The Fading Legacy of Allikuzhi Healers

Thirty cents is a modest measure by any reckoning — a fraction of an acre, barely enough to matter on a revenue map. Mine sits at the foothills of the Allikuzhi range, near a village called Shankarapura Kandriga in Andhra Pradesh, some forty kilometres from my weekend home in Dharmarajapuram. The land itself was never really the point. It was a foothold, nothing more, taken with a single intention: to walk into the hill forests that abound in "Jadi Booti" — herbs — and to study them in earnest. Not as a hobbyist collecting curiosities, but with something closer to a research discipline. A decade ago, I built a small hut there to serve as a base for exactly this purpose.

I mention the hut in the past tense deliberately. On my last visit, after an absence of nearly five years, I found it collapsed — undone not by any single dramatic event but by the accumulated, patient work of rain, wind, sun, and the particular breeze that runs off that hilltop. Nobody had done anything sinister. The land had simply gone on being land, indifferent to the plans I had made for it, while I went on being occupied elsewhere. There is a lesson in that indifference that I am still turning over, but it is not really the point of this piece.

The point is that the instinct behind the hut — that this hillside held something worth documenting — turns out to have been correct, and not merely in the way a fond hunch is occasionally validated. A formal ethnobotanical survey of these very forests, conducted by researchers from Presidency College, Chennai, and published in the International Journal of Ethnobiology & Ethnomedicine, recorded around sixty medicinally significant plant species across some three dozen families, gathered directly from the knowledge of local traditional healers in this belt — Shankarapura among the villages named. The Gudiyam caves nearby, a Paleolithic site first identified by the geologist Robert Bruce Foote, during the year 1863, sits at the edge of the same forest tract, a reminder that human beings have been extracting a living from this particular hillside for a very long time indeed — first as tool-users, later as herbalists, and now, apparently, as the occasional ethnobotanist with a clipboard.

What the survey documents, plant by plant, is a working pharmacy assembled entirely through trial, error, and oral transmission over generations: a root paste for eye irritation, a leaf decoction to bring down fever, a bark extract for tooth trouble, a stem paste for wounds, a snakeroot extract antidote for snake bite. None of it requires a laboratory. All of it requires someone who still remembers. And this is where the researchers' own findings turn quietly troubling — they note, almost in passing, that the healers who hold this knowledge, the Irula tribesmen, are ageing, and their children are not particularly interested in inheriting it. A pharmacy is being allowed to close for want of an apprentice.

I find myself sitting, unexpectedly, at the intersection of two kinds of neglect: my own small one — a hut left long enough that the weather reclaimed it — and a much larger, quieter one, in which an entire body of applied botanical knowledge is thinning out with each passing generation of healers who go unheard. An anchorage in the foothills of the Allikuzhi range will never substitute for what a proper research effort could do here. What it does offer is a reason, now overdue, to go back up that hill and pursue and try to restore the fading legacies. 

I plan to trek from the plot itself, over the hills to the Paleolithic caves, and down the far side to Gudiyam village, where a further forty-four cents of agricultural land near the old TELC Zeigenbalg church marks the other end of a nine kilometre trek, across a range of hill forest. It strikes me only now, writing this, what a strange span of time that walk covers: from a collapsed hut built out of a decade-old intention, through a forest that has been quietly cataloguing its own medicine for longer than anyone has been writing it down, past caves that have outlasted every deed ever filed for land nearby, and down into a village whose church carries the name of a German missionary who arrived on this coast three centuries ago. Very little of that timeline was planned. Most of it was simply there, waiting, the way the herbs on that hillside were waiting long before anyone thought to ask a healer their name.

The rebuilding, if it happens, will happen later. For now, the walk itself is overdue enough.

Iran, Oil and a Retrofitted Cycle

 

( How Global Geopolitics Put an Old Man Back in the Saddle)

The US-Iran conflict, now dragging into what feels like its permanent state of managed menace, has been doing something beyond rattling oil markets and unsettling foreign policy analysts. It has been quietly but insistently forcing ordinary citizens — those of us who fill petrol tanks and watch fuel prices with the resigned anxiety of people who know they have no choice — to ask an uncomfortable question: what happens when the oil actually runs out, or becomes so expensive that it effectively does?

Governments will deliberate. Economists will model. Committees will be constituted. The common man, meanwhile, will need to get to work.

I decided to act.

Not with a white paper. Not with a strongly worded letter to the editor. With a retrofitted electric cycle.

The Decision and the Sceptic

Sometime during the first week of May 2026, with the conflict showing no signs of resolution and petrol prices trending in only one direction, I called my son Skandan and asked him to source two battery-fitted cycles — one for Chennai city commute, one for my village home in Dharmarajapuram. The logic was simple, if slightly ahead of its time: when fossil fuels become genuinely unaffordable or unavailable, the man with an electric cycle will be mobile. Everyone else will be stranded.

Skandan received this strategic vision with the measured scepticism of a man who loves his father but has also observed him for several decades. There was a brief silence. Then: “Are you serious? You think you can ride after so many years?”

I said nothing. I am a man of vision. Vision does not explain itself.

The cycle was duly procured, and assembled the very next day by Patcha — Skandan’s father-in-law, a retired chartered engineer  and a man of admirable practical competence. All that remained was the inaugural ride. A mere 3 kilometres, from Skandan’s apartment back to mine. On a Sunday evening. On a battery-fitted cycle I had never ridden before. After a gap of over three decades and another half.

What could go wrong.

 

 

 

The Assembly, the Anticipation, and the Council of Dogs

I wheeled the cycle down from the apartment platform with what I hoped was the air of a seasoned cyclist merely warming up, only to discover that the exit pathway was occupied. Five street dogs sat in solemn conclave across the only route out, deep in what appeared to be a committee meeting of considerable gravity. They had not cleared their calendar for my departure.

