The Gate That Watched the Hill
Special Mention - English, Nāgrika Youth Writing Contest 2026
By Shree Shakthi S
City: Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu
What does a city’s landmark witness as the city around it transforms? Told through the voice of the Anna Arch in Tiruvannamalai, this piece traces the changing rhythms of a town shaped by pilgrimage, everyday life and growing tourism. As the arch moves from being a familiar, overlooked landmark to an illuminated symbol of civic identity, it reflects on memory, belonging and the quiet ways in which we come to see the places we have known all along.
Everyone who passes through this junction is looking at something else. Toward the hill of Annamalaiyar mostly and standing in the side of road saying a short but deep prayer. Pilgrims look at it. Shopkeepers look at it in the morning before they open their shutters, the way you look at the sky to decide what kind of day it will be. Even the children on the school buses that pass beneath me in the early hours, barely awake, scared of that day’s class test, heads against the window glass even they look past me toward the hill without knowing they are doing it. I have made my peace with this. I am the Anna Arch; they named me after a man everyone called “Anna” elder brother not because he asked them to but because he earned it. Arignar Anna, Scholar. The first Chief Minister of this state who looked like the people who swept its streets and farmed its fields and sent their children to schools that were still learning to want them. I’m the entrance gate, the landmark the town uses to explain itself to strangers “take a left at the arch, you cannot miss it” and I have stood at this junction long enough to know that being useful and being seen are not the same thing. For most of my life, I was useful. Only recently have I become visible. The difference has taught me more about this town than any of the years in between.
I remember mornings before the town remembered it was awake.
The school buses came through earliest, before most of the shops had their shutters fully up. A particular yellow bus passed me every morning going east, and I learned its sound before I learned its schedule sharp at 7.30 am a particular shudder in the engine as it slowed for the junction then stopped at the pavement’s end, and a little girl standing in the corner of the arch hops onto the bus with her heavy bag then the hiss of it moving again through the zebra crossing road that runs in front of me, the one the Girivalam walkers use at night when the full moon pulls them toward the hill. In the mornings that road belonged to the buses and the early vendors, and to few pilgrims.
The jasmine sellers came before anyone else. Two women, sometimes three, who spread their flowers on the pavement just to my left, near the row of shops that sold everything for the locals from plywood store to Bata showroom as well as to the pilgrims, there are stalls selling camphor, vibhuthi, coconut, string for garlands in front of the temple. They arrived while the light was still low and grey, sorting jasmine by hand with a speed that suggested they had been doing this since before they could remember deciding to do it. The smell reached me before they did that particular heaviness of jasmine in cool morning air that is different from jasmine in the afternoon heat, sweeter and less insistent, the kind of smell that enters a memory before you know it is becoming one.
The town in those years was festival-heavy but not yet famous for it, if that distinction makes sense. Karthigai Deepam brought crowds that filled every road around the hill, and the full moon Girivalam brought walkers who spilled across the zebra crossing in front of me in long, quiet lines. But these were mostly people the town already knew families from nearby districts, pilgrims who had been coming for years and knew which stall sold the best lemon rice for the walk, which temple to stop at, which stretch of the hill road was hardest on bare feet. They came, they circled, they left. The town returned to itself by morning.
A child looking out of a school bus window sees everything and understands almost none of it. I watched that yellow bus pass me for years and I watched the faces inside it the way you watch fish in a tank, movement without context, life without explanation. One face in particular pressed closer to the glass when we passed each other, a child who seemed to be conducting a small, private survey of everything the town looked like at seven in the morning, which is when a town looks most like what it actually is rather than what it is trying to be. I did not know then that this child would return as someone else entirely, would stand at this junction years later with different eyes and the expression of a person trying to reconcile two different memories of the same place. I only knew the face at the glass. I kept it.
Evenings were a different lesson.
By late afternoon the junction had become one of the busiest in the town when the day's business is at full volume a negotiation between vehicles that no traffic light could fully referee, autorickshaws cutting angles that could not to have worked, tourist traveller buses with the scent of spirituality and loud devotional songs stopping in the corner at the Vishnu temple as they never miss any temple in this sacred town, lorries grinding past with loads that made the road feel temporarily uncertain of its own solidity, motorbikes threading through gaps that existed for perhaps two seconds before closing again. The two roads that meet at my feet exchanged traffic in a continuous argument that somehow, through no visible logic, resolved itself every evening without serious incident.
People stood on both sides of the Girivalam road waiting to cross, the way people in this town have always waited not impatiently exactly, but with the particular Tamil readiness that is not quite patience and not quite impatience, a calibrated alertness for the moment the flow breaks. I watched this crossing for years. I watched a man in white carry a basket of fruit on his head across the road without spilling a single piece, weaving between two bikes and a goods vehicle as if the road had simply parted for him and closed again behind. I watched school children cross in groups, the older ones holding the wrists of the younger ones without being asked to, because the road had taught them something the classroom had not yet gotten around to.
The shops below me and around me were at their loudest in the evenings music from mobile phone shops competing with devotional songs from the stall that sold cassettes and then CDs and then, eventually, nothing at all because everyone carried their music on their phones. The smell of evening was different from morning; exhaust and frying oil and the particular dustiness of a road that has been crossed and recrossed all day and has the warmth of it still sitting in the tar. The jasmine sellers from the morning had either sold out or replenished, and now the garland stalls were doing their best business, pilgrims stopping before they joined the Girivalam route to buy what they needed for the walk and the next temple they are going which is probably the Arulmigu Easanya Lingam temple in.
