Mylaporean Gentleman of the Arts (a ghost):
Ah, my dear Maama, I am told I am extinct. A fossil. A sepia-toned relic with a Carnatic cough and a law-book under my arm.
Mylapore Maama:
Extinct, is it? Then why do they still invoke you with such reverence? You were once the city’s polished emblem — the cultivated man, the connoisseur, the gentleman of taste. Now they mention you only to compare me unfavourably with you.
Gentleman:
Compare? No, no. They mourn me while mocking you. That is the modern compromise. They say I represented culture; you represent its aftertaste.
Maama:
Aftertaste? That is generous. More often I am the punchline. I am the uncle in the white veshti, the guardian of correct pronunciation, the defender of vanished certainties, the man who believes the world ended when this street was last dug up.
Gentleman:
And yet you survive.
Maama:
Like a proverb. Like a bad habit. Like a temple bell heard above traffic blare.
Gentleman:
I once belonged to a Mylapore of sabhas, salons, lawyers, musicians, scholars, and patient afternoons. One could mistake the place for an intellectual republic.
Maama:
Now it is an intellectual republic of potholes, diversions, honking scooters, and heroic detours. My domain is no longer the drawing room but the traffic jam.
Gentleman:
Still, you continue to claim the old prestige.
Maama:
Claim? No. I merely inherit it with a bad haircut and a superior expression.
And an irresistible, fatal attraction to Sabha canteen junk-food too.
Gentleman:
That is precisely why they laugh. The old cultural self-confidence has curdled into mannerism.
Maama:
And your elegant condescension has become a museum piece.
Gentleman:
Touché. Yet I was admired in my day.
Maama:
And I am ridiculed in mine.
Gentleman:
A poor exchange.
Maama:
Not entirely. Ridicule gives me life. Without mockery, I would truly be dead. I live now as caricature, which is a sort of immortality.
Gentleman:
A bitter immortality.
Maama:
Bitter, yes. But also sweetly absurd. The younger ones, foreign-returned, polished, English-speaking, use my name to tease their elders and to tease themselves. They wear irony like cologne.
Gentleman:
So the sons have become satirists of the fathers.
Maama:
And the fathers remain standing, offended but still in the room.
Gentleman:
Tell me, then: am I merely dead, and you merely ridiculous?
Maama:
No. You are the vanished ideal; I am the surviving joke. Together we make the full Mylaporean tragedy, more poignant than any Shakespearean.
Gentleman:
A little cruel.
Maama:
Mylapore has always been cruel to its own myths. First it dignifies them, then it domesticates them, then it laughs at them over filter coffee.
Gentleman:
And yet the place still poses as the custodian of culture.
Maama:
Of course. Every neighbourhood needs an altar, and every altar needs an old man guarding it with a key he no longer understands how it works.
Gentleman:
You flatter yourself.
Maama:
No, I caricature myself before others do. That is the new civility for senior citizens like me.
Gentleman:
Then let us agree on this: I am dead enough to be remembered, and you are alive enough to be mocked.
Maama:
And between us stands Mylapore — majestic, congested, self-important, tender, devout, absurd… It’s My La La Puri.
Gentleman:
A place where old eminence becomes new parody.
Maama:
And where parody, if it lasts long enough, begins to feel like heritage.
The ghost of the Mylaporean Gentleman of the Arts goes “poof” and vanishes. The Mylapore Maama walks away … only to slip and fall bang into a newly laid roadside ditch.
(Curtain Falls)
