The Ahmedabad Diaries - Raju's Story

Raju's story is not that of a single man. It's the story of a community put together through anecdotes from several people. "Raju" just happens to be the main source. I have no idea what his real name is.

He lived in a slum, or as NGO workers like to call it, a community. It was a community where the stone-houses were haphazardly lined up against each other, with just about enough space to accommodate two small people. For most families, however, the actual number stood around 2 adults and 5 steadfastly-growing kids. It was crammed, but as their nation had taught them since the day they were born, they had to adjust.

Mazdoori was the main livelihood. The men worked from morning to night, laboring in exchange for an income that allowed the family to survive. The women worked hard around the house to ensure the family could survive on that income. And the kids…they learnt soon enough that the innocence of childhood did not waste its time on their likes.

Life was hard, but Raju knew there was something to be thankful for – they had water and electricity for the most part. They had jobs. They had their family and friends. They had a solid roof over their head. They had a home.

I guess he thanked too soon.

On a day like any other, Raju returned home from labouring to find that he no longer had a home. It was gone. Every last bit. As were all the houses of his neighbours, and their neighbours, and the entire community.

The only thing left was rubble. Piles and piles of it.

On his left, people were crying – moaning; to his right, a man was sifting through the rubble looking for something, though he didn’t seem to know what. Children were clinging on to their mothers, looking confused and terrified, trying to forget the sounds of the bulldozers as they tore down their homes in front of their eyes.

The government had decided it was time to vacate the land so that it could be used for construction. That Raju understood. What he did not understand was why they were not given a moment’s notice before their homes were turned into rubble. A hysterical mother had to beg the authorities to allow her to get her son who was sleeping unawares while the bulldozers approached his house. She had to beg, because they didn’t seem to care what came in the way of the bulldozers – a bed, a dog, or a child.

As Raju looked towards his wife and son standing where their house used to be, he could not explain the emotion that passed through him. Everything that he had, that they had, was gone.  The house, the clothes, the TV, the stove, the thali they ate from, they vessel they stored water in – it was all gone. “I was lucky I carried by identity papers and toolbox with me to work,” he recalls, “or I wouldn’t even have that now.”

Their lives were turned inside out. Without even the courtesy of a notice.

*** Flash forward 6 months later ***

Dust, for as far as your eyes can see. Bamboo sticks, attempting to stand upright in their position on the ground. Tarps – red, blue, white – hanging desperately onto the bamboo sticks as the wind tried fervently to release them.

This was the new community that Raju was now living in. Some might call it a camp. Some might call it a dump. The government seemed to prefer calling it home. And it had been “home” for the last 15 days.

Although the details of his life are not too clear after the house was destroyed, from what I understand the government gave some of the families flats in a distant community in an attempt to relocate them. But not everyone received a flat, and so they continued to wait; they continued to live on the rubble of what-had-once-been-their-house for a few months. After 5 months, it seems the government had had enough of the squatters and wanted to clear the land, so all the remaining people were rounded up in trucks and dumped unceremoniously onto a far-off land next to a major garbage dumping ground. There was no water closeby, no sign of electric lines, no food, no job, no money, and certainly no home. Just a vast ground filled with prickly weeds and plants.

When I met Raju, he had been living there for 15 days. His new home, consisted of a few bamboo sticks precariously holding up white tarp, with a sandy floor that had been laboriously cleared of the wild plants.  He stood in front of his house as he unabashedly narrated his story to me. The flaps of tarp that stood as a door fluttered in the wind, giving me a chance to look inside his house. It was bare.

He had sent his wife and son to their village and was living here alone. “Why didn’t you go with them?” I asked. He looked tired, almost defeated. “Because I will not be allocated a house unless I stay here,” he said, the unfairness of the situation crushing him. “I do not want them to have to live through this misery.”

And misery it was. It was the end of December in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and temperatures at night were steadily dropping. Blankets were nowhere to be seen. The number of people living on that ground surpassed a few thousand. The men claimed there were no jobs available around them. Food was hard to come by unless it was through charity. Three children had already died by eating poisonous plants growing nearby. Water was available thrice a day – almost a kilometer away. No one had bathed in days. No one had properly quenched their thirst in days. All around, the faces - whether they be of an 8-month-old or an 80-year-old – showed signs of exhaustion.

The question that seemed most pertinent, was how long they would have to endure this hell. The authorities said that they will respond by the 31^st – 3 days later. “And if they don’t?” I ask hesitantly. Raju looks at me directly, his eyes burning with an emotion I couldn’t possible describe, and said, “We might be here for 5 years. Or more. Who knows?”

