By Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
I’m so heartbroken about the Natural History Museum burning down this morning. I thought of my mum and the trips the two of us would make–almost every week during my summer holidays. They had an auditorium and if you asked nicely, they’d play you one or two of their Disney films on stock. I must have watched The Three Little Pigs about a zillion times, just the two of us in that dark auditorium. I remember the moth-eaten leopard which nevertheless looked spooky, poised over you on a branch, its mouth open in a perpetual snarl. I remember the rhino on the ground floor and how I’d run my hand down its flank, across the leathery skin and up its horn. I remember the benevolent T-Rex in the compound outside, who was never scary because of all the pigeons that built homes inside his mouth. I must have gone back on school trips, but for me it was always memories of a hot summer day, my mother and I and how all the guards grew to know us after a while.
The only other museum I had such an intimate relationship with was the Dolls Museum right next to the Children’s Library in ITO. I could tell you about all the exhibits, how I slowed down at the big Russian dolls, their china lips half open to show little ceramic teeth, how scenes from “Around The World” were laid out, how much I wished that just once they’d leave the glass cases open so I could reach in and touch them.
A city is only as good as its museums and with the Natural History Museum gone (and so many others falling into disrepair) I don’t think kids today will ever feel as my generation did — like a building was your friend and everything would always be in exactly the same place when you went again.
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of You Are Here, The Life & Times of Layla the Ordinary and Cold Feet. She also runs the successful blog Compulsive Confessions.