Thiruvalluvar counselled that one should give a little to the stomach, when there is no food for the ear. Nowhere else is this flouted more than in the canteens attached to the sabhas during Chennai’s music season. This Kural gist flashed on my mental screen when I saw Annaswami in the Music Academy canteen after I scrambled to it from a concert to have a vada thukkada with a coffee chaser. Annaswami was tackling an onion rava masala dosai, that stretched out of his plate. I could detect a slight curl of his upper lip in contempt, at my vada, a pygmy before his King Kong.
Technically, Annaswami is not my friend but a casual acquaintance. We meet with surprising regularity annually during the music season at the Academy, the holy of holies. We nod at each other from whatever distance we are at the canteen, feeling instantly happy that both of us are alive and kicking and the world is still spinning.
I had never seen Annaswami inside the auditorium at any concert—free or ticketed—for he comes to the Academy canteen with the motto, this far and no further. Last year or so, we stood together at the entrance of canteen after the filling and billing, since a heavy rain showers kept us inside the building. “Do you wonder why I come all the way to this place for my snacks, when plenty are available elsewhere?” he asked. I thought it was a rhetoric question for which the answer will come in hot pursuit.
It inevitably did.
“Though we see the regulars, the milk men, the newspaper boys, the vegetable vendors and the like, such humdrum appearances don’t mean much, unless these fine fellows fail to turn up. But one looks forward to attending weddings to meet relatives once in a while, some of them less frequently.
Likewise, I look forward to this music festival to feel happy things are happening, and the regulars are there. Don’t think I close my ears to the music. I lack the patience to sit through a concert. Do you go to the theatres any more when you can watch movies at home? So, I come here, to see people like you, the same caterer, waiter and such. The rain has stopped. See you next year, sir, God willing.”