Violence vs Silence

I woke up this morning to the sounds of a man hurling abuses at a girl and physically assaulting her. Needless to say, my Sunday morning was about to be ruined. For about an hour all I could hear was the man shouting, hitting this girl and the girl begging him to stop hitting, that it hurt her, she screamed more than a couple of times.

The context

This girl – about 23 – is one of the three tenants of my landlord's other house next door. My landlord is also the building secretary. He does not live in the building. Is it even legal for a society to appoint a sec'y-in-absentia? And if yes, is it logical? I’m inclined to believe otherwise, in light of recent legal developments. But perhaps that is beside of the question.

Let me set the context. Like in buildings in most middle class localities in Bombay, my building too has a skewed sense of design. Most balconies - even with next door neighbours - fall at the bare minimum distance of about a foot and a half or two feet. Obviously, most sounds easily permeate to the neighbours if you're speaking even at normal decibels.

The girls next door are loud.

I've had to ring their doorbell several times in the middle of the night to ask them - ever so politely - to STFU. Most times, this works. Sometimes it doesn't. I've heard sounds that range from sitcoms and music, conversations with parents over Skype, phone calls with the boyfriend, girl talk about clothes and hair and first sex, to three rounds of sex itself, card games and as of today - abuse.

What is one supposed to do? The landlord has been told several times - in vain, of course. The neighbours can't do jack shit. And calling the cops is always a last resort. Do I not know that one can complain anonymously on the police hotline? Of course I do. However, will that stop the cops from harassing the complainant?

The law

I was at the CII India Women's Network launch on Friday, where Meeran Borwankar, Additional Director General of Police, and I G Prisons, Maharashtra State, was a panellist at one of the discussions. Since awareness & engagement was being spoken about in several areas of societal functions, the law wasn't spared either. This question of trusting the police sprung there too. The defence at both ends was legitimate. The police force is under-staffed and so want to close as many cases, and as soon as possible. They are frustrated. So they try and catch those unaware of the law and try and sweep matters under the carpet by passing off the innocent as criminals? Yes, it's a vicious cycle and we are left no choice but to accept that they need better facilities and to be provided for from the taxes we pay. But until that pipe dream falls into implementation, how are civilians expected to trust them?

Support

My first instinct was to confront the girl; tell her that both my roomie and I were literally just a holler away. That we may have had problems with them, but we weren't going to tolerate inhuman behaviour. Sadly, she was subservient.

I also tweeted about it. Despite the anonymity and a general sense of detachment of the platform, there is a degree of sensitivity and trust even in the unknown. People pitch in to advice, suggest solutions, offer the first impulse of support. In fact, here's a snippet of the conversation that ensued between the five of us - some simple inputs and advice that can be used at short notice.

Twitter conversation this morning (9th March 2014 - a day after International Women's Day, btw)

I also decided to reach out to our neighbours - thankfully this city allows socialising at one's own limited terms. The lady immediately offered her cell number and assured that the next time this happened I had only to tell her and she'd call the cops.

Hope

What is most amazing, is that the city still has faith in the law.

Hopefully, this blog post will serve as a window to help. Evidently, your educational qualification is no indication of your awareness and ability to speak up. Most importantly, it doesn’t even make you human. It was made clear at the discussions yesterday at the IWN launch too – we need to stop blaming the government, the law, and most importantly, men. It’s not an attitude problem characteristic to this country alone either. As my roomie said, the victim could have sold herself and still cannot be treated this way.

I am going to remain shaken for a long time. Not only because this was so real - after all, this girl should mean nothing to me - , but because I witnessed it at such close quarters. What warrants violence? And what justifies silence in us human beings, when reaching out is not difficult? Among the several loud conversations I’ve overheard (inadvertently, of course) from these girls, they come across as rather opinionated personalities who know what they want. Doesn’t safety figure in their list of priorities? Doesn’t self-love count for anything? What about the thought that they live far away from home and their parents would die of the worry at the slightest hurt that would come to their child?

