An Inventory of Obituaries
Medha Venkat
During my first few years of working in a Delhi newsroom, what amused me most was that there were stock obituaries for important people who were on their deathbeds. Ready to be whipped out and put on page the moment there was a slight hint/scare of death. Often, the news of a convoy of cars rushing to AIIMS was enough to set this off. And then, according to the veracity of the news, the obit piece would be edited, re-edited, moved from page to page, sized and resized. My role in this whole system used to be that of a tiny worker ant, and yet I found these days to be the most exciting.
I was new to the obscurities of this city and its workings back then. In parts of Delhi where new immigrants like me tend to stay, impermanence (and imminent deaths) is common. Of people you love, even places and things you get attached to. You’re constantly living on edge and in extremes, and as I have learnt, death scares are routine. Just the other day, a friend gave me a scare when he told me that Thattakam, a Kerala hotel I used to go to often, may be shutting down. In every part of Delhi with a sizable Malayali population, you’re sure to find such ‘hotels’: no-frills establishments that serve hot, homely meals. While I am usually cautious about excessive Malayali nostalgia, my taste buds end up giving in more often than not. So I indulge. But quietly, not always telling the world.
Thattakam is situated in South Delhi’s Lado Sarai, close to the Qutub Minar. Lado Sarai is your typical Delhi urban village—groups of Jatt men smoking hookahs and massaging their tummies with mustard oil in winter, migrant students from different parts of North India living in one-room barsatis and preparing for government exams, Malayali nurses buying matta rice and dried anchovies from Kerala stores. Every time I walked through the gallis and entered Thattakam, the feel reminded me of boarding a private bus in Kerala. The feeling of entering a world inside a world; I don’t know how else to put it.
Thattakam vibes were immaculate, so was the music. The place was run by three brothers, and the music choice varied according to who was at the counter during a particular time of day. The younger brothers played Malayalam dance numbers (late 90s MG Sreekumar and early 2000s Jassi Gift) and Hindi heartbreak songs (Arijit Singh and Atif Aslam numbers from the early 2000s). In the mornings, it was typically the older brother in control. I liked his music best. On particularly terrible mornings, I would enter and hear some of my favourite Malayalam film songs from the 80s or 90s and it would change my day.
Thattakam always filled me with a feeling of home. It felt amazing to hear so much Malayalam around, to be able to pick out one dialect from the other in my head. It amused me to see specific food items which were going viral on Malayali Instagram being represented on the menu: paal kappa (a rich, gloopy stew made from tapioca and coconut milk) and kizhi porotta (a spicy, coconuty buffalo meat dry-fry packed inside a flaky flatbread which is then covered in a banana leaf parcel). I don’t know yet what to feel about how the food we consume inside and outside our homes is becoming more influenced by almighty algorithms and less by local cultures. But while other stalls in Lado Sarai jazzed up their menus with tandoori momos topped with mayonnaise and charred green bell peppers, this was what the folks at Thattakam—guided by a different SEO bubble—came up with.
The word Thattakam roughly translates to “territory” in Malayalam. I don’t know who was behind the naming of this place, but their choice was apt. Thattakam was not just a hotel, it was a community space. The OG regulars of Thattakam were all gym-bros with swanky bikes who worked as personal trainers at the Lado Sarai outpost of a fitness studio chain originating in Kerala. They convened at Thattakam before, after and in between their work sessions. They often made Instagram reels featuring their daily meals with a backdrop of nostalgia-invoking Malayalam music. They had their own football tournaments they played in an abandoned open space (owned by Delhi’s statutory urban planning authority), the golden trophies of which were on display on the walls of Thattakam. They also watched all their critical football and cricket matches there. Often, as evening faded into night, they headed to Madeira, a dingy bar not far from Thattakam, to catch their drinks for the day. It felt like their space of joy, love and brotherhood.
I observe, but rarely engage—like I do with most all-male Malayali spaces. It is rather strange that I don’t feel the same kind of intimidation and fear in spaces crowded with aggressive North Indian men. It is easier to belong because my more powerful identities come to the forefront by default. I am a woman, but an upper-caste, English-speaking, working woman. Occupying spaces populated by Malayali men, though, often brings back a specific childhood memory from a poora paramb (festival ground) in my hometown.
I must have been around ten years old then. My cousin brothers and I were running around the temple grounds, looking at the elephants and listening to the melam orchestra. There was one specific moment when I got lost in the crowd and wanted to find my brothers. I eventually found one of them standing with a group of boys from the neighbourhood, laughing about some silly thing. But in that time, space and moment, I found him to be fully unapproachable. I mean, these were all boys I knew. They were not strangers, they were not dangerous. Perhaps most often our fears as women navigating public spaces have nothing to do with individual men. For the ten-year-old me, it was about the ease with which the boys occupied, and in some sense even owned, that poora paramb.
In Thattakam, I take out my Malayali-woman identity with an eagerness that is almost childlike, one that can be easily wounded. This has never been easy. For this reason, I decided to gatekeep the place from my closest friends. When alone, I am more in control of how I am seen, and how much attention I attract to myself.
