The Chair

I am sitting on a broken chair in the corridor of one of the many grand red stone and brick buildings of the Madras High Court. 

Part of the great legacy of the British who made Madras, now Chennai, their first port of call’ while building edifices to an empire whose sunset heralded, to many nostalgic apologists, the beginning of twilight in this huge patchwork of a country called India, this too a legacy name bestowed by the firangis who came and went.

What is of course fascinating is not this quick refresher course in Anglo Indian history, but the chair.

I have to sit waiting for my case to be called while black and white suited advocates (pleaders as they were once called) huddle and murmur about the goings on here.

This is maybe what the old courts of kings were like, murmurs of palace intrigue, murder, incest and betrayal. Any way it is all very quaint. 

Opposite me sits an ancient lady somewhat shrunk by the years.  A lady she must have been and remains: perfectly turned out in an brown and gold sari, her white hair pulled back into a short pigtail bun, and her diamond nose ring lustrous with age and dignity. Her eyes with just the lovely hint of kohl are bright. She is sitting on a bench waiting for her lawyer to call her when their case comes up for hearing. I of course wonder what she has come to resolve at this stage in her life. I imagine stories of errant and greedy sons, of machinations to evict her from her stately home and such stuff that would make for a Victorian gothic novel. The truth may be more banal than my imagination allows, but, hey, not much more is happening here at the moment, so I indulge.

She sits, as I said, on a bench.

I sit on a chair.

Which is actually what this mental doodle is about.

The chair is made of a dark wood. Or maybe the wood is not dark, but a softer brown. It could be that it follows the example of  the colour of skin of the people in this delightful state: they are burnished to a shine by the southern sun.

Either way it is not new. It could even be as old as the Dame in front of me. 

It was made for a different era for sure and by craftsmen who probably ran their well-worked hands over the sanded surface in gestures of deep affection.

It sits on four solid legs, which don’t shift and cant even when I shake it.

The interesting thing about this chair is that has no left arm. Amputated by some accident and not because of bad workmanship I surmise. One little stump rises vertically at the left edge of the seat, where in its younger prouder days it would have met the left arm.

When something like this breaks you should be mindful of splinter. And rough wood, even a rusty nail. 

But not this stump: It is time worn and smooth and rounded at the edges. I marvel at how comfortable it feels.  And I can rest my palm there, much like a barbarian king resting his hand on the lion’s head on his throne as he leans forward to pronounce judgment. Quite dramatic, this little throne of mine.

And then I think that in this land, we don’t maintain, neither do we discard. We hope that time will be kind to the objects that forefathers have built. And if not we are equally dispossessed of affection for the trinkets of what should be our collective history. It could well be this is symptomatic of a culture that by and large burns its dead, and which does not preserve names and history in carved gravestones like the white man does.

I look at the old lady again. And the patina of years of her face and the grains of wood on this chair resonate with sympathy for each other.