Vishrambaug Wada

Where maintenance is forever at Vishram
Laxmi Road, Budhwaar Peth, Pune
Entry: Rs 3 (and a pound of heart burn)
[Built 1803-09; 10 years before the British conquered Pune]

Pune. A history of roughly 400 years. A culture that has absorbed from the fading Mughals, been in loyal servitude of the Maratha rulers, and weathered the peak of British imperialism… but I’m only précising a Wiki page and parroting accounts penned by historians. Stepping on to the other side of the threshold of Vishrambaug Wada, and looking up at the sky from the atrium threatens to erase much of all that background knowledge in an instant. My partner and I try to imprint a preliminary sketch of the sight that we have only seen in several pictures during our individual as well as joint research in preparation for the visit. Our fascination, competitive. Our purposes, different. His was to add a photo document to his portfolio. Mine, another capsule from the city to assign to my memory. Perhaps through the carvings etched in another time, or the wood itself, weathered through the ages.

Asking the guard at the doorway for a sangrahalay does not yield much of a response – no directions nor recognition of the word itself; he does point towards a signboard about 15 feet high. The entrance has two rooms on either side of the door, beyond which is the chowk, typical to old houses around the country. Vishrambaug’s identity, though, lies in the exteriors. Said to be the only surviving Peshwa wada, its meghadambari or curving pavilion at the front entrance is lavishly carved in cypress wood in the kalamdani style. The others were destroyed by fire in the 19^th century for reasons I’m yet to discover. This one too was victim of some minor flames, but was saved and restored in time. The restored motifs are believed to be more akin to the neo-Gothic mould – one finds depictions of a monkey and dragon instead of just the erstwhile intricate flowers and creepers.

The edifice has played several roles, like the recycled others of its grandeur. After the then Peshwa was exiled, Vishrambaug Wada assumed the part of Pune’s first British sponsored educational institution – the Poona Sanskrit College and went onto become the Deccan College. The Pune Municipal Corporation finally deigned to set up a tacky ‘heritage display’ within the premises, on the first floor. The last development is rather recent.

The rooms at the entrance are a handicrafts outlet run by an NGO for women’s empowerment. The rest of the ground floor is some kind of a printing press, devoid of charm or any sense of even monotonous regularity or neatness. A feature that held both our attention is the spiral wrought iron staircase that leads up to the second floor and meets a jammed closed window, overgrown with weed.

This is where you will begin to suffer the full throttle of my lament.

When I mentioned the fires of the 19^th century at the beginning of the write up, I’m sure a disdainful ‘why’ came to your mind, but the present state of Vishrambaug Wada hurt more on our visit recently. The efforts of the powers-that-be to suppress its splendour have borne copious fruit. We climbed up the stairs that led to the permanent display to be welcomed by a polite but fairly bored looking young lady at the ticket counter. Tickets paid for (PMC, I implore you to charge more and please justify the building’s history, if not what is left of it), my partner’s helmet left on the side, we walked on to behold bhwhat made both our jaws drop. We seemed to have disembarked onto another planet. The planet of a primary school local history project abandoned to dilapidate in layers of dust. The ante room of the heritage display at Vishrambaug Wada is created with wood planks from floor to ceiling, vainly camouflaged by lengths of black chart paper, textured with forks to give the feeling of old stone walls.

Yes, please laugh.

The displays conform to the primary school project imagery: low resolution photos blown up and labelled neatly on handwritten notes. Rudimentary hand drawn maps and sketches on more chart paper (yellows, pinks, greens and blues), again labelled in fountain ink, follow. The absurdity does not end there. Dark brown varnish covers ALL of the once-elegant wood carved angles, balustrades, pillars and beams of Vishrambaug Wada. To add to the beholder’s anguish, these cakey fixtures have obviously not been dusted in at least a few months. Now if it was a bachelor’s shack, the present state of affairs would have been acceptable. But we’re talking about a monument, however minor.

To illustrate the sense of the culture, they’ve spread moth-eaten double-bed mattresses and bolsters in the coves, with old style desks for company. These mattresses and bolsters have been wrapped in handloom sheets with cheap orange and brown floral prints. When you peep out into the the market surrounding Vishrambaug Wada, you see identical linen hanging from cabin shop displays. The studied neglect all around amalgamates to corner you into helpless disgust. Much like incestuous rape. Fucked by one’s own kith and kin.

