and the fish of day-before-yesterday. Similar strategies were in place for the prawns and shrimp and crabs. She sat on a huge stone boulder that she had found nearby. Her two sons had dragged the stone boulder for her and pushed it into the small corner between the two buildings.
And, when she would not be screaming out about her fish and sales, she would continue screaming in her regular conversation. It seemed that it was her normal voice and tenor, and she spoke to everyone in that loud, hissing-like, nasal voice. There was one problem that stood out amongst the many other problems that were very apparent. This was a major problem. She would never stop talking. She would be talking all the time. I mean it... she would talk all the time, all the time, all the time. Even if there were nobody listening to her. She would keep talking to herself, or to some imaginary people around her, in the same loud voice. It seemed like she could see people around her, sitting at her fish-stall, chatting with her.
There is another aspect that I should share about Chandramma before I go any further. She had no continuity in her conversation. She could talk to a customer about her fish, and suddenly include a totally different aspect of life and take the customer by surprise. She would include movies, the local superstars, Chiranjeevi and Rajinikant, and would go on to how the Mahabharata serial on B&W TV was actually better than seeing it on colour TV. Sometimes, she would go on chatting in this manner with her imaginary friends around her shop, and keep changing the subject. Once, the udupi restaurant owner confided in me, that once, she fought with one of her imaginary friends, over several days, and since she could not get her imaginary friend to agree with her, she gave up and came inside the restaurant and sat quietly, not speaking, and kept drinking coffee.
The owner of the udupi restaurant, Yenn Rao, seemed totally frightened of Chandramma, since she would always come inside the restaurant with her large fish-cutting knife. She did this because she was afraid that someone would probably steal it from her 'one-man-fish-market', as she referred to about herself. A random customer sitting next to her, a couple of years earlier, as Yenn Rao told me, had struck up a conversation with Chandramma and introduced himself to her as a poultry-farm owner somewhere north of Nellore, in coastal Andhra Pradesh. They had chatted together for more than three hours, with her fish-like smells being very comfortable to the poultry-farm owner. Yenn Rao recollected the poultry-farm owner, as Kodi Mama, (Kodi = Poultry, Mama = Uncle) because that is how Chandramma would refer to him, even after all these years, after a random meeting.
The waiters and serving boys at the restaurant referred to her strange ways with much familiarity. Some said that she had come from a distant place in coastal Andhra Pradesh, and that would be the reason why she may be recollecting Kodi Mama, the poultry-farm owner. Her son, who had determined that he would not sell fish, was an undergraduate student in commerce, at a local college. He disclosed, one fine day, to Yenn Rao and the serving boys community, that Kodi Mama was actually Chandramma’s younger brother, and would only come to Eldams Road to borrow money for investing in some business or the other.
He had not returned for some years, and Chandramma worried for her brother, Kodi Mama. So, she would talk about her perpetually borrowing brother, Kodi Mama, to her customers, popping the subject suddenly into the bargaining that some hurrying office-returning home-going hassled middle-class housewife may have been doing to save some money. And, she would also talk about Kodi Mama, and this time around, she would make him sound wierd to her imaginery non-existant friends who sat around her at the stall on the footpath.
Chandramma seemed to have a number of relatives spread out in Chennai and Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Suddenly, on occasion, she would remember something that was to be discussed with some relative, somewhere. She would jump out of her fish shop, and rush in a very rapid walk, much like a long-distance competitive walker, and barge inside the payphone counter at the cooperative store nearby. The queue of people, waiting patiently for their turn, to use the payphone did not seem to bother her at all. In fact, it could also be possible that she may never have realised that all these people were actually waiting to use the payphone. She would just push aside the person near the phone, and place a ten rupee note on the table and start using the phone.
All customers, salespeople and anyone else loitering around in the 2-storey cooperative store would immediately know that Chandramma was at the payphone. She would practically scream inside the phone, speaking in a very high-pitched shrill tone, without any perceived need for punctuation marks or for coming up for oxygen. She would go on and on and on and on and on and it could also be possible that the person at the other end of the telephone may have gone off to have their dinner or whatever and rejoined the conversation after a considerable amount of time. But, as a result of her extended conversations, and since I used to visit the cooperative stores frequently during those years, long ago, I got to peer inside the small window of opportunity to see and witness the life of Chaapalamma (= fisherwoman) Chandramma.
It was rumoured that Yenn Rao, the owner of the udupi restaurant, was also loopy about Chandramma. He used to refer to her as his own personal magic, like Krishna’s Leela, and yet, he was totally frightened of her. He would wait for her to come inside his restaurant and would get totally upset if she did come inside. He would keep looking out at the street, and would be happy if he heard her shout at the rest of the world, which was quite frequent. And when she would come inside his restaurant and speak about her brother, the idiot fish-smelling Kodi Mama, it would make him want to retch, which he could not, for it was his own restaurant, and he would have to clean up afterwards. Chandramma would insist on paying for her food, and she would make a long speech about how she loved to pay for everything. She would describe her intent to pay in the loudest of voice, and she would explain it in detail, and her long speech would cover everything about her own wretched childhood, and her noble brother, Kodi Mama and some 10-20 other relatives about whom Yenn Rao had never heard anything about or seen any sign of.
