Back Home Again in Besant Nagar

During our two decades in Indiana, one of the charms of the area we came to appreciate was the resounding voice of Jim Nabors opening the annual 500 Mile Race with the state song, “Back Home Again in Indiana.” While I never learned all the words, the upward swooping intro along with his formal styling left an imprint that somehow seemed an inheritance, even though I wasn’t born there. Who, after all, doesn’t want to feel back home again?

Now that we’re preparing to move to a city in a country nearly on the opposite side of the world, how can we possibly develop a feel for “home?” Well, we just took step one, that of finding out where in Chennai we’ll be living. Sarah’s new employer provides housing for its faculty, so we learned our new address recently and couldn’t be more excited about our new location in Besant Nagar. (No, that is NOT our place in the header photo–that’s a new architectural gem but it IS in Besant Nagar!) Not only is Besant Nagar a trendy area along the beach with lots of shops, restaurants, and cafes, it’s where we did some shopping last year and enjoyed masala dosa at our favorite Murugan Idli Shop. Our new flat will be about a seven minute walk to that Murugan Idli at the south end of the Eliot’s Beach Promenade with its Colonel Sanders leering out toward the Bay of Bengal. At least it’s the “First Green KFC in India.”

Several of our favorite boutiques are also nearby, with Naturally Auroville at the end of our block selling handcrafted items from the wonderful Auroville colony in Pondicherry, and Fabindia is only a few minutes farther, while Kalpa Druma is just off the north end of the Promenade. The area is quite popular and will no doubt be crowded during weekends and holidays, but it’s only a 15 to 20 minute drive to Sarah’s school and about the same to the Chamiers area where my favorite writing hangout and cafe is located. We look forward to exploring the many other coffee shops, cafes, and restaurants in Besant Nagar and will share our experiences as we learn, adapt, and fit into a lifestyle very different from our current one.

In addition to the commercial element of Besant Nagar, we will be flanked by the Theosophical Society, “… an unsecterian body of seekers after Truth, who endeavour to promote Brotherhood and strive to serve humanity,” on the north–Besant Nagar was actually named for Annie Besant, an English woman who was president of the Theosophical Society in the early 20th century–and the Kalakshetra Foundation where traditional Indian dance is fostered and taught, to the south. And the Sri Ashtalakshmi Temple is at the water’s edge just to our southeast.

Step two of course will be settling into a flat in a five story building in a very urban setting, and then step three, which most expats consider the most important, is meeting other folks and making new friends among the faculty, the expat community, and those who have lived in Chennai all their lives.

Back home again in Besant Nagar. It has a nice ring to it . . .

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. View all posts by David Hassler