The disrepair gets clearer when I tried to open one of the large low windows (that was me monkeying around) by unlatching the links at the top. Varnish has been so ruthlessly, thoughtlessly and in such haste pasted all over, that removing the links to cover the surface beneath did not occur to them. The pale yellow paint from a previous effort patiently peels away. Furthermore, the musicians’ jharukha in the front (the balcony that you admire from the outside sheltered by the pavilion arc) has been sealed off with the exception of one grilled door open so you can see where they sat. I saw a red plastic bucket and some length of wire eating more dust and rotting more merrily.

Apart from the shocking upkeep, the layout of the display too is quite confusing. You may lose your way! No directions (an elderly solo gentleman asked us how to get out) – somebody’s idea of showing the place to public. Yes, lock away what you can’t have cleaned every day and confuse the visitor to prevent other conceivable damage.

Such action is, (I’m willing to withdraw the opinion if anyone proves otherwise) representative of the attitude of the city’s denizens at large. I speak from not just my visits to the city, but also from observation in my six and a half months of residence in Pune. The city’s façade may portray a certain dispassion. Puneris take this maaz to the next level. They seem to revel in their blind adoration for the status quo; for mediocrity, for what they call balance and outsiders term laziness. Balance or laziness, they have little regard for their architectural legacy. Little wonder then, that their old buildings are either the colleges or left behind in debris and ashes. What remains, is their aggression towards preserving this blindness as if it is the answer to all questions of the universe and their narrow path to salvation.

This aggression manifests itself in many ways: verbal hostility comes first. Masochistic offense and unapologetic defence follow close behind – those are the only remaining elements in their anyway rusty armour.

My disgust though is for this obstinate protectiveness for the long gone. Of which remains only faded memories, guesswork and speculation. This mutual back-patting diplomacy discourages constructive criticism or novelty or both.

Pune’s attempts at the new seem like juvenile gun jumping. Unplanned in its layout, its civic infrastructure is its only saving grace. First it attracts throngs of techies and culture vultures, then it leaves them to forage. Its people endeavour twice as hard as say, a Bong to appear worldly wise. However, like an 11-year-old, Punekars live in the contentment of false, shallow promises without any grasp for posterity. Fancy malls, cafes and chains of bookstores do not a city’s characters make. Where is the human infrastructure to support the service experiences and details for which these brands have stood? Dishevel is ingrained, not studied or striven for in Pune.

My melancholy is for Vishrambaug Wada, but a latent sense of brotherhood between my city of birth (Baroda) and Pune absorbs me more. The former was a key province of the Bombay Presidency; the latter its monsoon capital. Sons of a mother, to use a cliché. The rooted Marathi culture. Cultural capitals of their respective states. Perhaps I should not claim the epithet for Baroda anymore. I have nothing to support it with. But Pune does. And yet its proximity to Bombay, its non-dry status, and heavy cosmopolitan student influx seem to give no momentum to its pace. They continue to start their day at 11:00 am, take their three-hour siesta break from 1:00 pm, return from work at 5:30 pm; their day still ends at 8:30 pm. 11:00 pm is late.

But I stray.

Vishrambaug Wada does not care for frowns – yours or mine. The intricately carved pavilion can eat the dust it is force fed each day. Its age can go live its reclusion in inattention. Its utilised spaces can be spat upon, iron trunks be dragged upon its flooring, and its general state of upkeep can leave as much to desire as it likes.

My reaction to this visit has built upon itself over a period of over a week. I was asked to build my writing upon this criticism even before we visited Vishrambaug Wada, but the dissatisfaction and despair is my own, and runs deep. In hindsight, both, my partner and my own motives for the visit sound not only pompous but a tad misplaced.

Questions surged.

What is the state government doing towards this end? Or the city’s municipal corporation. Is it not the responsibility, at least in part, of the keepers of official administration? Where is this city’s own pride of inheritance, however meagre?

I’m not yet entirely willing to write off Pune. मला हि नगरी आवडली, पण लग्गेच नाही . तरी एक दिवशी ती नक्कीच माझी होइल , तश्य भावनेची मी वाट बघते ...*

*SPECIAL THANKS TO Aditya Kulkarni & Ankur Hande for all the editing help with the last two lines in Marathi :)

Highway to high way

3 days. A long weekend. Many cat lovers. And a chocolate cake. As soon as I had moved to Pune three months ago, I knew this place had energy in store for me. I began to unlearn all my previous paces: of home, of Nizami thaat, of hapless filth. Even before I had arrived, I had been sold its lures. And the lure didn't lie so much in the monuments, in the food, in the city's chaos, oh no. Just people.
Plain vanilla people. 

