Small Town Girl

Actually, this is a bit belated. I meant to post this earlier but forgot about it halfway through writing it. This is probably going to be one of the simplest posts I have ever put up, and the one I am most emotional about in some ways. I thought it would be appropriate to post this now in light of the Indian cricket team's captain gettin' hitched in a city that frequently gets confused with Darjeeling (NO clue why). I was also thinking about how my friends from Pune sometimes find it so hard to comprehend why I want to go back "because it's so much funner/cooler/cleaner here!" Often, I feel very alienated even when conversing with many of my Puneri friends and have now concluded that this has not so much to do with geography (since we all speak English) but with the way classes are constituted so differently in bigger and smaller towns. What the average Puneri knew in 7th standard took about 4 more years to reach the average Doonite.  At least that's my direct experience of the stark divide between a modern metro and a tier 2 town that still seems trapped in a bygone era. So, without further ado, here goes.

*

I am sitting near the drippy drone of the cooler, it's punctuating the still June evening with its liquid monotone and gentle whirr. It isn't muggy here like it was in Pune, the scorch is dry and slightly prickly. But it's five o' clock and the vague whiff of damp earth and moist grass sidles over to my starved nose - the sky will rip open its thunder-jacket soon and let forth a torrent of rain, a benevolent favourite uncle. I can already sense his advent, the swelling shadows in the west, floating towards me imperiously, a palanquin of clouds carrying the June shower I desperately need and miss. And then, just like that, the cloud-carriage is here and the raindrops all alight in one go, thundering and booming out a tempestuous symphony, sliding down on electric zig-zags of lightning and whooshing by on mighty currents of air. This is the rain of my hometown. Himalayan and cool and lovely. I allow myself to be drenched. Each drop seems to carry the weight of a memory, cooling my brow with its kisses.

I go to college in a fairly big city, a college town on the prosperous Western coast, one which has a cosmopolitan milieu and all the socio-psychological trappings of a large, populous bustling settlement. I love it there but you know...I will never quite feel at home, the way I do here on these familiar streets that sneak around the expanding town like secret passageways, surprise empty old roads and creep up on the main highways. The circuits of the city are embedded in my memory and as I walk down these roads where my family has lived for generations, I feel a peace of belonging I know I will never be able to replicate elsewhere. I can wander around these Victorian vicinities in the early evening, with the facades of the houses, some robust with action, some locked up for years, guarding me and my way. I can be a careless flaneur in a time long ago.

There are the neighbours waving at me from the house next door, we have shared the colony for three generations and I call them all mamiji and mamaji, affecting a kinship that has nothing to do with blood. There is the old paan shop on the corner, old man D would let me crouch under the table when we played hide and seek as seven year olds. He died four years ago, taking with him a part of my childhood. The flour mill facing the main road has everyone in the neighbourhood stop by for ten minutes at different times of the day to glean gossip, crushing betel and spitting paan as they hitch up their imaginary petticoats, middle-aged paunchy men, and ladies returning from grocery shopping before dark.The house opposite mine is shut up now; there used to be two families residing there when I was growing up. It is a wizened abode, asleep with the somnolence of disuse and desolation, a forgotten relative that once sheltered laughter and tears and blood and sweat. It is bricked with stories.

The main road leading up to the old city is a fudge of cars and scooters, trying to slither by serially...there isn't even space to squeeze in a pedestrian any more. The main road is actually just one straight line cutting hastily through the centre of the city all the way to Mussoorie, narrower than a Vestal Virgin and with shops profilerating like bunnies on both sides. I am faintly repulsed by this intrusion of modern life into my idyllic nest. I decide to take the backroads, marvelling at how a huge sedan can actually turn a tiny corner and vanish into a mousehole of an alley, just like that! Blink and you miss it. It's like something from a Miyazaki movie. The medieval part of Dehradun looms large; the city's roots are intricated in this genteel ghetto, with the 18th century palace-temple of Guru Ram Rai, the fabled founder, hallmarking the heart of Doon, his camp or the Hindi 'dera' forever marking our small space as his. History groggily awakens to greet me and mumbles something about Dronacharya, the Great Teacher in the Mahabharat, having hung out here back in the day. I pay my respects at the palace, cup my hands to receive the Lord's largess and feel the dusty, pebbly stings on my sole as I shuffle out.

