This week, I write to you from Pondicherry, a lovely coastal town in South India. It used to be a French colony, and home to a major Indian poet and philosopher, Aurobindo Ghose, and is now a popular tourist destination and centre of pilgrimage. This is my fifth time in Pondicherry, and I won’t be surprised if I felt like coming here again. A Google search, I am sure, will throw up some spectacular images for your long-distance consumption. But, for now, let me show you around.
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A baby cockroach crawls out of the menu card I am holding. It walks around like a teenager on a sugar high, and I watch in a state of shock. Cleanliness standards at The Indian Kaffee Express in Pondicherry seem to have declined terribly since the last time I was here, two years ago.
My impulse is to check if there are any more cockroach babies or eggs hiding between the pages. I find neither. Only a note that says, “Liked our food? Place? Service? Please do leave us a review on www.TripAdvisor.com”. I am not sure if I want to order anything. But it’s too hot outside, and I need to sit down somewhere, and get cracking on this column.
The city I call home seems to have tagged along. The menu offers ‘Bombay Sandwich’, ‘Mumbai Tawa Pulao’, and ‘Mumbai Chicken Pulao’. A waiter comes over to say, “Sir, only beverages being served today.” I ask for a kettle of jasmine tea, pull out my notebook from a cotton jhola, and begin scribbling half-formed thoughts.
Aurobindo Ghose, poet and philosopher
***
I remember the cabbie who drove me from home to Mumbai International Airport for the Jet Airways flight. The half hour with him was spent hearing about his sad break-up with a girl who he liked but his parents disapproved of. He was annoyed that, in the seven months they had been together, they had only kissed.
His phone bill had gone up, his habits had been forcibly changed, and he had also lost her to a man who married her but left her behind in Mumbai to take up a well paying job in Dubai. She calls him at least twice every week, and he apparently tries to dissuade her. “What is the point of dating someone if your parents won’t let you marry her?” he said.
***
Despite the traffic, we arrived at the airport well in time. I queued up along with the other passengers, and waited to get my boarding pass. The familiar but indescribable airport smell somehow reminded me of Ila from Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines. There is this part where the unnamed narrator of the novel begins to share with Ila his longing to visit Cairo, and see the mosque of Ibn Tulun, and touch the stones of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. She is not paying attention. There are other things occupying her mind. When she finally responds, there is an anti-climax of sorts: “Oh yes, Cairo, the Ladies is way on the other side of the departure lounge.”
The narrator writes, “I had a glimpse, at that moment of those names on the map as they appeared to her: a worldwide string of departure lounges, but not for that reason at all similar, but on the contrary, each of them strikingly different, distinctively individual, each with its Ladies hidden away in some yet more unexpected corner of the hall, each with its own peculiarity, like the flushes in Stockholm’s Arlanda, so sleekly discreet that she had once missed two flight calls because it had taken her so long to understand how the handle worked. I imagined her alighting on these daydream names — Addis Ababa, Algiers, Brisbane - and running around the airport to look for the Ladies, not because she wanted to go, but because those were the only fixed points in the shifting landscapes of her childhood.”
Artwork: 'Curling up on a hand-cart outside the train station' - Photo courtesy - Ashay Kshirsagar
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Back to Pondicherry. My jasmine tea is over. The waiter clears my table. This air-conditioned bubble with dim lighting, and no other customer, seems too cosy to leave so soon. I continue writing. The events of the last two days revisit my mind.
This trip to Pondicherry materialised in connection with a teachers’ symposium organized by the Azim Premji University. I was one of a number of resource persons invited to engage with elementary school teachers. One of my sessions was built around experiences of having interacted with school children in many schools in Pakistan and India about the need to forge and deepen cross-border friendships because that seems to be the only sane response to our continuing diplomatic deadlocks.
Another session was a workshop with activities to help teachers recognise how we adults carry with ourselves a whole bunch of biases into the classroom. These could be related to the dialect students speak, their appearance, the family they come from, their religious affiliation, caste identity, and gender. I think we managed to have some really profound and meaningful conversations, where teachers spoke of things they have done that they are not proud of. That kind of honest sharing is possible only in spaces that feel safe.
Most of the teachers there were comfortable expressing themselves in Tamil rather than English, so we had a translator helping us understand each other. Sure, the pace of the workshop became slower than I had imagined but keeping it bilingual was a good decision. We put in extra effort while listening.
Sameer evicted the city from each image to give each human being a moment of rest
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I fly back to Mumbai tomorrow, and this time I am filled with neither excitement nor regret. When you begin to find anchor inside yourself, every place begins to exude a special glow.
My last fond memory of Mumbai is an art exhibition called ‘Please Have A Seat’, which featured illustrations culled out of Sameer Kulavoor’s sketchbooks. The show was hosted by ARTISANS’ gallery, which is right opposite the semi-dilapidated Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue on V. B. Gandhi Marg. They had invited me to be in conversation with the artist, a few days after the show opened. I had no idea how many people would come in to listen but, to my surprise, we had a full house.
What I liked about Sameer’s work was the simplicity and confidence in it. There was no clutter or chaos, no sense of ‘let me tell you what this means because I am the artist.’ All the illustrations were snapshots of people in the city finding a pause — a lover looking away after a heated argument, a shopkeeper snoozing on a cart at the end of a long day, or an employee stretching after the boss left the conference room. It seemed like Sameer had decided to evict the city out of each image to give each human being a moment of rest.
Chintan Girish Modi is a Mumbai-based writer. That he shares his last name with a Prime Minister is purely a matter of coincidence. He tweets at @chintan_connect