Women with pishvis, men in collared tee shirts or bush shirts, young techies with id cards dangling around their necks like nooses, kids in uniform with oil drenched hair, the big cars and their humble drivers, the autowalas and their माझ. Indeed, the rosy winters and the perennial bougainvillas did their bit in making me fall in love with Pune, but it has, honestly, been the people who have visited me or the friends who I've met whilst they were here on business, that have strengthened the heartstrings even more. I am yet to strike out any of the items I had jotted down on my to-do list while I'm here. But no matter. There's a vintage Beetle, ragged and rusty, cobwebbed, with its paint chipped, waiting each day for me to turn right from - a landmark not preempted. A charm that has the power to surprise everyday.

And yet that is also not it. What about Veeram's house? What about my own? What about my favourite restaurant? And its काली दाल and बैंगन bharta that I've yet to savour again?

So Sajani was here over the weekend. Here only to see me and, on short notice, also to rescue Duffer, my newly adopted tom. Having known Saj for almost seven years now is a tad hard to believe, because really, it was only that first week of spending concentrated hours with each other several times that account for our experience of each other. For our knowing of each other. For our comfort of each other. We have never lived in the same city, leave alone studied or worked together. We come from culturally diametrically variant backgrounds. Our achievements differ from one another's, and so do our losses, but expression has been so liberating with her! And perhaps our judgement and opinion of each other came about painstakingly slowly, but it is only a thing of wonder how often through both our car rides to and from bombay this time, we seemed to have been having two parallel conversations with each other: a verbal one, that goes yaketty yakk, and then there's our eyes that meet almost as often as there is stupidity prevailing. And Saj's talent allows her to speak even with a poker face, where I may be tempted to break into a giggle, roll my eyes or simply hit my palm to my face.

I reckon that our judgement of people comes partly if not entirely, not only from our experience of the world, but also from our mothers. We often don't get their kinks, and yet. For hours, we would lie in our PJs analysing the people we love and hate, and when a third person would enter, suddenly shut our eyes - Eyes, gobs, tolerance too actually.

Bus ride with Sajani, Bombay, 2010

And that familiarity manifests itself in myriad ways. Whether it is her calming me in my own house after an especially tiring trip by articulating my thoughts exactly, whether it is to get chatty with my roommate, whether it is taking a bus ride across town right after a long flight or train journey, whether it is to wait in the lounge area of my office as I get my stuff and swipe out after bunking half the day in my boss's absence, whether it is to tolerate an especially irritating boyfriend for his inane and dated arguments and fielding each one with a hard verbal slap back in the days, whether it is cycling in the hot sun across her university campus. And yet none of these episodes quite define the scope of our friendship. If she were a guy, I'd have probably professed my undying devotion to him. Not only for what he'd've been, but for what he was doing to me.

Her pune trip, like all her visits to all the cities I've stationed myself for a while in, was short, but not meaningless. It was rich in conversation, in experience, in details and in thought. She fished out a teracotta ring for me with a grumpy cat on it from Milan. She took care of Duffer in his most critical first journey across towns. She ate whatever I gave her. And she drank simply. She walked, because she enjoys roads and trees just as much as I do. She warmed up to Veeram simply for the warmth I had for him. She fussed not. She complained not. She remarked. She judged. She dismissed.

She got me a box of strawberries so I could sing for her and we could smoke outside a shut shop sitting on the ledge in Aundh.

To be friends with Sajani is not an ordinary honour. She takes forever to warm up. Her mocking smile is hard to fathom - am I her subject of scorn, and therefore ridiculed, or does she truly respect me? Three years it took me to know what she thought of me, and she chose to bare all one evening in 2009 when all was beginning to look bleak, loss seemed inevitable, and abandonment seemed to look like the only way out for us cats.

There are people we feel the need to understand in order to love. Then there are people we must accept and love.

