Meenakshipuram: the village in T.N. that time forgot Premium

Loneliness and nostalgia intertwine in the ghost village of Meenakshipuram, where the last resident's legacy lives on.

“Lonely places attract as many lonely people and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves,” British novelist Pico Iyer famously said.

S. Kandasamy, the last surviving villager of Meenakshipuram a ‘ghost village’ in Thoothukudi district, who died two weeks ago, gave life to the word loneliness.

Meenakshipuram village is infamous for its ghostly appearance after its inhabitants moved out over the last two decades due to various reasons such as water scarcity and unapproachable roads to nearby towns. Recently, the lone surviving resident of the village, aged about 83 years, died, sending all who were once associated with the village into a tailspin of nostalgia, spurring recollections of living happily in the village.

Reaching the village from Thoothukudi city is not a great task, one eventually lands up at the ghost village, after passing a series of villages that look nearly the same, along narrow lanes that snake along the Thoothukudi-Tirunelveli National Highway, 26 km from the city.

Meenakshipuram, long after its residents started moving out in the late 2000s, closed its doors to the world and has remained isolated from neighbouring villages. It remains alive and bustling only in the yellowing snapshots of village residents who have migrated from here. Most of the residents of Meenakshipuram migrated to nearby villages such as Nadu Sekkarakudi, Keezha Sekkarakudi, and a few moved to the town. 

Mr. Kandasamy, we are told, lived his last decade only with scraps of old clothes, cattle, a makeshift bullock cart and framed photographs of him along with his family and the village. He was alone for the past decade, and as his sons remember, maybe even a couple of years longer. 

Ganapathy, one of Kandasamy’s associates, whose family, like all others, had moved to the nearby Nadu Sekkarakudi village in search of a better livelihood, remembers days when the old man would take a walk along with his cattle to give them a bath in the mornings and evenings.