The Colony — Finding Our People

When we came to Delhi in 1975, I thought we had simply moved to another city.

I was too young to know that we had also entered another world.

Delhi was large, and mostly unfamiliar. The people around us spoke Hindi. The food was different. Even the names of places took some getting used to.

But there was a Tamil community already there.

The earlier arrivals had settled mostly around Karol Bagh and central Delhi. They had come before us, found jobs, found houses, found each other and, over time, created a little Tamil world in the middle of Delhi.

We were the next wave.

The newer arrivals seemed to gravitate south.

Places like R.K. Puram, Munirka, Green Park and Safdarjung Enclave had become familiar names in the Tamil community.

We started in Munirka, next to R.K. Puram.

I was about ten years old and in the fifth standard when I started at DTEA R.K. Puram.

The school was only about five hundred metres from home.

So I walked.

At ten, five hundred metres seemed like a perfectly respectable journey to make on your own.

What I remember most was not the walk.

It was what happened when I reached the school.

Until then, Delhi had seemed like a very large place.

Then I turned up at DTEA.

And suddenly there were hundreds of children who looked familiar.

They carried lunch boxes that looked suspiciously like mine.

They spoke Tamil.

They knew about vadai.

They knew about curd rice.

They seemed to understand things that, until then, I had assumed were just things that happened in our house.

I had not realized that I had been looking for people like me.

The temple was our cultural immersion.

For us, that meant Malai Mandir.

We went there for festivals, birthdays and whatever else our parents considered sufficiently auspicious.

But the temple was also a place where children could be signed up for things.

My sister and I were enrolled in Thirupugazh classes with Guruji S. Raghavan.

We became the Thirupugazh Anbargal.

The name sounded grand.

We were still children.

My sister was enrolled in Carnatic music as well.

Nobody asked whether we wanted to become musicians or Thirupugazh experts.

These were simply things Tamil children in Delhi did.

Looking back, this was how the community worked.

There was school for education.

The temple for religion.

Music classes for culture.

Tamil friends for everything in between.

And everywhere there were adults who seemed to know one another.

As our family moved around Delhi, we discovered that the Tamil world moved with us.

From Munirka we moved to Green Park.

Then Safdarjung Enclave.

Then back to Munirka, which by then felt less like a neighbourhood and more like returning to familiar territory.

Eventually we moved to Vasant Kunj.

The addresses changed.

The DTC routes changed.

The schools and playgrounds changed.

But somehow the Tamil network remained.

There was always a temple.

Someone knew where to buy the right rice.

Someone knew a music teacher.

Someone knew a good place for Tamil books.

Someone’s uncle knew our father.

And there were always children carrying lunch boxes.

As a child, I thought we were simply moving houses.

Only much later did I understand what was happening.

We had not just moved through Delhi.

We had moved through a series of little Tamil enclaves inside it.

They were never really separate from Delhi.

Delhi was all around us.

But within those neighbourhoods, schools, temples, stores and houses, we had built something familiar.

A small piece of the South.

Five hundred metres from home, on the walk to DTEA, I had discovered it for the first time.

I had walked out of our house as a boy in Delhi.

And somewhere along that short walk, I found my people.