On the Road to Poona

Travelling to Pune always reminds me of the time when my parents lived at CME and I used to take the train every other weekend from Mumbai to meet them. Being a   cash poor and time rich student, I usually hopped on to any available empty train and spent most of the ride admiring the scenery or writing furiously in my notebook. Some of those pieces made it into the student magazine but most are lost, their vanishing a little unnoticed and perhaps justifiably unsung. The more common route these days is the Expressway and though the buses are quick and efficient, something of the romance of the trip is lost, especially the arrival into Karjat and the climb and descent from Khandala. A mid travel eating spot remains and though this centralised facility is a little different from the quick grabs from a station or unscheduled stop, the eats on offer remain somewhat similar. I took a few quick snaps on the break. 

The staples of train travel - nuts, berries, fruits are of course still around.

As is the vada pav and the omelette pav.  The Karjat sellers would be swamped but now things are a lot more leisurely.  The meal I bought reminded me of a line from English August, where an urban type becomes a babu in rural Maharashtra. Spying a market meal, he thinks of it with a cartoon bubble - Hullo, my name is cholera, what's yours? I survived  my meal just like August.

What I don't remember is the Science at Home. I was intrigued by this - who runs it? - but the bus left before I could ask questions.

In Pune, I caught up with friends and family.  We went to Kirkee, which is much changed. Mid way through my trip we took a leisurely drive through the cantonment. Which has also changed but the old bungalows survive.  I am not overly sentimental about Army life but there is something of an ease in  being among things that formed part of a life already left behind.

Visiting old friends in Pune also reminded me of the Marathi Natyasangeet tapes that used to play in our hostel rooms.  There was one particular song I liked and never found in a tape - of course it is on youtube.

Gorai

Pictorial posts are what I call "lazy as fuck" posts - though there is a degree of effort in uploading the pictures.

These pictures were taken on a morning trip to Gorai, part of some downtime with the bro.  I was seeing the place after many years and in parts it was quite unchanged. In many ways it remains a sleepy village with a distinctly East Indian/Portuguese Catholic flavour.  It turned out to be a pleasant excursion. Here are the better pics (the camera is having a bit of a workout here).

Front of a House

AB at my window

Cross at a Square

Bougainvillea

On the Porch

House at the end of the street

East Indian movie poster

Hibiscus

Pink is the new Black

At the Beach

Tadgola/Toddy fruit

Salt Pans

Vegetable Farms

First Mangoes

Our Lady of Miracles - and Housekeeping

The bro's chauffeur never fails to offer his trademark take on life etc.  Apart from serpent deities, he is also partial to the more commonplace goddesses. One such is Tulja Bhavani, we passed by the derivative temple at Andheri and after many prostrations and genuflections (I have been reading far too much of The Hindu!), he offered an explanation.  His foot had gone bad when I was last here and he had made the rounds of the clinic only for the pain to return. Pig fat had also not helped. Naturally he sought divine intervention.  And it lay with this small temple, the priestess of which I remembered as a lady with a large red dot on her forehead and hair of a thousand knots.  She had immediately proclaimed the presence of numerous bad spirits and gave him a number of lemons (no If Life Gives you Lemons Make Lemonade joke here!).  He consumed these - I can't recollect in what manner. His foot was instantly better and remained so.  A few lemons remained and much later he discarded them in the sea.  Instantly he was gripped by pain. This time the lemon remedy did not come free, he spent 6000/- on the priestess who had meanwhile relocated to a small town. Still, he said, cheaper than the doctor.  The explanation for these bad lemons (way too many awful jokes here but I will desist) lay in them not being properly discarded at the chauraha.  I instantly remembered DD Kosambi's book which deals with the importance of mother goddess cults and the crossroads in Indian culture.  Kosambi's chapter on this begins with an episode in the Mrichchakatikam. Given the persistence of things in India this is a cliched view - yet it felt slightly odd that such an old ritual persisted on modern crossroads.

Our Lady of Housekeeping

Meanwhile my father has a new employee.  The lady who does the housework has a sweet disposition that is laced with an amusing tartness. Her world is different from the chauffeur's in so much that she is a Christian of a non-Catholic denomination that is much given to austerity, simplicity and the near absence of Catholic ritual.  Midway through her work we often sit down to tea and biscuits (Indian chai and biscuits I discover is a very madeleine moment) and I get to hear a fragmented recounting of her life.  One day it is her childhood, her father was a cook who travelled everywhere. Then the daughters only used foreign goods and learnt that white people smell too. Till the father died and they were all pulled out of school because their church "only takes money unlike the  Catholic Church which educates and supports those who fall on hard times".  Another day it is her youngest daughter who in spite of the church upbringing has succumbed to the lure of bad TV and expensive cosmetic makeovers. The other daughters are mentioned, she is off soon to welcome a new grandchild on which she wryly observes that even a grandmother is not welcome without gifts (she in fact will bear the expenses of the first few months of the child and this jolts me a bit, the precise economic allocations inherent in many Indian communities). Or  she may offer an amusing take on the skinflint and eccentric ways of employers - the luxury of talking to an employer is reserved for a few because most housewives she says cannot bear to see the maid idle for even a moment.