The tarp-homes held upright with bamboo sticks

Raju's home 

Here's hoping the bug doesn't bite

It starts with a little disgruntlement,

Like a little itch

Too slight to fret

Yet not so small to ignore

Still, you try

And slowly it grows

It’s gnawing at you

Like a bug bite that you want to scratch

Except it’s not on your skin

It’s nowhere that you can locate

Somewhere within

Maybe the muscle,

Or the bone,

Or the capillaries,

Or the heart

You don’t know

Yet it’s there for sure

Disgruntling

Frustrating

Angering

And as time passes

It takes over your entire being

Your muscle

Your bone

Your capillaries

Your heart

It’s a growing frustration

No matter how hard you try

You cannot ignore

But neither can you scratch

No matter how hard you try

You cannot reach

You try and put your finger on it

Yet it evades you even more

Or maybe you don’t want to reach it

Maybe you don’t want to scratch that evasive place

Maybe you don’t want to awaken the source of your anger

Because once you

Reach it

Catch it

Know it

You can no longer ignore it

You can no longer go on pretending

Pretending that everything is fine

That you are fine

That you aren’t bothered by that thing

That it doesn’t unsettle you

That it doesn’t plague your every thought

That it doesn’t dictate your every move

That it doesn’t allow you to be yourself

That all you want to do is scratch

Yet fear that which it may unleash

Because that would mean

Admitting that it matters

When it should not matter

Admitting that it hurts

When there is no reason to hurt

Admitting that you cannot stop

When all you want to do is stop

And admitting is hardly a cure

It will not take away the hurt

The anger

The frustration

The disgruntlement

The gnawing

The itch

So you continue pretending

Trying

Acting

Ignoring

Hoping that it will go away on its own

Knowing that it probably won’t

The "Hakuna Matata" kid

"...It means no worries, for the rest of your days. It's a problem-free philosophy - Hakuna Matata."

Headstrong...

I'm sure she's never heard this line. She probably couldn't even say Hakuna Matata (apparently it's quite a tongue-twister for 7-yr-olds). But without any conscious effort on her part, Shreya Pawar has embraced this philosophy in her life.

In a class filled with 45 screaming kids all vying for your attention, Shreya hardly stands out. That might be partly because she is NEVER trying to get your attention. She's content in her own world, with the few people around her, and never seems to need more.

But she did stand out to me, initially because of one simple feature - her smile.

Shreya is the smiliest kid - scratch that, smiliest person - I have ever met. In the no-smiling competition that I love to have with her, she can barely hold out for 2 seconds. Her eyes light up in pure unadulterated delight while crinkling up in the edges, and refuses to leave her face for the longest time. In fact, I think she's probably the only kid in my class who I've never seen crying even once! Once I found her sitting outside class with blood dripping from her knee, and the smile never left her face even as she recapped the incident of how she got hurt.

But if you think the smile is a reflection of her naivete and innocence, then you're definitely in for a ride!

The million-dollar smile

Any new topic I teach, she gets it in  a flash (although I doubt she's even listening). And as much as I appreciate the light bulb going on, the side-effect is that she spends the remaining time disrupting my already-disrupted class. Sometimes it can be as tame as whipping out her art book and drawing a gorgeous scenery, but more often than not it involves arguing and fighting with the students sitting around her. But to Shreya's credit, she never complains about the other students - she handles all the bullies on her own!

When I initially started noticing her cheerful attitude, I assumed she was one of those rare kids in my class that faced no hardship at home or with her family. Maybe she does, I don't know. What I do know is that her parents and siblings live far away from Mumbai in a small village, while Shreya lives near the school with her grandparents and aunt and uncle. She was one of those "lucky" kids that was given the opportunity to go and live in the city to get a good education. Whether that education is worth the separation from her family - only one person can answer. But good luck trying to discern the emotions behind that million-dollar smile.

I said earlier that in a class of 45 screaming kids all vying for your attention, Shreya hardly stands out. That's not exactly true. Shreya hardly tries to stand out. Yet she does. Her creativity, her talent, her defiance, her headstrong take-no-shit attitude, her curiosity, her cheerfulness, and her most genuine smile - with all these combinations, how can she not stand out? How can she not inspire?

"Some people try not to stand out, and they don't.
Some people don't try to stand out, and they do."

