I was around six years old when I saw my father in a suit for the first time. At home, he preferred to go bare-chested, wearing what can only be described as a loin cloth that aspired to be a lungi. But there he was that day, beaming from the screen of our Panasonic TV set as the video from his wedding day played. My parents had crammed quite a few watershed events into one video cassette recorder (VCR) tape: my ayush homam (a Hindu ritual that acknowledges an infant's first gruelling year of existence), the birthday party of a cousin, and their wedding. Until then, I used to replay the tape only to revisit my infantile antics. But the lethargy induced by the abject dreariness of a Chennai summer resulted in me letting the tape trudge along its terribly edited course. Puzzled by all the faces that appeared on the screen, I made my mother explain who they were as I pointed at them.
Brought up in a nuclear family, I had no memory of playing cricket with my cousins and I had only a nodding acquaintance with my grandparents. Our-two bedroom apartment hardly saw any visiting relatives. Watching the video made me feel like a miniscule detail in a tapestry; in a good way, as it connected me to a much larger story. The sultry afternoon soon made way for a temperate evening as the stories poured out; of aunts who were musicians and doctors, of roving uncles who took off to Italy to try their luck in the textile export business and other more tepid stories of relations who didn't do much at all. For the first time, I got an inkling of familial chaos. The video was revelatory, not just in itself, but because of the plethora of reminiscence it prompted for my mother. The barely edited, slow-paced video gave enough scope for a running commentary as background score. This was a unique experience for my six-year-old self as elders waxing eloquent about their halcyon romances was a rarity.