On our first visit to Chennai in 2016, we loved having Vinoth Raja drive us along Gandhi Street from the American International School to the Westin Hotel. On the maps, Gandhi Street is shown as a relatively major road and it does support a good bit of traffic, including the contented cows–
–and neighborhood dogs along with plenty of 2 wheelers (motor scooters), bicycles loaded with propane tanks or huge bags of fertilizer, hand-carts with mangoes or watermelon, the ubiquitous orange 3 wheeled auto-rickshaws, horn tootling cars, and wildly painted lorries, all of which flow unruffled around and among the walkers and those simply smiling and chatting or reading the newspaper. It’s narrow enough in most places that drivers rarely can pass by each other without waiting for an opening.
Yet the best part of Gandhi Street is the stalls and shops and stands selling everything from bicycle wheels (hundreds of them including the various parts like rims, spokes, and even a few tires) to fresh papaya and sari’s and electronics I’d never seen before, to this one selling, ahhhh, cool drinks to help combat the 37 degree (99f) temperatures.
Author: David Hassler
David M. Hassler was fortunate enough to have become a relatively rare male Trailing Spouse when his talented wife Sarah accepted a job teaching music in the elementary division of the American International School in Chennai, India, in 2017. His role included, for more than three years there, serving as her everything wallah, but also allowed him time for exploring, discovering, and sharing new places, new faces, and new tastes around Chennai, throughout south India, and beyond. When the pandemic arrived, Sarah retired and they moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where they continue to live and love life. David M. Hassler is a long-time member of the Indiana Writers Center Faculty and holds an MFA from Spalding University. His work has been published in Maize and the Santa Fe Writers' Project. He served as a Student Editor for The Louisville Review and as Technical Editor for Writing Fiction for Dummies. He is currently the Fiction Editor for Flying Island, an online literary journal. He is co-author of Muse: An Ekphrastic Trio, and Warp, a Speculative Trio, and future projects include A Distant Polyphony, a collection of linked stories about music and love, memories and loss; and To Strike a Single Hour, a Civil War novel that seeks the truth in one of P T Barnum's creations. He is a founding partner in Boulevard Press.
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