Notes from a dusty city: Law Garden

Wednesday, 2 April 2008

Law Garden

We woke up late this morning and it took us a while to make it out of the flat and into the sun. Once out of the building and at the entrance to our ‘society’, where there is a sentry post and old men in off-white clothes sit during the day and ruminate, we headed right onto Jodhpur Gam road towards Anandnagar road. Having got out some cash from the ATM there we headed back and picked up a teenage girl who was begging. She was dressed in a dirty sari and repeatedly made a feeding motion with her hand to her mouth and stomach. She stayed with us for about five minutes, showing us the money she had already and occasionally bending down to show supplication or, oddly, grasp the back of my calf. We said ‘bus’ repeatedly, which means ‘stop’ or ‘enough’ in Hindi but she persisted until we ignored her, at which point she delivered an unintelligible but unmistakable curse on us for our refusal to cave into her demands.

After a trip to D-Mart for cleaning supplies and a Mars bar, we caught an auto to Law Garden and got out at Swati for lunch. This is one of our favorite restaurants. We sat outside and enjoyed our food with a delicious Kesar lassi and an equally good sugarcane juice. Having paid the bill, cheap at a little over ₤3, we wondered over to Law Garden itself. The park reminded me of those in Valencia in Spain: landscaped and hot, with dusty paths and shaded seating. There were several canoodling couples in amongst the trees and on stone benches, so obviously public shows of affection between the sexes are ok in certain circumstances. As well as being pestered by another beggar and befriended by two sets of eager-to-introduce-themselves boys (the first older than the second and less annoying), we saw a variety of wildlife. The local stripy-backed squirrels were in abundance and joined in the trees by green lorikeets with yellow beaks. I was reading the botanical information about one tree when above me appeared the head of one of these parrot-like birds. In a hole in the hollow trunk of the tree the bird could be hidden and would occasionally pop its head out as if shy. Elsewhere the birds were high up in the branches of trees. Passing a bird poo spattered area I looked up and saw the underside of one of Ahmedabad’s kites. I’d seen a pair of these birds of prey from the rooftop of Pratham’s office the week before: they had wheeled and swooped over the rooftops, heads regularly down looking for prey and their shadows frightening the pigeons.

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Introduction

When the Moghul Emperor Jehangir, son of Akbar the Great, first saw Ahmedabad, he renamed it Gardabad: the city of dust. This remains an apt moniker 400 years later. Before the blistering heat of the summer months and after the sodden period of the monsoon, the surfaces of the city acquire a gritty texture and a red-brown sheen of dust covers everything that doesn't move. Jehangir was perhaps in the city to view his domain: fifty years previously it had been taken by force from the descendent of Ahmed Shah, the first pre-Mughal Sultan of the area. I am regularly asked by complete strangers why I am here and the answer can be straightforwardly that I was offered a job. But actually my reason for being in India is more complicated than that and starts before my year at the LSE, when I was made the job offer.

Something draws me to India, although I am not sure exactly what. I admit that there is an element of mystique in my attraction to the country. Somewhere in the back of my mind are mixed images conjured up by an audio tape of Kipling’s Jungle Book that I listened to with complete absorbtion as a child. With little effort I can recall the outlines of thatched huts in the night, lit by cooking fires in a clearing; the striped and powerful shoulders of Kipling’s fiercesome jungle-prowling tiger; the darkly gleaming hood of the patient cobra, curled up in the gloom of a weed-choked and forgotten temple complex deep in the bush. These images have been with me for a while and certainly stoke up wonderlust. But that is not modern India; at least not ninety percent of it.

A large part of the reason is that I have been here before, almost ten years ago. I am not chasing my younger self, but there is a satisfaction to returning to a place after such a long time and finding (also, expecting) yourself to be wiser, more knowledgeable and better able to understand the surroundings. The month I spent in India in the summer of 1999 was not an easy one for me. I carried a lot of introspective neurosis, low confidence and angst into the Himalayas with me that time, fueled by the bitter tail end of my teenaged first relationship. It is pleasing to return and feel that I can more than make up for what I missed last time, when I was looking inwards so much I missed the details of the outside world.

But it turns out I have an even earlier connection to the subcontinent and to Ahmedabad in particular. This connection was drawn out of me recently by a fellow Briton with whom I shared a compartment on a train journey from Delhi. He asked if I was in India because of a family connection and in jest referred to Curzon. I raised my eyebrows to that suggestion, but admitted that I did have a familial link to India. My Grandfather, Dr. J.S. Logan, was posted to India during the Second World War and served in mechanized field hospitals based in the Punjab. He learnt to speak Urdu, with a Punjabi accent. I knew all this before I came to India earlier this year, but I only recently discovered that my Grandfather had also been in Ahmedabad. He was here in 1944 to attend a course on mechanical transport and combustion engineering (in case the field ambulances broke down presumably) although he is a gastroenterologist. He tells me he had great fun roaring around the back-roads on an Army motorbike and on one occasion passed an Haveli belonging to the Aga Khan, where Gandhi was being held under house arrest by the British Indian Government. I have no romantic illusions about the Raj; I only mention this snippet of family history because it is fascinating to think that I am following in my Grandfather’s footsteps. I arrived in Ahmedabad sixty-four years after he did.

Of course, when asked a question you don’t have an immediate answer to the best response can often be to ask a question in reply. So when someone asks me, “Why India?” I do sometimes answer with, “Why not?”

Notes from a dusty city

Wednesday, 2 April 2008

Law Garden

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