Tethered to home

An ode to Chennai through my black scooter that carried me everywhere

Hello! I’m Apoorva Sripathi, a writer, editor, and artist. If you think my work is valuable and would like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.

I tried my hand at this semi-fiction piece last year when I began unearthing memories of my life in Chennai for all the fiction writing that I planned to do (which has only materialised now). This piece was accepted by a journal and then later rejected after I had done the edits they’d given me. And because I see this newsletter as a time capsule/receptacle of my memories as well as my words, I thought I’d share this piece here, now, at a time when I’m leaving Chennai¹. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed thinking about my life here.

My lovingly photographed scooter (license plate cheekily hidden)

When you’ve never felt tethered to your hometown, you begin to view every other city you’ve lived in as home. At least I did. It’s not that I actively hated Chennai or refused to build any memories of where I grew up. But this city, my city, resembled a ghost town after two years of academic exploration elsewhere. The Chennai of my youth seemed more languid, less furious, and more jubilant than the city of the present like fragments of a forgotten dream. 

When I was 16, I acquired a black scooter, a learner’s licence, and ceaseless arrogance to zip past obnoxious men on the roads, even if all I was doing was to be present at chemistry tuition and learn routinely about the process of saponification. After tuition, I’d sometimes meet with my cousin so we could raid local bakeries and eat our weight in veggie puffs, dense chocolate donuts, and ludicrously bright pistachio and sweet coconut cakes.

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Romance by any other name

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On the last day of school before our exams came to an end, before we would all realise that this was it, that our metamorphosis into quasi-adults was almost complete, we wore glittering saris and stuffy formals and gathered in the school courtyard to take pictures and say goodbye before we left the suffocating institution for good. A few days before, after many deliberations and measured savings, my parents had purchased our first ever digital camera, a silver Nikon Coolpix for the family, and I promptly christened it by hurrying downstairs and taking a blurry but proud picture of my scooter from various angles.

I didn’t know it then, but my scooter had quietly tethered me to the city. I travelled everywhere on it like a queen on a state coach, except with automatic transmission. What I loved about my scooter was simple: wind cradling me from all sides while riding at breakneck speed, people-watching when caught in traffic, and the ability to weave in and out of the queue of vehicles in a bottleneck. I tried my hand at driving a car, but its boxy emptiness only depressed me. The scooter was infinitely more pleasurable than just sitting inside a car, blasting the air conditioning, listening to music, and shutting myself off from my surroundings; it was about power in movement – like I was piercing the wind – about being in charge amidst the chorus of aggressive honking all around me.

I rode my scooter everywhere: to college (even though it was a mere 5 minute walk from home), to inter-collegiate competitions, to quiz meetings on Sunday mornings that were overpopulated with men, to all my workplaces and to various snack spots in the city. It was my constant companion in what I considered to be an otherwise lonely existence.

But there were days when I was less enthusiastic about my travels. And on those occasions I would be consumed by road rage, cursing and yelling at people who overtook me without so much as a hand signal or an indicator. Some days the skies would punish with rain beating on my back so hard that the raincoat seemed penetrable. Fingers shivering, palms gripping the handlebars and feet impatiently tapping the road, waiting for the signal to turn green so I could race home, peel wet clothes off of me, and devour a steaming bowl of garlicky rasam rice, a remedy by my mother. 

Rainy days also seemed to weed aggressors out of the woodwork. I remember, on four separate occasions, men forcefully slapping my back and laughing at my face or trying to lean on my thigh in the midst of a traffic jam. Weave in and out, honk loudly, and take a different route, I would repeatedly tell myself, whilst imagining a reward for quickly escaping them — a fresh hot puff at my local bakery, served by the loveliest, kindest person imaginable.

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This writing life

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 On the weekends, I’d be raring to go again, to meet up with my friends from school. We were a group of four, and two of us had similar scooters that we relied upon almost every day. So the other two friends would ride pillion, and we would ride alongside each other: on flyovers, beach roads, shady avenues; to cinemas, malls, and parks. We’d scout the city for restaurants and cafes, arts and crafts exhibitions, stopping at small side roads so I could take smoke breaks before we decided to ride again. 

There wasn’t much to do in a city like Chennai: we were limited both by our inadequate funds and opportunities to travel. Riding on a scooter to new and old neighbourhoods out in the open air, talking amongst ourselves in the height of the summer, while being stuck in traffic on busy Anna Salai felt liberating, especially at a time when our families were thinking of getting us married. One of us did, eight years after I got my scooter, and things were never the same again.

Sometime in 2016, two years after my friend got married, I gave away my scooter to another family with a teenage daughter, in the hope that she might find it as useful as I did throughout my late teens and early adulthood. Surprisingly, it was an easy parting at the time. I remember my father delivering a mock eulogy about the whole situation, something about how the scooter had carried me throughout most of my life-defining years, mostly in search of food, and that everyone rides bikes but I was flying on it. 

Growing up, my time in Chennai was punctuated by nothing special and certainly nothing ambitious or purposeful. It was mostly small joys that I refused to acknowledge at the time: walks to and from school during monsoons cradling a cabbage and bell pepper sandwich; fluffy soan papdi in green glass jars from a roadside vendor; the perfume of mangoes and jackfruits during summer; searingly spicy peanut sundal with raw mangoes, carrots, and paniyaarams at T Nagar post shopping sprees; burgers and chocolate milkshakes at a local bakery after weary tuitions; a tipsy first date walking around Parry’s Corner near the Armenian Church; twilight beach smokes with friends and strangers. And, of course, countless scooter rides around the city. 

This is the history of my life in Chennai, as I’ve come to accept it. Small moments wandering through life, through the streets, avenues, roads, and flyovers in this city, my city, punctuated with food and made possible by my scooter. When people cross borders, they usually carry prized possessions to help them remember the voices of their land, to help preserve archives and souvenirs for posterity, to help them remain tethered to home. In the seething heat of Chennai, in the exaggerated months of the city with nothing to do, my scooter drove me in pursuit of belonging, keeping me tethered to the idea of home.

1. I’m moving to London if anyone is interested in this information.