Old City New Charm

A week into my stay in Hyderabad and the culture vulture within can't sit in one place only. Waat to do saar??? So last weeked was yet another exciting trip across the city - and my सारथी, none other than Mr. Kotha. Of course, he was also playing porter on Saturday. To make amends, we decided to make a quick trip to Geetha's. Ha ha. What a jox. Quick trip and Geetha's. What was tentatively planned to be merely a social visit to the jungle resident, turned into a feast. Gee reminds me of my mom's aunt in Baroda. The food keeps coming out of the fridge like an unending flow! Seamless conversation that began with concerts, what one MUST wear, meandered to Karthik's super brat brother and finally to women and marriage. [Looks like this is more or less the range we're always going to follow.] Of course, there's so much talk about teaching and kids happening, it's not funny.

I'm most amazed at how the lines between Kart and Gee blurred almost instantly the first time I got them to meet. Their Chennai connection was so much stronger than having me as a link, which is seldom the case when I get any of my friends to meet for the first time. It is an overwhelming experience when two people from seemingly different spheres socialise and how! I thought Chennai could probably be a starting point, but they had so much more to exchange, I felt rather inadequate (:P).

But neither Kart nor I knew what the concert on Sunday had in store for us. The Chowmahalla Palace played host to one of the greatest concerts I've ever attended in my omnivoric hunger for great music. Hyderabad seems to always attract the best talent there is. I've often heard of its audience being intelligent and well read and widely travelled. The audience at Chowmahalla proved the point. even when it came to requesting, nothing short of an Amir Khusro popular would do!

That it was begum Abida Parveen on stage brought the kind'a audience that had to be either niche - pretty much mostly the old affluent - or outsiders (that's me!) who had a sense of the scale and concept that is Parveen's voice and area of expertise. I was simply taken by the simple fact that she sounds on stage exactly like she does on recording. I mean... the sound editor hasn't to work at all on getting the सुर right at all! Of course, what hits you as the listener is the instant and constant connect that she established with and when she began every composition with "मौला...".

They taught us, when I was training in classical music, that संगीत is the combination of getting the notes right and getting the thought spot on. Begum sahiba personified the definition flawlessly. Of course, my saying it adds no value and perhaps if I didn't, it would take away nothing, but the experience was made surreal: every time she began a new song, the cold drizzle, that threatened to bring the show to an abrupt end, ceased. That is the power of music, I guess.

Overall, a fantastic first weekend in the city that raised my bar always always.

My First Bad Time

I've always found Bombay people extremely easy to tread around. Even late at night - established even in my blogs, right? Broad daylight can be a digression, though.

A couple of Sundays ago, I was out on a solitary outing. Like a date with myself. Movie - saunter from Metro to Marine Drive - a bit of the sea to end the hot afty. It was all great. I didn't mind the tan either. The breeze more than made up for the lack of good company, the recent lows and more. Upon crossing the road from the Pizzeria corner, it suddenly struck me how long it had been since I visited the Drive on a holiday and how crowded it got.

A largish man clad in shades of rust also entered my frame of vision. Haywire yet "set" curls, he stood out without much effort - the air of a "townie". Looking into the distance... Strolling, not walking; not in a hurry.

I sauntered off to a clearing on the parapet between numerous couples with my back against the sun - the sun still too harsh. All of a sudden, the peculiar man seemed way too close for comfort. For a while, looking in the other direction seemed quite the adequate thing to do. All of a sudden, I hear "I love your neck piece; it's quite nice." "Thanks." Period. No, really, I thought that would be the end of it.

You really think it would be, at least - it was broad daylight, after all. So many people. It was beginning to get onto my nerves. No, he didn't hurl any physical abuse at me, nor words. I said I'd like to be left alone. He began talking about healing and life and freaky things that I'd probably discuss with Nidhi or Neel and NO ONE ELSE EVER.

That was it. My only escape without either attracting any attention or getting the chap into trouble with the police was to get up at once hitch a cab.

One associates intrusion as a "gowti" trait. People being nosy, never letting you be alone and always trying to know what it is that bothers you - as if sure of being the only rescue or resort. For once, I look up to the suburbites as more respecting of privacy, even in public. Letting you be alone. Letting you do your own thing. Allowing you to be in a shell or out as you may please. Incidentally, anyone come across a PG in Bandra, please to be telling moi.