At 10 pm on Friday, a truck loaded with cooked dinner for 3,000 makes its way through the semi-dark Brick Kiln Road, in the Purasawalkam residential and shopping district near Chennai’s Egmore and Central railway stations. Only a few electric bulbs are lit. Candles flicker behind other windows. A cry goes out from the truck "Saapaad, vaango". Food, come!
A man sitting on his front doorstep that spills on to the road lazily waves the truck by. Further down, the truck pauses in the middle of the road and volunteers hang over the sides to drop packets of biryani and sambar rice into a few waiting hands.
One woman asks "Bread? I know you have bread."
No bread, only meals, is the reply from the truck.
Not believing the reply, she continues to bargain good-naturedly for a few minutes till a volunteer convinces her that it is saapaad or nothing. She walks away with a couple of packets of biryani. Others are not interested in the truck unless it has milk.
As the vehicle makes its way slowly forward another query comes from the dark street. "What food have you brought?" One volunteer remarks to another, "So now they are asking for the menu?"
Volunteers on the food truck and a Chennai police car. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
After touring many dark streets, some on which people are still wading through knee-high water, the truck gets to Chennai Central station where only a few stragglers come forward to claim food. It's almost midnight and more than half of the food stock is left.
These volunteers work with businessman Sam Paul who has been running relief out of his office in Kilpauk since the heaviest rains hit the city on December 1.
"We did great work for the first couple of days, but now it has slowed," said Paul. There's more than enough food now with the government getting into the act in the past 24 hours, he says. Municipal councillors are making sure that kitchens in their respective wards are feeding the flood-affected. Several people whose kitchens are functional are cooking, loading their cars up with food and distributing it directly without coordinating with collections centers like Paul's. Others keep sending in to the center for distribution.
Cooked food received and packed. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
With so much food around, Paul's volunteers get some very specific requests when they go out. "They say 'If you have mutton biryani, give. We don't want sambar rice," Paul remarks. But fresh cooked food is still pouring into the relief centre. "We can't say no when the food comes," one volunteer says. Paul makes an appeal on Facebook asking for only non-perishable food.
The relief trail
At 3pm on Thursday, December 2, the queue at the cash counter of a Croma store on the Outer Ring Road in Bengaluru consisted entirely of people all buying power banks. Demand for the nifty devices shot up in overnight when Bengaluru saw that Chennai's citizens needed their power and mobile connectivity desperately after being cut off by torrential rains and floods.
Bengaluru has rallied to help Chennai, the metropolis to which it connects easily by road and deeply by emotion. In a few hours citizen initiatives across Bengaluru had collected tons of food, clothing, bedding, medicines and water and were dispatching them to Chennai by the truckload.
"At Metro, there were queues of people buying things in bulk to send," said Kaushik Nadadhur. "One guy was even loading a truck from right outside Metro."
On Friday afternoon, Nadadhur and his wife Divya Raman drove their rental Mahindra Scorpio loaded with cooked food and blankets out of Bengaluru. They had spent the morning and the previous night receiving relief material collected by other groups and loading a truck that would follow them into the waterlogged city.
Loading relief material in Bangalore. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
"We were planning to go anyway," said Raman, whose parents and parents-in-law live in Chennai. Since both their houses in T Nagar and Anna Nagar in Chennai have not been damaged in the floods, the first order of business is to deliver puris and chapatis to Paul's centre.
The puris and chapatis leave the centre almost as soon as they come in, being handed out to a dozen or so residents or so residents of slums around Kilpauk who have been gathering outside the center looking for dinner.
Kilpauk slum residents outside the distribution centre. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
Two men from Tiruvetriyur collect 500 strips of paracetamols and bottles of tonic. "Our area is completely waterlogged and people are still stuck on their first floors," says KS Praveen Kumar. "People say there's enough food but they need medicines for aged people and young children who are falling sick."
Paul and his volunteers have decided to shift focus from distributing lunches and dinners to giving out clothes and blankets where they are needed. But this poses a new problem. "How to distribute?" Paul asks. "I have five sets of clothes, there are hundred people waiting to take them. Who do I give it to?"
Unloading food at Koyambedu bus stand. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
At close to 1 am the food truck rolls into Koyambedu bus stand where volunteers are relieved to see people thronging to receive food before they hop on to their night buses to leave for Bengaluru, Kerala and other parts of Tamil Nadu. Even here, one traveler, disappointed that the biryani is over, hands a packet of lemon rice back to a volunteer.