There is the language I thirst for. The word-lover and verbal jester in me feels maimed in a land where my lingual gymnastics, punnery and grammar games have no takers. I may be an Anglophone by education, but I remain first and foremost a speaker and appreciator of Hindi. I always say that English is my lover but Hindi is my husband...I can have the most passionate love affair with the Anglo-Saxon/Latin beauty as I split my infinitives and subordinate my clauses but it's the staid, steady earthy rhythms of Khariboli I return to time and again. It's not just the play I miss, it's the cultural jokes and codes and folk wisdom enmeshed in the tongue of my ancestors. It's a record of prima posteriori knowledge (is that a phrase? I don't know but it best describes the immediate information of cultural data one is exposed to). It is the ad libbed couplets of random sagacity thrown around while walking with a friend, it's the tradition of tehzeeb and refinement of manner when speaking even in comfortable company, it's the interiority of experience one is invited to share just by uttering a single word whether it's the full range of philosophic meaning or the slice of a social nicety. I don't know quite what...a password, a punchline...it's so much all at once.

Dehradun does not have a multiplex, something I often get made fun of for. I don't mind. I know that it's a sign of the linear, Euronormative model of economic progress and development. I would like to bracket that entire sentence within inverted commas because I can only chuckle bitterly when I see the forests around Doon being uprooted to make way for these tired institutions of a hyperreal post-globalised society. I am not a green queen but even critiques of this pattern of capitalist metastasizing seem moot and dull now. I shall simply say that my friends in Pune may snigger when they hear I only watched dubbed English films in a single-screen till I was 14, but I would fiercely guard the appropriation of the uniqueness of my space by the monsters of Mammon. I would care that my city did not look exactly like every other city, like an organism that has been cloned and stunted. I am OK with watching Sitara Jung: Humshaklon ka Hamlaa (Star Wars: Attack of the Clones) if it means I get to keep Paltan Bazaar and Astley Hall. If it means I get to drink a Rs. 10 coffee at the Buffet than a Rs. 100 one at Barista.

I go to meet relatives just on the main road behind my house. People flit in and out, it's visiting hours in the evening, people popping in for chai, namkeen and what's up with ____. Old North Indian houses, with courtyards for women now being used as common areas for everyone. And I am there, in my jeans and t-shirt, looking so out of place as I munch on my homemade biscuits. There's the aunt of the guy who owns the flour mill near my house, 70 and sweet, doddering in with her umbrella and then the middle-aged couple from up the road who just sent their son off to medical school in Delhi. And a myriad of other people, a steady stream of visitors. I keep repeating what I am doing in Pune.

Why Philosophy? How old are you? Will you think of marriage once you graduate next year? We will find you a nice boy. Where will you apply for Masters? Go abroad, like my daughter. Where are your parents these days? How is your mausi? It goes on. Most people cannot place me at all, a dorky, pale creature chomping cookies in a corner. Then I am introduced as my mother's daughter. Glimmers of recognition light up in every eye and a collective sound of 'aah' bundles up relics of half-remembered images and conversations from the museums of their memories and casts them into the sunset of the courtyard.

"I remember your mother," I suddenly feel a warmth unfurling inside me, "So beautiful. When she got married, I was there. Saw her grow up, that one. You have her smile."

And that's all I need. In this town, I am not Kamayani Sharma.  I am not 'the girl from Dehradun who studies philosophy at Fergusson College and lives on F.C. Road and do you know she is in her second year and won't be here after two more years.' I am my mum's little girl, the youngest of my clan, the Sharma kid who lives down the road. I have a permanent address, an unchanging identity. I fit in beautifully, a piece in the puzzle, a stitch in the tapestry, a permanent fixture. These are my people, who attached themselves to me years before I was even born and the roots of that association have already penetrated so deep that they will anchor my sense of self for a lifetime. My house has hosted people for almost a century and today those people host me in their houses when I come back, the scion of an old Brahmin family tracing itself back decades and decades and decades. I feel like I will always have the key to this city, no matter how far I go and how long I am away. I will be welcomed into the bosom of Dehradun with masala chai and a gentle joke.

Pune will always have that special place in my heart as the city I made my own home in and built myself in, in many ways, but it is here, in Dehradun, in the shade of gnarled lychee trees, breathing in the aroma of incense veiling the bulb-lit main road with its patchwork of little shops that start closing up at 7.30 for dinner, greeting the postman on his way back after lunch, telling the shopkeeper when my brother will be back for vacation, relaxing in the drizzle as I tramp around the main city with its British remnants of architecture, getting some momo at the stalls downtown just before it gets too dark, standing on the roof and seeing Mussoorie twinkle...

It is here, in Dehradun, where my great-grandmother taught the girls of the city, where my handsome grandfather wedded and brought home my exquisite grandmother from her small U.P. town, where my mother learnt to climb trees and garden and discovered her inner botany-nerd, where my father lost his dog, Tipu, in the streets and found his passion for books in the second-hand market, where he came to call on her brother and fell in love with her, where my brother was born and later, came of age, and where I experienced almost all my significant firsts.

Pune has my life, my head, much of my loyalty. But Dehradun has my heart. And, as I have come to realise after years of living away, it always will.