But when I met Z, he crashed past those gates much too fast. He’s someone who had spent a large part of his formative years in Delhi. While walking around the city, Z would often stop at a street to point out to me a building or a house and tell a story from his past. Many times, the said story was not actually about the building or the space, but about something else that used to stand in its place. Having a personal history with a city is a strange thing, it tints and sometimes even taints the lens through which we see it. Between Z and I, the physical city around us was the same and yet we saw two completely different places.
“Do we need to make a reservation?” Z texted me when I first made plans to meet him at Thattakam.
I found it hilarious. Reservations are for spaces that are averse to crowds. It makes no sense for those where people float in and out, spaces that people are free to make their own.
“LOL no, it is a tiny place,” I texted back.
I still don’t know why I so easily let Z into Thattakam. Maybe it was some sort of strange faith I had in him: that he would understand the place. He, too, was an immigrant to another confusing big city after all.
He was a fan of their no-nonsense chaya, like I was. A simple Malayali chaya (made by a Bihari man) with no adrak, no biryani spices; just tea leaves and milk and water frothed to the right level. Z loved his routine, and Thattakam became part of it over the next few days. In between my workday, I would take autos to meet him there for chaya. There were days when we would sit for hours, giving back-to-back chaya orders. It was six one day, and eight the next.
I am going to write a film about Thattakam, Z told me one day. It was going to be a bilingual film, a love story set in Lado Sarai.
Does this love story happen in winter or summer, I asked him.
Winter, obviously — he replied.
We were sitting on flimsy metal chairs placed on a floor mat that had fake grass, right outside Thattakam. It was only September then, but I swear I felt a whiff of cool air on my body. Z felt it too. Sometimes these gallis and their tightly-packed matchbox houses have a way of blocking out the sun completely and bringing you chills from god knows where.
In the next few weeks, the Thattakam love story began consuming Z’s head and heart. The brothers who owned the place began warming up to him, more than they ever did with me. The older brother even got Z to try new things from the menu: chicken al-fahm with mandhi rice, both middle-eastern dishes that have now become staples of the Malayali diet. How jealous I was of this fact.
The next time I went to Thattakam alone, one of the guys asked me for my “friend.” I replied curtly that I didn’t know where he was. Later, over many chayas, Z narrated to me various scenes, storylines and characters from his film. The main character (inspired by the older brother who ran the place) was a Malayali man who falls for a Jatt woman police officer. From my fading memories of Z’s narrations, I see her as a woman with broad shoulders and a husky voice—the kind of woman our protagonist never thought he’d be attracted to. Poles apart from his ex-girlfriend, a Malayali nurse with whom he had first come to Delhi.
What ruptures would this new relationship cause in his rather insular Lado Sarai life? There have to be slight cracks in the existing structure for new bonds to form, after all. Z was obsessed with the many possibilities that these questions held. He began spending inordinate amounts of time at Thattakam, and often without me.
When I once complained about this, he told me, “Yaar…I had this extreme bodily urge and I quickly took an auto. And the thing with spaces is that I like seeing them alone, aap ke saath space becomes the backdrop. Now it’s just the space.”
Was Thattakam becoming more his than mine? Of course, my tendency to blend into the backdrop of the place was of no help, as opposed to Z’s active engagement with the space and its many characters. He was equally intrigued by the outsiders who ventured into the space as he was with the main characters—like two Bihari boys who were adventurous enough to order the Kerala fish curry, despite being unsure of how to deal with the bones and scales.
When he shared an outline he wrote for the film, I saw that he had written about things that I’d not paid too much attention to. A poster of the iconic Malayalam movie Chemmeen, the garlic mayonnaise that they served with the mandhi rice.
“You know, when a place feels too much like home, these details become irrelevant to you, no? I feel like only an outsider could have written this way about Thattakam,” I told him.
“Yes, somebody who is still looking for his Thattakam,” he said.
Perhaps as immigrants in strange cities, this is all that we seek. Our own Thattakam.
Many months have passed since that day. And now the older brother, the protagonist of Z’s story, seemed to be on a similar journey — as I found out when I went all the way to investigate Thattakam’s apparent closure. There was an urgent need to get to the bottom of things, despite the fact that I’d been trying hard to kill all memories of the place from my heart. I’d moved far away from Lado Sarai and stopped talking to Z entirely by then.
When I went, the space appeared to be in a state of transition. But our man, Z’s protagonist, greeted me at the door and called out to the kitchen for a strong, not-so-sweet chaya. My regular order.
There was no music playing in the background.
So the place was not shutting down. It was simply changing hands, becoming someone else’s Thattakam instead. But the knowledge of this fact barely did anything to calm me down. That immense sense of loss I felt when I heard of the place closing remained. After all, Thattakam was where a lot of my life happened. The space was the reminder of a rather heady, intense time in my life and moving away from the neighbourhood only further solidified that feeling. What, then, am I to do with the feely obit piece that was taking shape in my head? Should it be discarded? In that moment, sipping on hot chaya to the squeaking sound of the ceiling fan, I felt the need to mourn.
Perhaps this is not as strange as it seems. Don’t we all maintain an inventory of obituaries in our hearts? At least I do, for the many people, places and things that I love—for what was, for what could have been. I think an obituary becomes valid only from the time you acknowledge that a loss is a loss. And this was my moment. Though at this point, I don’t know what it’s become anymore, an obituary or a dead love story.
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About the Author
Medha V is an independent editor and writer. She lives in Delhi.