Malai Mandir — Where God Met the Community

 

Malai Mandir — Where God Met the Community

The name itself is indicative of a confused community as Malai in Tamil meant hill and Mandir in Hindi meat temple. The name came from the fusion of two languages.  Temple on top of the hill.

New Year began early in our house.

It began with a bath.

This was unfortunate because it was usually January, and Delhi in January was not a place where a child wanted to take a bath voluntarily.

The water was heated in a bucket with an immersion rod. We were warned not to touch the bucket while the rod was plugged in, which seemed to make the entire arrangement even more dangerous.

After the bath came the new clothes.

We were dressed carefully, given flowers and coconuts to carry, and taken to the bus stop.

Our destination was Malai Mandir in R.K. Puram.

The DTC bus was usually crowded, and by the time we reached the temple we were reasonably warm again.

This was temporary.

Malai Mandir was built on top of a granite hill, in the open, which meant that after being warmed by a hot bath and a crowded bus, we had to remove our shoes and walk barefoot on freezing stone.

I remember the first few steps particularly well.

You walked quickly.

There was no point pretending otherwise.

We then stood in line to see Lord Muruga.

We had been told that starting the year with a visit to the temple was auspicious.

We assumed Muruga understood the arrangement.

He knew it was New Year.

He knew we wanted the family to have a good year.

And if possible, he was expected to make sure that school went well, nobody fell sick and our parents remained reasonably pleased with us.

We did our namaskarams.

Amma put money in the thattu.

We received prasadam.

And the new year had officially begun.

For us, however, Malai Mandir was not just a place for New Year.

Every birthday seemed to require a visit.

Every festival required a visit.

Any day that an adult considered auspicious could become a visit.

After a while, we knew the temple almost as well as we knew our own neighbourhood.

We knew the steps.

We knew where to leave our footwear.

We knew where the flowers were sold.

And we knew the people.

There was a pookaran at the temple whom my family knew particularly well. He had come from an interior village in Tamil Nadu and somehow remembered all of us.

My uncle had once given him his old Bajaj scooter when he no longer needed it.

This appeared to have established a permanent relationship between our families.

The pookaran would see us and smile as though he had been expecting us.

The kurukkals were even more impressive.

They seemed to remember every member of our family.

“Mami, eppadi irrukel?”

They always remembered Mami.

Mama was sometimes less fortunate.

As children, we eventually understood why.

Mami was the one who put the money into the thattu.

A generous mami received more attention.

More flowers.

More prasadam.

Sometimes even half a coconut.

Mama would stand beside her watching this carefully calibrated distribution of divine favours.

We thought it was funny.

Amma did not.

She would come away carrying her flowers, prasadam and half coconut, while Mama carried nothing except the knowledge that his contribution to the family was apparently less visible to the temple authorities.

As children, we also noticed something else.

Everybody seemed to know everybody.

There might be hundreds of people at Malai Mandir, but the adults behaved as though they were all meeting in someone's living room.

One uncle would stop another.

Someone would ask about someone's daughter.

Someone else would mention a boy who had just got a job.

There were really only two temples that mattered to the Tamil community we knew in South Delhi.

Malai Mandir in R.K. Puram.

And Pillayar Kovil in Sarojini Nagar.

Both were much more than temples.

They were where you met people.

Where you heard the latest news.

Where relatives from Tamil Nadu could be found.

Where families quietly assessed other families.

And where, if you were an unmarried boy or girl of the appropriate age, you could become the subject of a conversation without ever knowing it.

The temples were also unofficial matchmaking centres.

We only knew that whenever we went to Malai Mandir, somebody knew us.

The pookaran knew us.

The kurukkal knew us.

Some uncle knew our father.

Some mami knew our mother.

And somebody always seemed to know exactly how we were related.

Years later, I realised that this was what made the temple important.

For our parents, Delhi was a city of jobs and government colonies, far from Tamil Nadu and from the families they had grown up with.

Malai Mandir gave them a little piece of that world back.

For us children, it was simply the place we went.

We went to see Muruga.

We went for festivals.

We went for birthdays.

We went because Amma said we had to.

And somewhere along the way, without our knowing it, Malai Mandir became the centre of our little world.

We went there to pray.

But that was only part of the visit.

There was always someone to meet, someone to remember, someone to ask about, someone to introduce us to—and, if Amma had been sufficiently generous at the thattu, perhaps even a little extra prasadam.

Looking back, God was certainly there.

But the community was everywhere.