The Canal That Remembers

The Buckingham Canal does not appear on most tourist maps of Chennai. It runs behind things — behind the fish market at Kasimedu, behind the tarpaulin settlements of Tondiarpet, behind the memory of a city that once moved its salt and its timber by water. Old Rajan, who sells tender coconuts from a blue cart near the Otteri lock gate, will tell you this if you stop long enough: the canal was here before the roads, before the flyovers, before the software parks that glitter on reclaimed marsh to the south. He says it the way a man states a simple fact, without nostalgia, the way you might say the sun rises in the east.

The lock gate itself is a relic — iron, colonial vintage, painted over so many times that the layers have become a kind of geological record. Green, then black, then oxide red, then green again. Someone has recently added a cheerful yellow stripe that nobody can explain. The lockkeeper's quarters are occupied now by a family from Thanjavur, three generations of them, who grow curry-leaf plants in paint tins along every available ledge. The youngest daughter does her homework on the stone steps in the late afternoon, the canal shimmering bronze behind her as the sun drops toward the western suburbs.

People in this part of north Chennai have a particular relationship with water that planners from other cities never quite understand. They do not fear the canal so much as negotiate with it. During the northeast monsoon, the water rises and they shift their belongings to higher shelves, learned behaviour passed down like a recipe. After it recedes, they return their sandals to the doorstep without drama. Meenakshi, who runs a tiffin operation from the lane just off Canal Bank Road, says the flood of 2015 took her gas cylinder but left her steel almirahs standing. She replaced the cylinder and moved on. Her idlis, she will tell you firmly, were never interrupted for more than two days.

The neighbourhood around the canal has its own grammar of belonging. There is a small Mariamman temple whose annual festival in the Tamil month of Aadi closes the adjacent road for three days, an inconvenience everyone accepts as a structural feature of the calendar. The kolam drawn at the temple entrance changes with the season — simple rice-flour geometry in the dry months, elaborate coloured patterns for the festival. The woman who draws it, Vasantha, is seventy-one and nearly blind in one eye; she works by memory and muscle, laying down each line as if tracing something that already exists beneath the surface.

The canal carries things. It carries the obvious refuse of a city with inadequate waste management, and this is real and documented and ought to be addressed. But it also carries something harder to measure. Fishermen from the lagoon mouth navigate small wooden boats up past the Otteri gate in the early mornings to reach the wholesale market, a practice that connects this street to the same tidal logic that governed the Coromandel coast three centuries ago. Children from the settlement near the Wimco Nagar bridge fish with hand lines in the late evenings, catching small catfish that their mothers will fry with turmeric and dried red chilli, a dish that tastes, if you ask the children, exactly like itself and nothing else.

Urban renewal proposals have visited this stretch of canal several times in the last twenty years. Each plan arrives with renderings: promenades, heritage lighting, food plazas, pedestrian bridges painted in appealing colours. The plans recede like the monsoon water, leaving the canal and its people largely as they were. Old Rajan is not bitter about this. He has seen the proposals and he knows the canal's value as a drainage spine and he understands, with a canal-bank pragmatism, that a promenade is a fine thing but a functioning storm drain is essential. He peels a coconut in four clean strokes and hands it across without looking up.

What holds a place together is often not its monuments but its continuities — the accumulated habit of people who have agreed, without formal discussion, to belong to a particular stretch of ground. The canal is not picturesque in any conventional sense. It does not invite the kind of looking that produces postcards. It invites instead a longer attention, the kind that notices Vasantha's kolam changing with the months, the curry-leaf plants climbing the lockkeeper's ledge, the homework being done on ancient stone steps as bronze light fills the water behind a schoolgirl's bent head.

The Buckingham Canal runs behind things. That is exactly where it needs to be.

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