It’s almost as though someone blew a magic powder over vast rolling lands, whispering ‘let there be life’, and suddenly the huge bustling monstrosity that we call the city came up. Swarming with people, flavours, noises, colours, smoke and rumours, the modern Indian city expresses at best, what we call ‘life’. I recall a friend pointing out to me, that the jungle is where you find life. She echoed what a number of biology books, and wildlife television channels tell me about the forests being the storehouses of life forms of different sizes, habits, colours, patterns and characteristics, and yet, as I look at vast stretches of city around me, I cannot help but believe that what surrounds me, possibly hosts a wider variety lives, characters, colours, and habits than the wilds. It is the city where I see qualities of the living manifest themselves in a myriad ingenious ways, and all these different manifestations, amalgamate is a most brilliant way to conjure up today’s idea of the urban and of the city.
.....Deepa climbed onto a bus at the regular stop. She was going to meet Akhil, at the art gallery, 14 kilometres away. Akhil lived closer to her, than the gallery. In fact, they were neighbours. Yet she was to meet him at that quiet gallery where the most artistic students at the university display their work. The paintings are crude and uncensored and express the primal ideas rebellious students have. Parents don’t go there. They say it is a place for the ‘dopers’. They couldn’t meet nearer home, because there were always the prying eyes of neighbours, ready to carry tales to their parents, and ruin everything. On the bus, Deepa met Ambika, her salwar-kameez clad cousin. They chatted for a while about the newest bollywood hotbod, and of how wrong it was for Sheila didi to have eloped with Azan, and when Ambika asked Deepa where she was going, a confident, “French Class” was what she got for an answer. Deepa had been putting up this facade of learning the language for three months now, and everyone was quite sure, that she could speak the tongue quite fluently. “If only they knew....” she thought to herself.
Deepa wasn’t going to tell her parents about their romance anytime soon. They wouldn’t get it. It wasn’t that her parents didn’t understand love. However, love didn’t exist between teenagers, or between people of different communities. Here again, they weren’t to be misunderstood as communal. Deepa’s father’s best friend from the missionary school that he went to did belong to a completely different community, and they got on perfectly well. Yet, if Deepa told them about Akhil now, they’d inflict tortures similar to honour killing on her, and so, ignorance was bliss. It also wasn’t that Akhil was a fling. She knew she would marry him, in the traditional hindu way, with her parents’ blessing, but that time was just not now. She would tell them, when the time was right. It would cause a few tempers and fights, but they’d handle it. She wouldn’t elope or do anything else that would bring them shame. She loved them. She loved Akhil too. And she often wondered if what he said was really what he thought...
So, here was the city. A simple urban incident – a parley of ideas, thoughts and emotions. The traditional, the conservative, the snide, the rebellious, the intelligent, the intellectual, the adventurous, the honourable, the brave, the doubtful, the candid, the dishonest, the ambitious, the base, the human, the animal, the divine, and the primal, all blended in harmoniously together, to give rise to a simple incident, of little interest or variation. All these qualities of the ‘living’, accentuated and highlighted in a beautiful pattern to give only a small chapter of city life.
Every little activity here is swarming with life. Every little corner, every narrow street, every important road, and every stately building, is swarming with activity. This is life. As varied, and as condensed as it can get.