Breathing New Zealand

Pristine. Breathtaking. Untouched – words that are usually found in novels that prefer to delve more into description of the setting than to carry forward the plot. And I hate those novels. Well, at least I don’t love them. I crave a story – something to predict; something to look forward to. The description – well, that’s just there, isn’t it? It’s still, static – boring.

In the last 48 hours that I’ve spent in New Zealand though, I’ve realized that there is something to be said for that stillness – some kind of perplexing beauty in the lack of action. Ever since I reached New Zealand, which just happened to be on Labour Day (which was co-incidentally also the day after the Rugby World-cup final, so everybody was busy sleeping over their hangovers), the country has been dead. No people in sight. I’ve seen more sheep and cows than humans. Every 5 minutes I would turn to my parents and ask – so what do we do next – gesturing helplessly at the deserted water-sports area around us. And every 5 minutes, I would receive a shrug in return. So eventually I stopped asking.

And started seeing. And hearing. And feeling. And most importantly, I started breathing. I saw before me some of the most spectacular lakes and clear blue water, with snow-capped mountain peaks rising from behind, so far away that I couldn’t even capture them on my camera lens. Behind me, green grass spread out for acres, often covered by the straight-backed pine-trees neatly arranged in perfect lines that could have put a march-past team to shame. The scene was right out of those ‘scenery’ pictures I used to draw as a kid, never realizing there really were places that had such a perfect blend of blue, white, and green.

I heard the rustling of the leaves in the wind. I heard the sounds of insects which I had forgotten existed thanks to my busy city life. I heard my own feat crumbling the gravel on the ground below. I heard water gurgling from the boiling geysers that form part of New Zealand’s main natural attractions. I heard the sound of my own breath – quite a strange experience when you actually think about it. You know what I did not hear? People chattering, music blaring, horns honking, children shouting, myself yelling – everything was quiet. And calm. And peaceful.

I felt the wind like I haven’t felt it in ages since Bangalore. I felt the cold like I used to feel it in Canada. I felt the relaxation I had felt every time I went home to Kuwait. I felt the beauty of the landscape that I felt as a child in my house in Dehradun. I felt alive the way I do in Bombay – but so much more. Not alive to do things, but to just be. And I used to think that being alive means making the most of every single minute, of not wasting time but doing all the time. Yet in the last couple of days, I haven’t done anything. Unless you count lying down on the grass and actually falling asleep without a care in the world. Or walking along the most beautiful lake I have ever seen. Or realizing that I could feel alive while actually being static.

And so I took a deep breath. And then another. And a few more. I let the calm and the silence wash over me.  I let myself be immersed in beauty that for the most part has been left unaltered by man. I fell in love with something that was pristine. Breathtaking. Untouched.

Something that was static. Yet alive.

Utterance

“I don’t like it.”

Four simple words. Nothing complicated about them whatsoever, with the possible exception of the apostrophe on the second word. They were just there, swirling around in my head, as though waiting for me to swoop in with a net and throw them out of my mouth.

It seems we do a lot of that – waiting. As the words waited impatiently for me to pick them up, I waited too: for the right moment, for my anger to subside, or perhaps, for it grow to a point beyond control, so I would have an excuse to say those words. Waiting was the means to my end – what that end would be, I wasn’t sure. Whether, like on the stroke of midnight of August 15, 1947, my words would find utterance; or whether they would fade away to silence and grudgingly trudge towards the enormous pile of forcefully discarded thoughts.

I hoped for the former, but hope, when mingled with waiting, can be a dangerous combination. The determination is there, the resolution set, the anger surging. Yet the trigger remains just out of reach, as I sit around, waiting, hoping for the opportune moment to come along.

The scene has already played out a gazillion times in my head. For all the silence that envelopes me from the outside, my inner mind is seeing the satisfaction of an eloquent and persuasive monologue, one that Shakespeare would be proud of. I know exactly what to say, and effortlessly express my anger, my hurt, my disappointment, while a wave of understanding washes over the other person. All our misunderstandings are forgotten as my words drive the point home, and the ending, as Disney so eloquently puts it – is a happily ever after. All thanks to me and my words.

But while we applaud Shakespeare for giving us words that manage to grasp the complex emotions of misunderstanding, we forget something quite obvious – he wasn’t the actor. He wasn’t the performer. He wasn’t the one standing on stage, with hundreds of eyes upon him, waiting expectantly for him to say those words. No, there were others to do that task. His job was writing, and that’s what he did. He was lucky there were people around him willing to say those words aloud for him in his plays; just like the one taking place in my head, the one that had ace performers and cheering audiences.

