Making the papers

The 15th August is Indian Independence Day and so both Dani and I worked from home on the morning of that Friday; my office and Dani’s school were closed. In the afternoon we took an auto to Law Garden, where the charity run by Dani’s Principal had organised a road closure and street fair. This was meant to be for all children, the well-off and those surviving on the streets, and it was good to see them queuing up to go on a swing, watching a magician and trying to keep up with a serious-looking dance instructor giving rapid instructions in Hindi. There was also a band and a DJ.

Unfortunately for us we drew a lot of attention from the crowds, admittedly mostly after we had had orange, white and green stripes daubed on our cheeks like many of the kids. We were hardly able to walk 20 feet without a press cameraman or amateur with a camera phone asking us to pose. After a while my grin became more of a rictus and even that I could barely keep up. We made it into the Ahmedabad editions of the Times of India and DNA newspaper though. The Times captioned our photo in front of the Indian flag, ‘Crossing over the spirit of India!’ In both montages we had almost as much space as Rahul Bose, the Bollywood actor drafted in to make the charity event extra news worthy.

The weekend feeling the street fair gave us had actually started the night before when we went out for dinner. I think we committed something of a sin doing this, as we ate in one of Ahmedabad’s seriously up-market Italian restaurants. This one, poorly situated behind a petrol station but on the SG highway that skirts the Western edge of the city and where the land prices for expensive ventures must be attractive, was actually rather fun. A huge neon sign-board blaring ‘TGB’s Little Italy Ristorante’ in bright white italic lettering identified the place from afar and we headed past the petrol pumps to approach the door down a walkway covered by white tenting adorned with the Italian flag. We were early for dinner at quarter to eight; the place was empty. But this suited us. We settled into deeply comfortable seats in the air-conditioned chill of the slate, wood and glass dining room, got carried away and spent Rs.850 on crostini, garlic bread, pizza and calzone. That’s four times the cost of an average meal for two in Ahmedabad and eight times the cost of dinner in a road-side dhabba. We were not, suffice to say, surrounded by a cross section of Gujarati society once other dinners began to arrive. The food was good, though the crostini were overly oily and the calzone immense. We were both defeated in the end, which rarely happens. The capers, olives and mushrooms I welcomed as if long lost friends though…and then ate with pleasure.

On Saturday, the day of a festival called Rakhi where sisters give their brothers a bracelet in imitation of a goddess, we both worked in the morning again, sitting either side of our plastic table in the living room. In the late afternoon we set out on a walk, a ‘power walk’ to use Dani’s term, with the aim of getting some exercise and ending up at Star Bazaar. It started to darken after half an hour of us starting out. After several twists and turns down seemingly identical residential streets, we began to think we had gone wrong somewhere, as no supermarket loomed at the end of any of them. At last we could make out the glaring spot lights of the building between two tower blocks. Making our approach through a part of Satellite we had not ventured into before, we followed a road that cut through two open and empty lots, overgrown with weeds and scattered with rubbish and building debris. In one, two peacocks screeched in the dark. As we walked, large bats flapped through the darkening sky above us, their total wing span perhaps a foot a half, their bodies moving lazily through the air. I counted more than fifteen of them. Within a short while we finally found ourselves opposite Star Bazaar, thankfully with our blood un-drained.