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A man sitting on his front doorstep that spills on to the road lazily waves the truck by. Further down, the truck pauses in the middle of the road and volunteers hang over the sides to drop packets of biryani and sambar rice into a few waiting hands.
One woman asks "Bread? I know you have bread."
No bread, only meals, is the reply from the truck.
Not believing the reply, she continues to bargain good-naturedly for a few minutes till a volunteer convinces her that it is saapaad or nothing. She walks away with a couple of packets of biryani. Others are not interested in the truck unless it has milk.
As the vehicle makes its way slowly forward another query comes from the dark street. "What food have you brought?" One volunteer remarks to another, "So now they are asking for the menu?"
Volunteers on the food truck and a Chennai police car. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
After touring many dark streets, some on which people are still wading through knee-high water, the truck gets to Chennai Central station where only a few stragglers come forward to claim food. It's almost midnight and more than half of the food stock is left.
These volunteers work with businessman Sam Paul who has been running relief out of his office in Kilpauk since the heaviest rains hit the city on December 1.
"We did great work for the first couple of days, but now it has slowed," said Paul. There's more than enough food now with the government getting into the act in the past 24 hours, he says. Municipal councillors are making sure that kitchens in their respective wards are feeding the flood-affected. Several people whose kitchens are functional are cooking, loading their cars up with food and distributing it directly without coordinating with collections centers like Paul's. Others keep sending in to the center for distribution.
Cooked food received and packed. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
With so much food around, Paul's volunteers get some very specific requests when they go out. "They say 'If you have mutton biryani, give. We don't want sambar rice," Paul remarks. But fresh cooked food is still pouring into the relief centre. "We can't say no when the food comes," one volunteer says. Paul makes an appeal on Facebook asking for only non-perishable food.
The relief trail
At 3pm on Thursday, December 2, the queue at the cash counter of a Croma store on the Outer Ring Road in Bengaluru consisted entirely of people all buying power banks. Demand for the nifty devices shot up in overnight when Bengaluru saw that Chennai's citizens needed their power and mobile connectivity desperately after being cut off by torrential rains and floods.
Bengaluru has rallied to help Chennai, the metropolis to which it connects easily by road and deeply by emotion. In a few hours citizen initiatives across Bengaluru had collected tons of food, clothing, bedding, medicines and water and were dispatching them to Chennai by the truckload.
"At Metro, there were queues of people buying things in bulk to send," said Kaushik Nadadhur. "One guy was even loading a truck from right outside Metro."
On Friday afternoon, Nadadhur and his wife Divya Raman drove their rental Mahindra Scorpio loaded with cooked food and blankets out of Bengaluru. They had spent the morning and the previous night receiving relief material collected by other groups and loading a truck that would follow them into the waterlogged city.
Loading relief material in Bangalore. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
"We were planning to go anyway," said Raman, whose parents and parents-in-law live in Chennai. Since both their houses in T Nagar and Anna Nagar in Chennai have not been damaged in the floods, the first order of business is to deliver puris and chapatis to Paul's centre.
The puris and chapatis leave the centre almost as soon as they come in, being handed out to a dozen or so residents or so residents of slums around Kilpauk who have been gathering outside the center looking for dinner.
Kilpauk slum residents outside the distribution centre. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
Two men from Tiruvetriyur collect 500 strips of paracetamols and bottles of tonic. "Our area is completely waterlogged and people are still stuck on their first floors," says KS Praveen Kumar. "People say there's enough food but they need medicines for aged people and young children who are falling sick."
Paul and his volunteers have decided to shift focus from distributing lunches and dinners to giving out clothes and blankets where they are needed. But this poses a new problem. "How to distribute?" Paul asks. "I have five sets of clothes, there are hundred people waiting to take them. Who do I give it to?"
Unloading food at Koyambedu bus stand. Photo: Nayantara Narayanan
At close to 1 am the food truck rolls into Koyambedu bus stand where volunteers are relieved to see people thronging to receive food before they hop on to their night buses to leave for Bengaluru, Kerala and other parts of Tamil Nadu. Even here, one traveler, disappointed that the biryani is over, hands a packet of lemon rice back to a volunteer.