Reality, of course, is that other stage, the one set outside my head, where I play the role of a mute, unable to express the feelings that are now becoming too painful to restrain. And so I close my eyes, willing myself to calm down, when the truth is that I want nothing more than to let go and let it all out.

As always, silence wins the round. Reluctantly, I assure myself that the next time, my words will find their utterance.

The good, the bad, and the murky

Hero or villian
Friend or enemy
Freedom fighter or terrorist
Founder of a nation or destroyer of another
Victim or criminal
Martyred or punished
Pro or anti
Heads or tails

People say there are two sides to every coin. True. But when you flip a coin you should get only one side: either heads, or tails. So how is it that the two of us can look at the same coin, and you see heads, while I see tails?

That's when things get murky.

I'm right, you're wrong
We have no common ground
We stand on opposite sides
And from my side, I cannot see your heads
From yours, you cannot see my tails

In 1947 - two major events happened in the Indian subcontinent. Depending on who you ask, you might get two different answers:

A nation was carved apart by a butcher's bloodstained knife,
A new nation was born, eager to open its eyes to brand new life.

It seems like an obvious statement: they both refer to the same event. But again,

I'm right, you're wrong
We have no common ground
We stand on opposite sides
And from my side, I cannot see your heads
From yours, you cannot see my tails

If you studied history in India, you might have come across the name 'Mohd. Ali Jinnah' - the driving force behind the partition of India. He was the one responsible for tearing our nation apart; for forcing the largest human migration in history; for all the communal bloodshed that followed; and for creating a country that has done nothing but wage wars against India ever since it was born.

Yet if you studied history in Pakistan, you probably came across the name 'Quaid-e-Azam' - the man responsible for creating Pakistan; the man who fought for the rights of Muslims in a country that tyrannically oppressed them; the man who envisaged and executed the impossible; the most revered and respected man of our nation - the founder of Pakistan.

Partition or Creation
Jinnah or Quaid-e-Azam

And so, depending on which country you grew up in, you were instantly indoctrinated in the respective ideology.

Two opposite sides of the coin. And again:

I'm right, you're wrong
We have no common ground
We stand on opposite sides
And from my side, I cannot see your heads
From yours, you cannot see my tails

Stuck in these dichotomies in our beliefs, refusing to take that step around the coin and trying to look at things from the other person's perspective.

Why? Because seeing things from someone else's point of view would mean

admitting that I am not the only one who is right
admitting that there are alternative positions on the same topic
admitting that while the other person may not be my friend, he isn't necessarily an enemy either

admitting that there exists a middle ground - a no-man's-land infested with murky terrain forbidding in its appearance

admitting that it doesn't have to be
only friend or enemy
only victim or criminal
only hero or villian
only pro or anti
only good or bad.

Sometimes, it can just be murky.

Clubbing in India - eerily similar to a walk through dadar station

I know it's a weird comparison - a club and a railway station; people 'dancing' and people trying to get on/off trains. But once you get to experience both - and I mean really experience both - you realize the two are not so different.

What is Dadar station? Only the biggest hub of local trains and national trains in Mumbai - where you start to feel like a snail when walking at a normal pace; where you come to expect being pushed and squeezed like a lemon (not unlike the juice vendors outside the station) while trying to get on or off a train. The attack can come from any side-  perhaps the woman brandishing a long black umbrella or the bare-handed one preparing herself with a fist.

Either way, the experience of Dadar station is incomplete unless you leave the place as the proud owner of a more than a few bruises (and in all fairness - you probably caused a few as well).

I never would have imagined I would compare this hellish intersection of train lines to a fun night of clubbing with friends. It's not that I expected an empty club - after all, the popularity of clubs is based on the number of people it can engulf. It's the same everywhere. Mumbai. Toronto. Wherever.

But there was a slight difference in the clubs of Toronto. Because there are so many couples grinding (which I still do not consider dancing, but whatever), they tend to remain within their own space. Even if there are hundreds of people jammed in a club, the majority of them are busy sticking to their partners, so they tend to leave the others alone.

Continue to imagine that club, but just replace the grinding couples with a bunch of Indians for whom dance is incomplete unless it involves the unchecked flailing of hands and legs. Add a few bottles of liqour and you've got Indians gone wild - or rather - hoards of hands and legs gone wild. And once they start flailing, they don't care what or who comes in their way - they will whack you right left and center.

Not unlike the woman brandishing her umbrella as prepares to get on the train to Kurla at 6pm.

Next time I want to get whacked like that - I think I'm really going to have to think of which of the two options I'm in the mood for.