[Reader-list] Barodascape(3 of 3).

[Amitabh Kumar]

There is a white wall outside my house. A window lies stuck to the wall and
four window panes are missing. The two green ones that are there turn
fluorescent when the sun shines too hard. I stop what I am doing and stare
at the wall, anticipating something. A squirrel jumps across it. In a flash
of a second it's gone.

Gone.








I spent four years in Baroda. Four years of sweat, laughter, bad haircuts,
petty envy, violence, drunken reveries, stoned visions, paint on clothes,
heartache's, wet boring afternoon's, lectures, a million stutters, an
occasional teardrop, the faint sound of music, dignified sorrow, mad mad
love, aborted dreams, forced futurescapes.



            Four years. Of that and so much more.



And intertwined with these abstracts was the fabric of the concrete, the
tactile, and the sensory. There were the long walks back to the hostel from
a late night movie show. The pathetically sweet chai in the bus stop at
three in the night. The bickering for a ticket to Ahmedabad in the travel
agent's counter. Hunting for country made liquor around the slums next to
the hostels. Going to the railway station for bhajiya at four in the
morning. Getting into drunken rowdiness on the painting department roof top,
as if there was no tomorrow. On good day's there really wasn't.

                                    I remember walking back from the
hostel's at four in the morning, with the smell of turpentine still
following me. Entering the campus and playing cricket for another two hours.
The sun would signal bed time.



I remember and it was my memory of things that took me back to Baroda.



What I saw was a funeral procession in waiting.


   The police had made sure that everything shuts down at ten-thirty. Late
night chai was at a place unknown to me. Even the dogs gnarled at me. There
were cops everywhere. Drunken drives in a dry state meant certain
imprisonment. If you were caught walking down the road at 11 in the night,
you were liable to be questioned by a police van. The slums had got razed
and so had the travel agents shop. My favorite hair saloon was also knocked
down. Drunken binges were now not louder than a whisper and jamming sessions
unheard off.

Somewhere between all this I turned a stranger to a place that was once
mine.


    It was worse that the that  wet afternoon when I had first come to
Baroda and was charged thirty rupees extra by the rickshaw driver. It was
much worse than getting lost there for the first time. Because now, I knew
the roads well. Just that these roads weren't the ones that I had once
walked on. I wasn't familiar to them and god knows who or what had turned
them into the strange beasts that they are now.


    The traffic seemed busier, people seemed lonelier, the tea never as
sweet, the alcohol ineffective. New faces cropped up who only knew me as a
word. There was a contagious heaviness in the eyes of my friend for having
been a mute, helpless spectator to a sudden change. I soon caught it.

                      I do not want to rediscover the changed texture of
this city. It has a rotten stench that makes me feel cheated, rebuked,
orphaned. The memories of what it once was and what I once had are still
very pronounced. Very alive. It was a witness to four years of my life. And
only now do I realize that perhaps I was a witness to something too.





http://barodaoutrage.blogspot.com/
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