Of course, we were at that age when things were beginning to happen – like when Shalini Iyer got tangled up with DaCosta. We snickered about our physical education teacher, Prem Sir, who wore sweatpants in spite of the scorching Madras sun, and said, ‘Hands on hips, now side to side,’ as he swayed his body back and forth.
#AMMA FACEBOOK FREE#
During our free period we rolled up the sleeves of our uniform shirts and played badminton, and shrieked when our bats missed the shuttlecock. There was a heavy homework load – we read As You Like It and memorized Yeats, solved algebra equations, and learned physics – and assignments were carefully graded test scores at the school were good, and college admissions all but guaranteed. The nuns who ran the school, wearing pleated white robes and perpetual frowns, were strict but kind, and this pleased our parents. The fees were fair enough, attracting girls from all kinds of families. Sacred Heart was the type of school that fostered equity, beginning with the admissions process. Sacred Heart Girls Matriculation School was a pleasant place back then. But we knew her when we were children ourselves. Actress, mistress, politician, and Amma to an entire state for nearly as long as we had our children in our homes. When her beloved quit films and became the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, she, not his wife, was his escort to every convention, every gala, every state dinner.
She was the greatest actress of her time, mistress to the biggest Kollywood star of our era, the heroine of twenty-eight of his movies. They consider her beyond human, a shimmering goddess, their heroine, indestructible. Her devotees are of all types: children, women, men. She appeals to the fisherman, the rickshaw driver, the bricklayer.
‘Please never do that again.’ He touched the letter to his cheek and framed it. When she saw the video, she wrote the teacher a handwritten letter.
A police superintendent cut his fingertips off and delivered them to the Ganesh temple, praying, ‘May my sacrifice result in her re-election.’ A martial arts teacher asked his students to drive nails through his hands and feet, made a speech in praise of her, and fainted. One artist used five litres of his own blood, frozen, to make a life-size sculpture of her head. ‘We knew her before it all started,’ we still like to say. Before she became Chief Minister, before she became a star, she was our classmate at Sacred Heart Girls Matriculation School in Church Park. Before all of this, before they prostrated at her feet, before she wore large, round, dark red bottus with light red namams on her forehead, she was one of us.
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