On the road with Ravi

In those days, there were less people on the road, although perhaps not significantly more courteous. It was so long ago that even when you added up our ages you were still only in the teens.  
My brother and I whiled away the hours in the car’s back seat taking a break from pulling each other’s hair by reading the road signs that flashed past and puzzling out the meanings. An ‘Officer’s Mess’ must be where the brave moustachioed ones in uniform would fling banana peels at each other and spill massive bowls of gravy down the aisle. ‘Lions Club’ gave rise to the image of tawny lions serving and smashing, and leaping gracefully over the tennis net to shake each other by the paw. ‘Meals Ready’ (now all but martyred to ‘Dhaba’ in the colonial victories of the North) meant, naturally, that the food must be left over from yesterday and we’d kindly advise our parents that we shouldn’t stop here for lunch. The forest department signboards which announced new plantations of E. Globulus and other varieties of eucalyptus saplings enthralled us too. We grew faster than they did, but they overtook us. The Nilgiri slopes, planted before our eyes, got covered with dense jungle.
Years later I sat, basking in a noisy tropical thunderstorm. It was inside the Rainforest Café at Piccadilly and I attempted to enthral two precocious children with the story of the rogue elephant that thundered behind the little red Herald on our way home when we were their age. A solitary elephant in the jungle called for caution and we were indeed charged more than once, a frightening experience but one that can be looked back on with complacence. Mudumalai still had large herds of elephants in the 1970s and as we drove through the sanctuary on our way to or back from the plains, motorists would stop to let them cross the road; first the tuskers and young males, and towards the end the cow elephants, trailed by their babies. It’s a sight you no longer see.
There were no elephants on the British motorways either.
Over the years, I’ve had many holidays being cosseted and indulged by my brother and his family in London, an annual retreat from the scorching May heat of Pune in a city of orderly queues, free admittance to the art treasures of the world, round-the-clock humour, early dinners, and chocolate with every meal. On the M3, whizzing happily past signs for Guildford and the Basingstoke roundabout, we’ve often driven through the mythical village this motorway once famously sundered in two in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Traffic is slow on the A303 past Stonehenge – for as long as memory serves, congestion on this route has been accompanied by debate on whether a tunnel would endanger the ancient monument. On this road I learnt that flashing lights from a car driving towards you could mean, “after you, my dear sir” rather than “get out of my way, idiot”, as it does back home.

At Kew Gardens in April 2011

It’s one of the most beautiful parts of Britain and on our route to Longleat, the Cotswolds, and even Cornwall. The first glimpse of the startlingly bright blue of the Cornish coast comes as a shock almost physical. Mired as we are in Shakespeare, Harrods, the Natural History Museum, London Bridge and so on, it’s easy to forget that this great seafaring nation of the history books is in fact all surrounded by sea. It’s an eight-hour drive and, taking a cue from an English countryside sign offering “Woodlands for sale”, a new generation of avid board-reading backseaters made us laugh by pleading piteously, “Don’t sell the woodlands!” over and over – a welcome change from “Are we there yet?”
Cornwall has much to see and our days there brimmed with natural beauty, local food, relics of old tin mines, ancient history, and more. A Welcome sign that stands out in memory proclaimed “Lanhoose Population 5”. The settlement boasted three buildings including Lanhoose Barn and Lanhoose House, and we wiled away a pleasant evening wondering how the five people might be distributed among the three homes, and whether there was a Lanhoose resident’s association and perhaps even a Lanhoose Bridge team or string quintet.

Pain, drama, true-life learning

I’ve heard that women often go mad when their kids grow up and they have no one to yell at any more. Well to be honest I haven’t actually heard anything like this but I’m sure it’s pretty common. Here, for instance, is what happened to me as my youngest one’s eighteenth birthday hurtled towards us, giddy and relentless: I turned eighty, and my arms suddenly became too short.
First the arms. For years I’d held book in hand while reading. Then one fateful day, with no warning, I found that my arms had shrunk. They were just too close to my face, the words were all fuzzy, and I simply couldn’t read.

Photo by Ayesha Monani Broacha for Verve in 1996

As for the business of eighty – it was a rare and wonderful accomplishment. I’d hovered below this significant benchmark for months, waiting, anticipating, as does one for headlines about the Sensex.
Finally, one morning, Sensexily, I crossed the psychological barrier forever. I did attempt some teetering, shifting centre of gravity from side to side, but the needle stayed firm, and there was nothing between me and the carpet but my bath towel and that would have been a horrid sight for the cleaning lady, so nothing for it but step off the scale and admit it. I was now in my eighties and that was that, might as well brazen it out and pretend that this was exactly what I had been intending, bring on the samosas please and I’ll just have another two (or six) jalebis while we’re here.
Out of the window forever went the pompously named General Motors, the degenerate-sounding South Beach, the holier-than-thou Fit For Life, and the rest. The weak and puny were welcome to their gym schedules. I had more serious business – lying in bed with a book, flexing that rapidly shrinking arm into an enormous foil bag and rattling large handfuls into my mouth. Of course everyone knows that pretending thin women look better is nothing but dastardly propaganda by men who want to keep all the food for themselves. Of course.
And it so happens that, being a woman of remarkable substance with karma rapidly coming to fruition, I have endured monthly felonies – a drunk driver, a forged cheque, a jewellery heist, and finally, on the first day of the new year, a hacking crime that crippled my office for three days.
Poetic justice, some will mock: for years I bossily insisted that we work on the first of January, virtuously demanding that we begin with gusto and ambition rather than lolling about bleary eyed and hung over. Instead, we struggled and cursed and I finally headed off (never one to miss a chance of cozying shamelessly up to officials in high positions) to my dear friends the police where I learnt to my dismay that this was not really a cybercrime, which would have been a super notch on my belt of serial victim-hood, but merely the plain or garden variety of extortion.
Later, the eighteenth birthday came and went, with noisy celebration by friends of the concerned party, and weary cheer from the exhausted family. Weary from the years of turmoil past, I renewed my commitment to the stitching group and hanging out with the girls, exchanging recipes and such. I even relinquished hold (a little) on the kitchen where my ISO 9001:2000 habits had caused hardened crooks (I mean cooks) to run shrieking in exasperation. To be frank, we were just a short step away from blaring instructions on megaphones and frog-marching miscreants into long shower rooms with tall chimneys.
And the other day, in an emergency situation, I used the men’s loo. I peeped in and instructed a helpful-looking young man to keep KV outside. He did. Getting older is really not such a bad thing.

