Adyar: On this side of the bridge

Adyar was a self-sufficient area, emracing its inhabitants and yet throwing its gates open Photo: The Hindu 

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Evelyn Ratnakumar  The Hindu 25 July 14

In the 1950s, sisters Ambigai and Uma Nataraja had hopped on to their cycles daily, and made the quick trip from near McRennett Bakery (now Adyar Bakery), where they lived with their parents, to The Besant Theosophical Society High School.

Flanked by paddy fields, the nearly-empty street snaked through the locality and ended at Theosophical Society (TS), where the sisters studied from their Montessori days, right up to their SSLC exams.

“It was a time when we children were one with nature, silently observing its many wonders,” remembers Dr. Uma Nataraja.

At that time, beyond TS there was just a mass of casuarina trees swaying in the sea breeze. Now, it is a maze of realty development.

“Property here is absolutely unaffordable now. Earlier, people dissuaded you from investing here,” says Dr. Nataraja.

Back then, ‘people from the other side of the bridge’ — as those living outside Adyar were jokingly referred to by old-timers — made very rare trips, if ever, to Adyar.

It was an area cut off from the rest of the city, and to traverse the bridge was considered an excursion to the outskirts of Madras. “Today, Adyar has become the destination for everyone in the city,” she says.

In the 1950s and 60s, Adyar was a self-sufficient area, embracing all its inhabitants and yet throwing its gates open to residents from other parts of Madras as well.

“People from all over the city walked to Annai Velankanni shrine for the chariot procession on September 7, and every year, it used to rain on that day. We residents would open our verandahs so devotees could take shelter,” says Ambigai Nataraja.

Eighty-year-old A.N. Jagannath Rao remembers the many trips he took along with Ms. Nataraja’s husband, Siddarth Buch, on his boat, ‘Attaboy’, along the Adyar river.

For him, be it bonfires at scouts’ camps or finding love at his school campus, Adyar has been a way of life, an area peppered with opportunities for aesthetic, cultural, intellectual and philosophical pursuits.