No matter how big, metroes never have the charm of small towns
TYPICAL OF THE male species, the husband moved me to Swansea in Wales and left on a six-week jaunt of the world. His excuse? ‘It’s work, darling!’
Typical of me, I did not throw myself on the carpet, drum my heels and shriek, ‘No, it’s a violation of the Domestic Violence Act of 2005!’ I should have. Instead, I thought, ‘I’ve been brought up in Saharanpur. What dangers can a “mofussil” city hold that I have not encountered before?’
Well, for one, language. This deep in Wales, they speak English, but that’s mostly when they’re not talking Welsh, and it’s English as few Englishmen would have claimed for their own. After dashing for the nearest mirror the first hundred times I had a phlegmatic ‘Awwwrrrright?’ flung at me (no, I had not grown a second nose overnight, not even a spot!), I realised this was the Welsh equivalent of ‘Hello’!
Day five of solitude, I thought of taking the local bus to the city centre. I needed to see some proof of humanity, to exercise my vocal chords before I forgot how to speak.
Needless to say, we had chosen to live in the most picturesque part of the city, read the farthest from any semblance of metropolitan amenity. Shades of Saharanpur again, where we’d actually lived in a part of the city where dacoits still made overnight trips to the chaiwala down the road after a night of, well, I presume, dacoity and watching lissom lasses dance on shards of glass. Sadly, I got to see no Sunil Dutt or Vinod Khanna those days.
The bus down the hill from us in Swansea runs once an hour. Fresh from London, where one stamps one’s foot impatiently if the bus arrives two minutes late, I was in a state of panic. What if I missed the bus? There wouldn’t be another one for a whole hour! The anxiety keeda in me got me to the bus stop half an hour before time. Look on the brighter side: at least, it wasn’t raining. Swansea was not quite living up to its reputation of being the rainiest city in the UK.
Five minutes before the bus was due, the stop started filling up. By the time the bus arrived, I was replete with the temerity of the Swansea municipal council, which had slashed buses from once every half-hour to every hour the May before, just before the ‘season’ started in the Mumbles (‘would you believe it?’).The Mumbles, or Y Mwmbwlsas the Welsh write it, is the aforementioned picturesque part of Swansea, which hosts an orgy of water sports in the bay during the summer ‘season’.
I listened to the woman tell me exactly why the council had not lived up to her expectations, content to listen and nod in assent. I am quite happy myself to take a few pot-shots at authority, any authority, especially if the aforesaid authority was laying itself out like a sitting duck waiting for pot-shots.
Then she came up with the show stopper. ‘It’ll take you at least fifty years to be accepted in Mumbles. I moved here in 1965 and it’s only now I feel like a local.’ I did not scramble to do the math; I was born in 1965.
Before I reached home in the late afternoon, I’d learnt more about Swansea and its residents than I would have if I’d watched the news.
The lady at the pharmacy told me one of my new neighbours had lost her husband two days ago and I should probably go and say hello. I cannot think of a more traumatic way of ‘getting to know your neighbours’ than paying a condolence visit. But I guess it was my fault for lingering at the pharmacy. I can’t help it. I’ve had a fetish for lingering in pharmacies since I was a child in Saharanpur, when our friendly pharmacist would ply me with cold coffee and let me open up a dozen packs of Binaca toothpaste and pick my choice of the little rubber animal inside.
I helped another lady at the M&S get her husband a new outfit for a funeral at a nearby Welsh mining village: ‘You know how they are at those villages?’ she whispered confidingly while her husband thrashed around in the changing room. No, I didn’t, but I was willing to learn.
It was all part of the game, a game I was quick to re-learn. Memories flooded in. I could remember my favourite haunt in Saharanpur – the bookshop where I was left for hours by my parents while they went shopping or for an ‘unsuitable’ movie. The bookshop owner became a kind of surrogate parent to me, letting me devour whatever books he had in his shop, feeding me and clucking over me like Amma never did. There were no fears of potential child abuse in those days. When I took my newborn son to see my ‘surrogate’ parent many years later, his eyes were damp with tears.
I remembered other days when my parents would leave me in our trusty black Fiat, reading newly acquired books while they went to the grocery. I would hardly have read a page before someone would pop up at the window, enquiring after my parents (you can see why I preferred being left at the bookshop!). I soon got into the habit of sitting in the footwell of the car, windows rolled up even in the summer, so that no one could see I was there.
It was the same everywhere in Saharanpur. Everyone knew my parents (and they hadn’t even been there fifty years!), and everyone knew me. Everyone called me ‘Baby’ till I almost forgot my own name. The rickshaw-wala who took me to school would stop halfway in the summer and make me take a huge gulp of water from my bottle. The mali would protect me from Amma when I’d got her dander up. The elderly darzi who made my clothes was stricter about my necklines as I grew up than Amma.
It was a cocoon of warmth and protectiveness that I missed sorely when I moved first to Delhi and then to London, where blank anonymity replaced it all. But the cocoon also provided me with the confidence that only uncomplicated affection can bring. It brought me to the Rajdhanis with a strong feeling of who I was, of the roots that held me strong and unwavering.
Many years later, I was interviewing a potential copy editor. ‘You have to cut me some slack,’ he told me cheekily. ‘I’m a small town boy!’
‘Oh yeah?’ I fixed him with my eye and smiled quietly to myself. Sometimes, it just doesn’t do to believe everything you read, especially about life in small cities. Metros may give you swagger, but it’s what’s in your heart that counts.