Some parts of this appeared in Saaz ki Awaaz under the title ‘Geriatricks’ in Times of India, Pune on 10 Feb 2006

Neighbours

A few years after I first came to live in my little shaded neighbourhood in Pune, still exulting in the sandpit and flowering trees and comfortable parking that fifteen years in Bombay had somehow exemplified as an impossible dream of luxury, I became aware of a rather subtle phenomenon. People would say hello to me, and I would say hello back, impressed by their friendliness, but completely unable to place them. Embarrassed, mildly disbelieving, my newly-wedded husband explained that these were our next-door neighbours.
This was a big surprise. I wondered how these could possibly be people who I passed by frequently on the way to and from home, yet I knew for sure I had never seen them before.
Pondering this puzzle for a while, it struck me that this must be a legacy from all those years of living in little apartment blocks piled higgledy-piggledy on top of each other, with grandmothers and dogs and Sintex water tanks and African violets all jostling for their little inch in five hundred square feet of space. To walk down the corridor was to smell someone else’s dinner. To look out of the window was to encroach on someone else’s most private moments. To curl up with a book was to be distracted by the loud whacking, by merciless mothers, of children who couldn’t remember their seven-eights-are. Of course we had to find ways to keep ourselves to ourselves!

BOMBAY CLICHÉS: Neighbours (Collection of Udaya Manjeshwar)

I lived in Bombay for fifteen years, and never thought I’d move. That was me, there, attending book readings at the British Council, plays at the NCPA, and inhaling deep to hold my breath as the double decker careened past the aromatic Sassoon Docks and lurched to a halt outside Bus Station. That was me boarding the coach at the Air India building in the dim hours to catch early flights out into the unknown, laughing happily when concerned security guards asked why my father or brother hadn’t come to drop me. Me who tried to comfort the bumpkin on a visit to friends in Santa Cruz while she watched, dismayed, as the train whizzed past not only the Santa Cruz station, uncaring, but also the next four, and had to face the prospect of grievous bodily injury while attempting to disembark. And yes, I can remember trying to buy vegetables at Andheri market. What a savage place it was! We were like animals, vying for the same prey. The aggression levels of Andheri market, Andheri station, and the environs, will live as icons of dread in my memory forever.
And Colaba, Colaba – for years I have thought of Colaba as my village, with familiar faces dating back thirty-five years and more. All this seems to me, when I think about it now, like snatches of existence from another lifetime. I still own property in Bombay – another of life’s miracles, for a humdrum person such as myself to possess a piece of the planet on which a size-four foot stands on a fortune.
And for many years I lived in a little kholi in Bandra with a Kathak class right below me. Visitors sometimes asked, “How do you LIVE with that noise?” And I would say, “What noise?”
I honestly could not hear it at all, and went about my daily activities with the incessant thumping and banging and jingling of bells entirely outside the scope of my perception.
Years later, focussing on this habit for the first time with dawning awareness, sweeping my neighbours with a sincere and appraising eye, I began the long process of breaking free.
Was it just me? Hadn’t we all developed this facility? Wasn’t it a normal, big-city phenomenon? Didn’t the glazed, faraway look in the eyes of public-transport commuters the world over as they gaze, unseeing, into those of their co-passengers, speak of the same trend?
Here, in Bombay, we had blindly accepted hideous black-and-red
window grilles (or sometimes evilly white ones), and installed double and triple doors with multiple locks on each, and a large ugly padlock hanging outside ostensibly for safety but really more just to delineate our personal space. After that, working on an auto-pilot with the wisest guiding light, we went and developed this special type of blinkered vision in which only we and those who we knew personally actually existed.
Now when I visit, walking down the streets of Bombay, suffused with the warmth and comfort that one can only experience in one’s own true home, I am acutely conscious of how the teeming crowds on the railway platform affects me. On one hand, it’s impossible to describe the exhilarating freedom in the anonymity which no small town, not even my nearly-there, wannabe adopted home can provide. An insignificant corpuscle flowing in a moving mass of humanity, I need never pretend to be who others think I am.
On the other, an intense claustrophobia arises. I long to take deep breaths, but am inhibited by the sundry fragrances that suffuse the air.
I see familiar faces where there are none. I smile at people who I think I know. Hardly anyone smiles back.
Parts of this first appeared in Maharashtra Herald on 25 Jan 1998