The village that time forgot
Meenakshipuram in Thoothukudi is known in the region as the village where one man lived. C. Palanivel Rajan takes a trip to this remote and eerily quiet village that everyone seems to have abandoned, after that lone resident died recently.
“Lonely places attract as many lonely people and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves,” British novelist Pico Iyer famously said. S. Kandasamy, the last surviving resident of ‘ghost village’ Meenakshipuram, who died two weeks ago, gave life to the word loneliness.
Meenakshipuram in Thoothukudi is infamous for its ghostly appearance after its inhabitants moved out over the last two decades for reasons like water scarcity and poor roads to nearby towns. Recently, the lone surviving resident died, aged about 83, sending all who were once associated with the village into a tailspin of nostalgia, spurring recollections of happy days spent in the village.
Taking narrow lanes
While reaching the village from Thoothukudi city, one passes a series of villages that look nearly the same. The narrow lanes that wind along the Thoothukudi-Tirunelveli National Highway, 26 km from the city, will lead a curious traveller to this abandoned village. The village has remained isolated after the residents started moving out in the late 2000s. It remains alive only in yellowing photographs that villagers who have migrated from here had taken when it was bustling with life.
S. Kandasamy, we are told, spent his last years only with old clothes, cattle, a makeshift bullock cart, and framed photographs of him and his family. He lived alone for a decade, and as his sons remember, maybe even a couple of years more.
Ganapathy, one of Kandasamy’s associates, whose family like all others had moved to the nearby Nadu Sekkarakudi in search of a better livelihood, remembers the days when the old man would walk along with his cattle in the mornings and evenings to bathe them.
Stubborn old man
Searching for words, Mr. Ganapathy adds in a frail voice, “The old man was very stubborn, and he wanted to die in the same house where his parents once lived and died. As I grew up seeing their family and cattle, I cannot stay put in my ‘new’ house in the new village, so I come here once in a while to check on his cattle.”
Kandasamy’s elder son K. Ravi, who has taken over his father’s duties by moving into the ‘lonely house’ to look after the cattle, says, “My siblings [younger brother and two sisters] and I grew up in this house until we moved out after we got married. We cannot afford to lose our father’s memories in the place he lived and breathed his last.” Most of the residents of Meenakshipuram migrated to nearby villages, such as Nadu Sekkarakudi and Keezha Sekkarakudi, and a few others moved to the town.
Mr. Ravi has quit his job as a driver and moved to the lonely house, but he says his wife and children are not willing to accompany him, and so he has to visit them once a week. He and his siblings have renovated Kandasamy’s makeshift cart, which he used for rekla (bull cart) races. They say it is a symbol of the bygone days spent with their father who enthusiastically trained the cattle for races and jallikattu.
Mr. Ravi, who is proud of his father’s decision to stay alone when everyone else moved out of the village, says that after a few years of living away from people, Kandasamy began to enjoy his loneliness, turning it to an advantage by thriving in the remoteness of the village. Kandasamy’s mates, who live in the nearby Keezha Sekkarakudi and Nadu Sekkarakudi, remember him as a happy person, though media reports in the past portrayed him as a lonely person living in a haunted village. While it was true that the village was separated from the rest of the area because of poor connectivity and water scarcity, he did not care much for these discomforts, though the others saw them as problems that rendered their village uninhabitable.
Living in peace
Ramasamy, aged above 70, from Keezha Sekkarakudi, says Kandasamy visited the place every two to three days to buy groceries and beedis. He reiterates what Kandasamy used to say whenever his friends and family advised him to move out of the village and live with them: “No worries, makka [mate]. I have learnt how to live peacefully with all the oddities of life.”
Though he was happy living on his own, Mr. Ramasamy says, he often used to worry about the water scarcity and other problems which officials ignored whenever the villagers highlighted them through petitions or protests. “Had the problems been attended to by the government and transport facilities been created for better connectivity, the village would have stayed alive,” he remembers Kandasamy as saying till he died.
Mr. Ravi recalls his childhood days when he and other villagers used to walk roughly 5 kilometres on the fields and in forests, fearing snakes and other animals, to reach the school in a nearby village. “Owing to poor connectivity, nobody was willing to open shops in the village, forcing the villagers to walk five kilometres each time they had to buy something,” he says.
However, he doubts whether the villagers would have stayed on even if there had been proper roads because water scarcity peaked at one point in time, and the villagers had to walk miles to reach the nearby waterbodies to fetch water. Even for farming, they depended on rain, and if the rain failed them one season, it would be a nightmare for the whole year, he notes.
Unable to sell their land
The villagers have not been able to sell their land because no one is ready to waste their money, he says. On a positive note, the land is one of the two reasons for the bond between the villagers and the village to remain intact. The other reason is the presence of two temples — the Kaariya Siddhi Srinivasa Perumal Koil and the Parasakthi Mariamman Koil. Keeping an unwritten promise, the residents turn up in the village for the temple festivals to meet their former neighbours and friends. Mr. Ravi says the once-in-five year Mariamman Koil festival could not be conducted this year, as his father was bed-ridden.“Worrying about our father’s health, we decided not to conduct the festival this year, but we perform regular pujas through a priest,” he adds.
Mr. Ravi has decided to restart farming, with the help of his brother K. Balakrishnan, after the jallikattu and rekla race seasons; they are busy training their bulls for the competitions.
He does suspect that isolation had made his father lose sanity in his later years as Kandasamy started forgetting things and relatives. “At one point of time last year, he could not recognise me. He could recall my trip to West Asia many years ago for work for a short period, but that was his last memory of me. While he remembered my brother, he could not remember me and my sisters. That was when we started worrying about his decision to stay on alone,” he says.
As the news spread about the mass migration, the district administration, realising the gravity of the issue, informed the villagers that they would help them return to their village, but no one was willing to come back, claims a Revenue Department official.
The villagers say they don’t trust the word of officials because of the situation in Pottulurani, Nadu Sekkarakudi, Mela Sekkarakudi, and Keezha Sekkarakudi. These villages too face similar problems, and even now, the issue of shortage of potable water has not been resolved.
Protests for clean water
Pottulurani residents have been staging protests for supply of clean and hygienic water. They allege that waste from nearby fish units seeps into the waterbodies. They even boycotted the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
Similarly, Sekkarakudi residents grapple with water scarcity. As they are not being supplied with drinking water regularly, they have to fetch water for their daily needs from the village centre in pots loaded on makeshift carts.
A teacher at an anganwadi at the entrance of Meenakshipuram says that despite the Thamirabarani flowing through their district, the government is unable to supply water to the residents. “When students are taught about climate change and its implications, water management on the ground should be taken seriously while decisions are taken,” she says.
Mr. Ravi, who has decided to resume farming while staying on in the village and managing the cattle, has whitewashed the house in which his father lived.
Is he worried that like his father, he may lose sanity by staying all alone in the village? Reminding us again of Pico Iyer’s words, Mr. Ravi smiles and says he will find peace in living alone, far from the crowd.
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