The times I see her I realise there is something inherently soothing about her presence. Her work is silent and neat.  And there are affecting and understated touches like the tiny garlands she threads for my mother's portrait.  And though this Mary is no goddess - well perhaps she is a domestic goddess of sorts - there is something a little charming about her quiet navigation of life. And a sense of that old feeling of there being a little divinity in people.

At my Grandmother's-I

I have been staying home for long spells on this visit and the quietness of the suburbs on week days has been surprising. The places I live in are admittedly tucked away, yet even on a short drive you turn into a lane and it will be silent. There is something slightly schizophrenic about leaving behind the chaos of the main roads to enter these streets.

At the moment I am at my grandmother's place and while she is in better cheer than I expected, at times she's like the lines of a poem I wrote for her - small, sorrowed, a crumpled heap. Life is a small room, her walking-aid, a chair to watch the lane below -but she also listens to my chatter-her "bedtime story" for today was my reading of Country Style. 

I have been loitering around the back of the house today - once a getaway and a splendid spot for childhood games - now more sedately I shot a few pictures (the camera has been with me everywhere on this visit documenting little else than domestic minutiae). The painters were around for awhile but not of late - their tools have been left behind till they return. The cobwebs are on our neighbour's grill, there is a certain gloomy satisfaction in seeing this - its the companionship afforded by the impossible housekeeping required of the large houses here.  

But the strongest memory of my childhood lay in this wall. I found it appalling as a child that people would keep out intruders by way of embedding glass and it still makes me uneasy.  And it is still around, albeit dressed up by a lick of paint. 

Equally, "servants" are bemusing.  There is complaining, bullying, wheedling, parsimony and the companionship of idle chatter in the relationship.  And though much has changed, the occupation is by no means a professional one and the underlying master-supplicant relationship remains with all its attendant stereotypes.  A harshness and discontent often exists on both sides.  My grandmother has had the same help for twelve odd years and is on good terms with her.  But a one day notice will suffice on both sides.  

 

Though I have been home for long spells, I haven't done much by way of reading or anything else. In Friedan's words, housework expands to fill time. And so it does, a few largely useless tasks occupy my entire day.  Perhaps this repetition is also soothing in some way, there is something vaguely Zen about the silence and the mundanity.  This is also because I am largely free of the tyranny imposed by a functional household, that peculiar insistence that tasks be done a particular way.  This morning while drying the clothes, I wryly remembered the oral instruction manual issued to young girls of my time entitled On the Proper Drying of Saris.  Girls obeyed, girls rebelled.  The situation was worsened by marriage. But after a proper and decent amount of time with the in-laws, young women could always go on to their own domestic tyrannies (I believe The Proper Stacking of Dishwashers is quite popular these days).

At my Grandmother's-II

I had hoped to take a few pictures around the colony but my walk proved disappointing. 

I started with the house. The garden that we share with our neighbours is scraggly and dusty beyond belief (though I must admit that my morning watering of the garden is one of few tasks I like). In spite of this, the first signs of the Mumbai spring (if one can call it that) are evident on this raggle-taggle, neglected bunch.

Part of the disappointment was because the old houses have overwhelmingly given way to the two-storeyed block which leaves little space for anything else.  The streets still boast a few odd trees but on the whole there is a dispiriting sameness, a tiredness to the landscape in these parts. The colony is far too tiny to make a difference to the world changing around it and in itself it is not sufficiently interesting, too many houses  are mediocre monuments to success. The timidity inherent in this robs the place of both elegance and an elegaic feel.

My uncle briefly contributed to wikipedia on the history of the colony, a decidedly more neutral take.

The numbering of the houses had always seemed vaguely confusing, I hadn't realised that a helpful map is provided at the entry (note spelling of city, the sign has been around for awhile).  Or that Tansa was a helpful marker.

In the tiny lanes, the dogs outnumbered people on a sleepy afternoon. And the desi badaam trees that dotted the colony have not completely vanished though the red pods we ate are still to appear.

Of the older houses that remain, many are in a state of disrepair. The only exception is the house of one of our acquaintances which is carefully and immaculately preserved.  After introductions I was invited in and their sun filled courtyard was sufficiently delightful for me to photograph a few flowers (I realise there is a monotony to flowers but cannot stop photographing them, besides these are so evocative of old Indian gardens).

Walking around, I thought a bit about my life.  I was born not too far from this colony and have been coming here through postings and moves.  I played on its streets as a child. My grandparents have always lived here, its the only fixed address I knew of for a long time. Properly, I should feel a deep affection for it.  But strangely it is already distant and a part of my past, I am already nostalgic for it even as I walk around. What it is now no longer belongs to me.