Notes from a dusty city: Tulsi Row and other musings

Saturday, 4 April 2009

Tulsi Row and other musings

My favourite part of each day is the short walk down Tulsi Row to get home. At the entrance to the dusty lane I nod to the 2 or 3 men sitting on plastic chairs on the pavement by the road. Some of them spend all day there, shaded by the overhanging branches of a tall tree. Just inside the entrance is a white-painted pill box, about 9 feet high, where the oldest of the men sleeps every night on a narrow ledge protruding from one wall. On the inside of this sentry box hang religious icons depicting jolly Ganesha and serene Krishna, and on the floor in a corner is a round earthenware pot of the kind commonly used to cool water for drinking. Walking down the lane the noise from the main road gradually fades and is replaced by the high pitched squeaks of stripy-backed squirrels, the soft hooting of wood pigeons and the animated chirps and calls from beady-eyed Jungle Babblers and Myna birds. On either side of the lane trees overshadow parking spaces and their branches droop down, shedding twigs and spent blossom onto the tarmac. The short side roads giving access to the bungalows allow glimpses of front yards adorned with pot plants. It is at most a minute from the entrance to the block of flats, where several tall trees cluster together and enclose the lane. Nearer the flat some plant gives off a feint but intoxicating perfume during the hours of dusk. At the intersection where the tall trees stand a group of young boys often plays, darting amongst the pillars of the parking space under the flats and hiding behind the cars. As I reach the flats I now expect to see them marching towards me en mass with hands outstretched and mouths working over time on 'Hello!' and 'How are you?!' It makes my day to come home like this, to handshakes, hellos and high fives.

Sometimes this group plays cricket in the society's garden opposite the flats. Dani and I have played badminton on this small patch of lawn a few times, knocking a shuttlecock back and forth without a net. Standing in this green space, surrounded by houses and apartment blocks on all sides, one has a good view of the small, incongruous brick hut that has sprung up on the roof of Tulsi Flats. The family that was living in one of the fourth floor apartments shifted out and built themselves their own little home on the roof terrace. Made of cheap brick and with a zinc roof, the hut boasts a separate toilet and low overheads because as far as I understand it the family are not paying for their electricity or water. Rent is also not a problem. Naturally the rest of the society object to this Do-It-Yourself approach to sharing the building, but the husband's brother is a mafia gang leader who is in prison but able to 'make things happen' from behind bars. This little hut on the roof of our building is not a particularly uncommon solution to a housing problem in India. Indeed much construction here is semi-legal, with land purchases and construction deals awash with black money. Apparently most land in India has a market price and a real price incorporating a huge black mark-up that has to be paid in cash. Obviously this is a real problem for anyone that wants to buy land; somehow they have to account for spending a huge sum of money, perhaps five or even ten times the official price, which they've handed over in cash under the table. As it turns out the whole of our block of flats is an illegal build. This explains why it stands out like a sore thumb amongst the neat rows of 2-story bungalows that surround it. The original developer had all three blocks built without getting permission. This is likely to have been done on the cheap: when the earthquake struck Gujarat in 2001 C-block (ours) collapsed and has since been re-built. The flats were not a welcome addition to the neighbourhood; at least not as far as the bungalow owners were concerned: they continue to refuse to incorporate the flats into their society. As a result the flat occupants and bungalow owners usually celebrate festivals separately, although during Holi this year families from both societies were out to watch the big bonfire being lit and take a turn sprinkling offerings around the pyre.

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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

Saturday, 4 April 2009

Tulsi Row and other musings

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