Once, she came into the restaurant and stayed through a heavy monsoon spell on Eldams Road. Her two sons had been left on the road, to take care of the fish and frozen ice. The restaurant was dry and a better place to be than with her sons on the wet and slushy roadside footpath. She kept eating a lot of food, including the snacks stuff that Yenn Rao had kept for the evening customers. The fish-smelling old demon-lady kept clattering and making sounds with the wonky aluminium dish-plates on the dining table and kept making unending metallic sounds that seemed to make increasingly irritating and haunting sounds inside his head. He was getting irritated, but how could he ask her to go out of the restaurant? He knew that she would give him a long fictitious story about her brother and her sons and would go away after the monsoon rain spell had got over. But when? It was known that such intense rain spells on Eldams Road could go on and on and on for more than 2-3 days.
Yenn Rao was wondering as to when would demon-lady go back to waiting it out on the street, for her customers, to sell her fish and stuff. The rains did not seem like they were about to stop at any particular time. He kept staring at her for a long time, almost enough time to convey his negativity and strong vibes to make her realise that she was perhaps not welcome anymore in the restaurant though Yenn Rao had no other option but to allow any customer to wait it out at the place as long as they were purchasing foodstuff and eating them and paying for them. But, she was not paying for them, or so it seemed, for she did have a long-running credit account and she knew that sometime or the other, her two sons would come through and pay for all the bills that she had not paid for.
She had started talking on her phone, screaming and talking at her own extremely high pitch. Most other customers at the restaurant were really getting bugged about her presence, because not only was she a nuisance, but she was also smelling badly, and her stink was spreading through the restaurant. Some customers seemed to prefer to brave themselves out into the rain rather than sit it out safely inside the restaurant. Yenn Rao was beginning to realise that his overall turnover of customers seemed to be getting lesser and lesser. Suddenly, he had a niggling thought. He was listening to the conversation, that is the words that the fish-demon-lady was screaming out. Yenn Rao realised, as he kept listening to the words, that the conversation seemed to be entirely one-sided. It seemed like a fake conversation. It seemed like she was just talking out of sync, and she was faking the words and sentences.
She seemed to be contributing the most of the conversation and speaking for both sides of the conversation. The sentences would start with a question, like she was repeating the questions, and then, she would reply in the manner of her reply. And to create the emphasis, she would repeat her answer, and ask, if the person on the other side of the telephone line had heard the question. It went something like this. “Halllloooo, Halllllloooo, Yesss, did you hear me? did you hear me? did you hear me? tell me if you heard me. No. No. No. No. I told, I told, I told, no, no, listen to me, listen to me, listen, did you hear me? tell me. tell me. Yes. I can come to the village anytime. Yes. I said, I can come to the village anytime. No. No. No. I am not asking if you can come to the village. You are at the village. No. No. No. I am not at the village. You are at the village. No. You are at the village. I am not at the village.”
Yenn Rao was wondering as to when would demon-lady go back to waiting it out on the street, for her customers, to sell her fish and stuff. The rains did not seem like they were about to stop at any particular time. He kept staring at her for a long time, almost enough time to convey his negativity and strong vibes to make her realise that she was perhaps not welcome anymore in the restaurant though Yenn Rao had no other option but to allow any customer to wait it out at the place as long as they were purchasing foodstuff and eating them and paying for them. But, she was not paying for them, or so it seemed, for she did have a long-running credit account and she knew that sometime or the other, her two sons would come through and pay for all the bills that she had not paid for.
She seemed to be contributing the most of the conversation and speaking for both sides of the conversation. The sentences would start with a question, like she was repeating the questions, and then, she would reply in the manner of her reply. And to create the emphasis, she would repeat her answer, and ask, if the person on the other side of the telephone line had heard the question. It went something like this. “Halllloooo, Halllllloooo, Yesss, did you hear me? did you hear me? did you hear me? tell me if you heard me. No. No. No. No. I told, I told, I told, no, no, listen to me, listen to me, listen, did you hear me? tell me. tell me. Yes. I can come to the village anytime. Yes. I said, I can come to the village anytime. No. No. No. I am not asking if you can come to the village. You are at the village. No. No. No. I am not at the village. You are at the village. No. You are at the village. I am not at the village.”
“I can come anytime. Yes. I can come anytime. Did you hear me? Did you hear me? Yes. I can hear you. Can you hear me? I can come if you want me to. But, here, my two sons, they want me. My two sons. Yes. Yes. Yes. No. No. Yes. Yes. My two sons. No. They are not at the village. They are on the street for selling fish. I am not selling fish. My two sons are selling fish. I am at a restaurant. I am eating food. No. No. No. My sons are not eating food on the street. No. No. No. Yes. Yes. No. No. They are not at the village and they are not selling fish. I am eating food. I can come to the village but my two sons, they say that they want me to stay back. They say they can take care of the fish and I can sit in the restaurant and eat food and I do not have to sell fish. I do not have to sit at the street because my sons they say that they can take care of my work.”
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