We are rebuilding our house. It’s an ancient two-storied, shelf-less, rodent and termite-ridden relic that might have been named a national heritage building had we not decided to pull it down. How we came to the decision could fill a 400-page book so I keep off that topic.

Since we couldn’t get a flat close by we’ve shifted to a nearby locality. The rent is gorging into our salaries but I’m not really complaining. This new place is quite nice – close to the market, school, bus-stop, etc. The best thing is an ancient temple which is small but has the most impressive deities.

I suspect about 100 years ago our locality was an agrahaaram aligned with that temple. The old street houses have of course been replaced by sprawling bungalows and duplex apartments, thanks to a steady inflow of Silicon Valley dollars (just like Kerala houses with green walls and orange roofs scream Gulf money, the existence of an NRI son can easily be guessed by the interiors of a Chennai house).

But we the people of this locality would like to mentally belong to the previous century, thank you. We will have marble flooring and stained glass for all our windows but we shall let in the servant maid only through a separate entrance.

We have three different sinks – stainless steel for puja things, a black slab one for the utensils and another for the plates, spoons and assorted ‘echchal’ stuff. If you interchange their uses, the servant kills you with a look. Yes, a long innings in this locality has made the servant maids staunch followers of the madi system. The bathroom has a separate cupboard for soaps and shampoos to be used exclusively during three days a month.

If you hit the terrace at around six in the evening, you can see an assortment of mamas in various stages of sandhyavandanam. Then the mamas greet each other (only English, please), water their respective rooftop gardens (table rose and thulasi maadam), pick up the dried clothes and go down – they are now eligible for a second round of evening coffee.

Come Ammavaasai and our area looks festive. Mamas race around in their Honda Civics, wearing panchagajam and naamam/vibuthi pattais, to catch an ‘earlier round’ of tharpanam at a temple. Mamis bring out their madisaars and beg the crows to peck at their rice. The servant maids tread around the house so carefully that you wish you could give them special madi-proof gear so that they don’t really have to behave like burglars.