My granddaughters — Hiranya, the elder at ten, and Keerthi, the younger one of six — were already perched on Skandan’s scooter, primed to follow me home and ensure the old man arrived in one piece. They issued immediate counsel: Thatha, don’t upset the dogs. They are downright nasty guys” I considered their advice for approximately one and a half seconds. Then I shooed the dogs firmly and without negotiation. The parliament dissolved with a few murmurs. I rolled down the ramp onto the street.

The great expedition had begun.

The Lemon, the Yelling, and the Giggling Gallery

It was approximately thirty seconds into the open road that I made a discovery of some consequence. The cycle had no bell. No horn. No whistle. No auditory warning device of any description whatsoever. It was a silent machine in a city that communicates exclusively through sound — horns, bells, the creative percussion of vehicles asserting their right of way at every junction.

I had two options. Turn back. Or yell.

I yelled.

Hello, Ayya, Thambi! Careful! Coming through! Move, move! — delivered at varying volumes depending on the proximity of the threat and the apparent hearing capacity of the person or vehicle in question. I became, in effect, a human horn. A retrofit of a retrofit. I informed Skandan over my shoulder, between two such announcements, that the cycle company had sold us a complete lemon.

Behind me, the granddaughters dissolved into giggles that did not stop for the better part of half a kilometre. Skandan maintained a straight face. He is his father’s son.

Battery Anxiety and the Apollo Prophecy

The first stretch was, in every other respect, a revelation. The evening air, the hum of the motorized wheels, the road opening up ahead — thirty years dissolved in about thirty seconds. The body remembered. The legs found their rhythm.

But somewhere in the middle of that first comfortable kilometre, I felt it. The battery — which had not been fully charged before my arrival — was already beginning to flag. The motor was losing heart even before we reached the Apollo Pharmacy ahead.

I turned toward the scooter behind me and delivered what I consider one of my finer comic observations of the evening: “This EV may not even last up to Apollo Pharmacy.”

It very nearly didn’t. The motor faded to a whisper. I pedalled on under my own steam — not the desperate pedalling of a man in crisis, but the steady, purposeful pedalling of a man recalibrating his expectations of modern technology. Somewhere around the pharmacy, after I had done sufficient honest work with my legs, the battery appeared to recover its courage. The motor hummed back to life. I turned right and pressed on.

The Hillranger: 1. Battery anxiety: 0. For now.

The Villivakkam Subway: Sixty Seconds of Truth

Of everything that lay between Skandan’s apartment and mine, it was the Villivakkam subway that had occupied my imagination well before the ride began. Not the dogs. Not the traffic. Not the battery. Not even the absence of a bell, which I had by then partially compensated for with lung power. The subway.

That long, sloping underpass — down one side, level through the tunnel, and then the climb back up on the other end — had been the subject of considerable private anxiety. Would the battery hold? Would the legs hold? Would I grind to an embarrassing halt in the middle of a Chennai underpass on a Sunday evening, requiring retrieval?

I had shared these fears with Skandan, who had said nothing reassuring, which is how I knew he shared them. He and the granddaughters followed me into the tunnel rather than waiting on the other side — a small but telling decision. They weren’t sure I would make it through unassisted.

Keerthi had already registered her assessment: “Thatha, I bet you will not get past the subway.” Six years old and already a realist.

The time was around nine in the evening. A Sunday, mercifully, so the traffic was light. I gathered myself, deployed whatever kinetic energy the downslope could offer, kept the pedals turning, and went.

I emerged on the other side gasping, triumphant, and approximately ten years older than when I had entered. Behind me, Skandan exhaled. Hiranya broke the silence: “Look at Thatha speeding away to glory!”

I chose to accept this at face value.

The PTC Bus and the Wisdom of the Footpath

MTH Road was otherwise manageable. The evening traffic was thin, the road wide, the motor cooperative. Then a PTC bus (MTC bus in today’s Chennai) materialised on the highway with the authority of something that has right of way over everything, including citizens making principled statements about energy independence on electric cycles. Skandan accelerated ahead to assess. I eased onto the footpath and waited, with great dignity, for the monster to pass.

There are those who might call this retreat. I prefer the phrase situational awareness.

The Security Guard, the Basement, and the Question That Went Unanswered

My apartment building appeared ahead. I turned in through the gates, flushed with quiet satisfaction, and was greeted by the security guard.

He looked at me. Then at the cycle. Then back at me. It was the long, slow, carefully neutral look of a man trying to determine whether the resident he had known as a person of means had suffered some catastrophic reversal of fortunes, arriving home on an elementary retrofitted bicycle at nine o’clock on a Sunday night, hollering at pedestrians. I gave him my most dignified nod and rolled past before he could arrive at any conclusions. He kept glancing back at me, probably guessing that I had lost my marbles.

Down the ramp to the basement. I rolled to a stop.

I had made it. 3 kilometres. One dog parliament. One failing battery. One bell-less cycle compensated for by vocal cords. One subway of existential dread. One PTC bus. One security guard’s eloquently sceptical expression.

Hiranya clapped — enthusiastically, genuinely. Skandan swung his scooter around to leave. And in that moment, Hiranya turned to me and asked, with the timing of someone who has inherited a certain instinct for the well-placed question:

“Thatha — when did you last ride a bicycle?”

Before I could answer, her father had sped away into the Chennai night.

The question, dear reader, is worth sitting with. Because embedded in it is a larger one that the US-Iran conflict, the oil markets, and the petrol pump queues of the near future are going to put to all of us very soon: when did we last think seriously about how we move through the world, and whether we can do it without fossil fuels?

I have my answer. It came on two wheels, on a Sunday evening, with a flat battery and no bell.

The old man is ready. Are you?