I was, in all of this, simply present. A landmark. Something to navigate by rather than something to look at. If you asked anyone who lived in this town to describe me in those years they would have said: the arch, the big one, at the junction near the roundabout, you know the one. They would not have said anything about what I looked like, because I did not look like much; I existed, I was large, I served my purpose. That was enough. The town did not ask me to be more than that and I did not know yet that I could be.
Then the town changed, the way towns change when the world beyond them decides they are interesting.
It did not happen all at once. First the numbers at Girivalam grew — not dramatically, but noticeably, the way water rises in a vessel without you watching it until suddenly the level is different from what you remember. Then the numbers grew dramatically. Then there were so many people crossing the zebra crossing in front of me on full moon nights that the road had to be managed, cones placed, policemen stationed, new parking spots created, the whole crossing choreographed in a way that once would have seemed unnecessary and now seemed barely sufficient.
The Ramana Maharshi ashram drew a particular crowd foreigners in white or saffron mostly but not always, walking barefoot, a mala around their neck with a seriousness that seemed both sincere and slightly borrowed, carrying water bottles and small backpacks among pilgrims carrying coconuts and camphor, and the town accommodated them all with the particular pragmatic hospitality of a place that has always had more visitors than it could entirely explain. New hotels appeared on roads that had previously only had small lodges. Restaurants that had served tiffin for forty years added items to their menus that their grandmothers would not have recognised. Even momo was introduced to the town right before me. Tour buses began to park in places that tour buses had not previously known existed.
The vendors multiplied and shifted. The jasmine sellers were still there in the mornings, but around them had accumulated an entire economy of the road flower stalls with electric lights, shops selling Rudraksha Mala and oil lamps and printed photographs of the hill, a man who appeared every evening with a cart of fruit and a speaker playing Shiva songs at a volume that suggested either great devotion or significant hearing loss. The road in front of me, the one where the pedestrians waited to cross, grew more complex, busier, louder, more layered in its purposes while the hill behind all of it remained exactly as it had always been, unchanged by any of our arrangements at its base.
I watched all of this and remained what I had always been, old paint over older concrete, a gate that people passed through without particularly noticing, the town's landmark by habit rather than by beauty.
Then they repainted and rebuilt me.
I do not know exactly when it was decided, it was in 2022, that the entrance gate to a town of this significance should look like something more than it looked like. I only know that one morning there were men with scaffolding and raw materials and a plan that involved colours I had not previously worn the terracotta and orange, the gold columns, the Tamil lettering in the particular formal script that announces civic pride, the decorative finials along my top edge that catch the light at certain times of day. They worked for what felt like months. When they left, I was different. The same junction, the same roads meeting at my feet, the same hill visible in the same direction it had always been visible. But at night, for the first time, I was lit.
The first night I was illuminated I did not know what to do with the attention. Motorbikes slowed. People on the Girivalam road paused their walking to look back at me, which pilgrims on that road almost never do the whole practice is forward movement, one foot and then the next, attention on the hill and the breath and the count of kilometres remaining. But that night some of them looked back. A man took a photograph. Two young women stopped in front of me and took a photograph together, laughing at something one of them said, and then kept walking. I also had company of the newly opened life size statue of former chief minister M. Karunanidhi in the side of me.
I thought of the school buses from the early mornings. I thought of the face at the window glass, conducting its quiet survey of what the town looked like before it was fully awake. I thought of how many mornings I had been passed through and not once looked at, and how that had seemed like the natural condition of things that a gate's purpose was to be passed through, not to be seen.
A year ago, someone stood at this junction in the evening and looked at me for a long time. Not a tourist, not a pilgrim someone who knew this junction from before, I could tell by how they stood, the particular stillness of a person who is superimposing two images of the same place, the one in front of them and the one they carried inside for years without knowing they were carrying it. They looked at the new colours. They looked at the lit columns. They looked at the roundabout, which had also been redone, with a bull in its centre, more intentional, than the junction I remembered from my earlier years.
Then they looked up at my Tamil lettering – “அறிஞர் அண்ணா நுழைவுவாயில்” and something in their expression shifted, the way a face shifts when it finishes a calculation it did not know it was running.
I wanted to tell them that I am the same gate. The paint is new. The lighting is new. But the junction is the same, and the road is the same, and the hill at the end of the sightline is exactly as it was when you looked at it from a school bus window seven years ago, barely awake, pressing your face to the glass to see what the town looked like before anyone told you what to think of it. I am still here. I was always here. I was only waiting for someone to decide that being here was worth illuminating.
The town teaches this slowly, and not to everyone, and not in any language it knows it is speaking that the things which hold a place together are usually the things no one looks at twice. Until one day, for reasons that are never entirely clear, someone looks. And the gate that spent decades being passed through without a thought is suddenly, in the yellow light of new floodlamps, impossible to miss.
Whether that is a loss or an arrival, I have not yet decided. I have only decided to keep standing here, lit or unlit, noticed or not, while the hill endures behind me and the Girivalam walkers cross the road in front of me in the blue-dark of every full moon night, bare feet on warm tar, going somewhere I cannot follow and have never needed to.
I am the entrance. That has always been enough.
About the Author:
Shree Shakthi S
Shree Shakthi is a fourth-year Bachelor of Planning student at the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal. Having lived in Erode, Tiruvannamalai, Chennai, and Coimbatore, she has developed different perspectives on how cities are experienced and understood. Through academic projects, fieldwork, and internships, she has explored the everyday realities of neighbourhoods and how people interact with the spaces around them. Her piece, “The Gate That Watched the Hill,” draws from her memories of Tiruvannamalai, bringing together her personal connection to the place and her evolving perspective as a planning student.
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