The trouble with itchy feet, a flaw in the genes or just a lack of commitment spawn into a family of migrants. Each generation leaving the familiar , the bindings that come along with it and setting forth into new lands.
“What language do you think in?”, someone had asked long ago.
“English”, I didn’t have to even think about the answer.
A father who taught English Literature at a University, studying in a convent school and growing up in a multicultural environment, thoughts came only in English.
No one ever asked me which place did I dream of!
I left my hometown, Patiala, 25 years ago, but the town still stays on. It stays like movie set, the place being a constant while the acts change. After 25 years of separation, every dream and every nightmare is still based there. The people change but the location does not. The hometown still sticks on, staying through the night and vanishing from the memory in the morning.
I left it on a fine autumn morning with a determination and reluctance, opposing forces pulling apart, and then there was the bitterness. The brightest of the days feed the darkest of emotions. It was a crisp morning, bright sunshine with a nip of chill ,a promise of winter in the air. I was at the bus-stand, childhood friends seeing me off, promises to keep in contact. In the days when cell-phones were unheard of, long distance calls priced at levels to allow only the most required of communication and letters took weeks in arriving, promises to keep in contact, when made seemed false.
The memory of that crisp morning, the promise of winter , bright, sunny mornings in the air and the bitterness weighing over me.|
Twenty four years of living in that town and and the only memory that stands out is the bitterness of that fine autumn morning.
Even though I did not feel it, the sense of home faded away with that departure. Once you are uprooted it takes a strong attachment to bind you down again and in an environment where opportunities depended on the risks you were willing to take, how far or how frequently you were willing to travel, sprouting roots did not seem a smart way of doing things.
Hyderabad gave a new perspective to everything. A city conservative in parts, cultured in corners, but rough, unyielding in everything else. This was a time when the city was still not diseased by IT affluence .
It seemed like a city where a cultural experiment had gone wrong, resulting in a dish with unrecognisable flavours.
And still I came to like the city over a period of 3 years. My sales job taking me around all nooks and corners and I knew the city even better than Patiala. The experiences were new, the casually insulting way of talking, the biryanis of the old city, the Irani cafes with their uniquely flavoured tea and bastardized samosas, and for the first time an experience of going out and not seeing a single known person.
The small town living experience took time to go away, taking offence at perceived insults, which were actually nothing more than normal talk and using English as the primary language of communication. By the time I started to like the city it was time to move , a job transfer taking me to Bangalore.
Bangalore in 1997 was like a person suddenly coming into money and spending it wisely to take in the good things of life, but still managing to live healthily. The IT boom was slowly showing its effects with all of the good and little of the bad.
The city was definitely dirtier than what it had been in the late 1980s, the roads a little more crowded and the infrastructure straining at its seams but not yet bursting.( as it finally did by the turn of the century)
When Citibank made the ATM a common man’s bank, delivery pizza was able to negotiate the complex addressing nomenclature of Indian cities and a technology park set high standards and managed to maintain it, the city began its acceleration towards what would be a break neck growth. The late 90’s was still a time where you could find parking on MG road, take a walk and not feel crushed, sip a cup of coffee while having potato cutlets with fries at the India Coffee House(without feeling cheap) and go to Tom’s near Langford Road for drink with friends(before it decided not to renew its liquor license and turned into a hotel)
The 90’s was also a time when having one mobile phone was a luxury, the Airport Road was still not crowded and Shangri La on Brigade Road, owned by Tibetans, served Chinese food.
Bangalore in 90’s was a city of small joys, restaurants which did not make you wait, a walk did not involve traffic fumes and getting around town took less than an hour.But my days in paradise were short and I left within 3 months , called to Mumbai on another assignment.
Mumbai was a shock to the senses. It was an energy drink that kept you awake, forever. It was breathless city, constantly moving despite not having space to move, a constant endless shuffle from forever to forever.
“People live like cattle” my roommate, himself an outsider, told me in the early days of my stay in the city. The cattle trains ferried us to and from work every day, everybody stacked together, even in first class. We returned crumpled, pressed, worn everyday only to start a new day again.
Mumbai tested each sense to the extreme. ‘Do you know what a struggle it is to make a living in Mumbai’ my friend had asked me soon after I landed there. A few days in the city I realised what she meant. The struggle in getting out of the house, the crowded trains(which ran on schedule), dirty streets, seemingly crumbling buildings and in all that disorder , an order like nowhere else.
I lived as a Paying Guest, which meant that instead of renting an apartment I rented a bed. I could move around the apartment but it did not belong to me. There were others like me in that apartment, people from all corners of the country and oddly there was a feeling of belonging there.
I belonged because like me, everyone else was an outsider. The differences in character eclipsed the differences in cultures, there were simple hardworking people, there were charlatans and there were the ones in between, waiting for circumstances to drive them t either side.
Below the seemingly prejudiced exterior it was also a city seemingly without prejudices, your language, religion seemingly did not make any difference. But there was another parallel divided, darker Mumbai underneath. Criminality lurking just below the surface , skimming up casually, a stabbing on a local train or the polite extortion of shopkeepers by a local toughie.
But it was also a city was a drug you wanted it more when you had to leave it. I craved for the endless crowds which seemed stifling during my stay there. The conveniences of life so available seemed lacking elsewhere. And moving to New Delhi showed just big this gap was.
New Delhi was a Rowdy carnival. It had its attractions, the rides, good food, but you had to make your way through a rowdy crowd to get through to them . You had to push to avoid getting pushed, shout to avoid get shouted at and if you managed to get through all that, the carnival was yours.
Mumbai was where you diffused into crowds, indistinguishable, but New Delhi was where you had to stand out. Authority or at least the symbols of it meant more than ability
The 1990s was then the Universal Coffee House was still a genteel cafe with affordable beer. A backpackers could find as much comfort as the two families who were meeting to introduce their children for a prospective marriage. Friday night beer at the Universal Coffee House, a dinner or burgers at Nirulas, weekend book shopping at Connaught Place and then there were the occasional trips to Patiala.
Then there was the closeness, at least relative , to Patiala.
5 years after leaving Patiala , I was close enough to make a weekend trip back to the city, riding buses or occasionally hitchhiking on trucks to go back home, where there was no longer a home.
The expectation of arrival was clouded by the late night hour that I always reached there. But the early evening departures, still light enough to see the city and all that was left behind was where the separation pangs set in. Each trip was the last till there was another one.
Looking back, after the years, thinking about the where the thread finally snapped, it was with the departure from New Delhi. The few months spent in that city, with some of the weekends back to my hometown, it was there that I finally realised there was no going back.
