Post-Tsunami on the Tamil Nadu coast there has been a lot of activity generated by agencies, individuals and groups coming in to do primary relief, to advice, train, to hand hold and to rehabilitate. The coastal population and property was affected but stumbling through the shock and trauma, accepting the inevitability of what happened to them they got into the process of picking up their lives and getting on with it. The degree of being affected was dependent of location, elevation, type of development, livelihood practices and community.

Living since more than two decades in this area I take the cycle of seasons for granted –every winter monsoon peppered with cyclones followed by a blink of an eye period of cool mornings with balmy evenings before the season of heat, dust and sweat that goes for you with hammer and tongs. So, on that cool and clear Sunday morning in December when the sunlight was cutting through with a clarity that catches you in the throat while you linger over your cup of coffee, the rumour floating up from the beach that “the waters are coming in” seemed irrelevant. The coastal road became a river of humanity moving to higher grounds. The sandwich of demographics of fishermen, Dalits, Vanairs and the commercial strip developers along the beach road all floated up with the debris of their possessions and buildings.

The coastal villages were made of streets lined with verandas that tangled and untangled around casual open spaces that contained temples, schools, playgrounds, open drains, mounds of garbage and drying fishing nets. There were sit-outs with low shaded overhangs that created opportunities of interaction between the inside and outside. The low walls punctured with small windows roofed with either terracotta tiles or palm leaves outlined with mud smeared plinths provided a frame for the lives lived in them. The roads would be dusty or full of slime depending on the season with the perennial puddle around the pubic water taps. The potable water distribution system ensured a forum for dispute creation and settlement along with providing a stable ecosystem for constant mosquito supply. I was enchanted and repelled by all this every time I would wander through one of them, the endless innovation with scraps of detritus to produce children’s toys made the HP television ads look like silly showing off by insecure people.

Every morning before the far horizon had taken over by the silver greying line proceeding the creeping dawn, the hangover men would stumble around dragging up their lungis’ to take on the seas once again. Bundles of children squiggle out of the way of their flat footed fathers on the veranda and sleep through the cries of unison rising along the beach to keep time with the collective tugs to get the boats into the waves. If you went for an early morning walk to watch the sunrise you wanted to keep your eyes on the horizon to let people have their privacy while keeping your peripheral vision keen so as not to step into the leavings of the early risers on the sand. 

The women in the fishing communities with their provocative self-assertion coming from being on the helm of marketing and banking what the men brought in everyday from the sea would harangue the cycle rickshaw chaps to get them to the markets before the late morning shoppers come in. There they ruled the trade with more style then their men ruled the seas. In some seasons the air would be perpetually rancid with the drying fish on the beach that could drift right up the road into the areas where people who wanted to eat their fish and not smell it lived.

So, when I go to evaluate the housing projects that are coming up to replace the villages that were washed away I wonder if I had imagined these villages. The coast is sprouting hundreds of thousands of boxes laid out in anonymous monotony; each is laid out singly with a 3 foot deep veranda that has a cantilevered roof that will shade neither from the rain or sun. The two rooms inside leaves one wondering who or what could be accommodated in it. The windows are too high for a floor culture people but there is no space to put in furniture unless one would jump from one to the other to get across. The projecting flat concrete roof is too high to serve as window shading device but not high enough to let a fan swing around inside without lopping an arm off if you stretch out after a day of pulling in the nets. The back yards are now strips of land that has no boundaries or enclosures, there is no lean-too verandas to have the afternoon naps. But there are staircases that lead to a handkerchief size roof and poky little toilet that attached to the house. I have seen houses where the toilet hole is covered with a slab of stone or plank of wood and been converted to a puja room.

When did these boxes become the ideal solution for post-disaster housing? I have try to seek enlightenment from the agencies doing the rebuilding work and they cite 2 factors in their defence – 1) if you follow the government controls on building safety, site planning standards and costs you will end up with this. 2) This box what the people want, ask and demand for. They want permanent houses with flat concrete roofs, they do not want to share walls with their neighbours and they absolutely have to have the ridiculous strips of land set back on 4 sides to make it as unusable as possible….. .

And you know what, they are right. The coastal communities want these boxes in a row without ever a possibility of a street life germinating here; no intimate neighbourhoods will get better of these concrete roofs to lend itself to a back yard. I tried to understand the motivation behind this image that they aspire to, as the reasons they put out in pubic consultation meetings of security, hygiene and basic amenities could met by the vernacular villages layouts that they lost with punctual interventions for planned sanitation network and some social action of the local self-help groups to ensure civic participation in garbage collection.

Guess, what is the reason they all want these boxes? Well, this is the image of moving up in the world; this is what they see in semi-urban and suburban periphery when they go to the market to sell the fish. This is what they see as being arrived; all small and big towns in India are packed with chock-a-block of single standing concrete boxes. This is what they see on local television networks serials as the best way to live, romance and have complicated family dramas. Boxed in, boxy, think outside the box, put it in the box, it is all boxed up………..the expression roll through my mind and I wonder if I am not actually the one who is caught up in a box to keep hankering for intimate urban and rural built environment. Why should I resent the folks who want to live in these gated housing societies or the people who want to live in cookie cutter plotted housing developments? Why should it matter if people want to divide the coast, the hills, the fields or even the whole country to make small single standing houses surrounded by strips of un-usable setbacks?

It seems that the homo-sapiens sapiens has been waiting for these boxes to live in since they discovered fire and moved out of the caves…………….to become homo-boxiens boxiens.