I am complaining again

Jaipur, popularly and very gaily called Pink City came out tops in a 2011 Happiness Survey by Outlook-Mahindra Club (don't bash me up for Pink/Gay/Happy connotation, I am just feeling undiplomatic. Read Love in the Land of LGBT for my real views). Back to the survey - it's another story that about 2000 people out of 1.27 billion were surveyed for happiness. 

It’s soon going to be a year. Yet I don’t like the city any better. But that's my incorrigibility. I have whined before about not liking Bangalore's weather, it made me glum and suicidal; now I have a dislike for Jaipur's happiness. I feel hemmed in here. In this dead peaceful city, my restlessness grows. I am biased. I don’t like the street names I say - Imli fatak, Jaleb chowk, Jhotwara, Jhaalawar, Jhaalana Doongri, Moti Doongri. Awful, they sound. What do I prefer then? Timarpur, Mayapuri, Munirka, Masoodpur? Maybe.

I am a fan of the metropolis. I like the pulse of a big city. The glamour of non-stop action, of which you may or may not be a part; the madness of millions (including the serpentine traffic jams), the seedy underbelly and the anarchy. I love their unrestrained frenzy, loveliness, ugliness and vulgarity. Delhi, Gurgaon and Mumbai. (Bangalore is an overgrown halli). 

I miss Delhi. Its exquisite beauty in the winters, wrapped in fog. Throbbing with life and sweat in the burning summers. Bursting at the seams during rains. The green of the city's affluent, the brown of the down-to-the-wire, and the yellow haze of everything in between (like the glow of DDA flats in the fading sun). The boorishness of its men, the pigeons on its window sills. I love it all. The city's characterless character. Loosely moralled. With no respect for boundaries. Much like myself. Lacking in compunction. Standing tall, stuffed with pride, despite its failings. Yet, groveling time to time, to get what it wants. More like me.   

Jaipur is a peaceful city. Its people seem to have values. Values are supposed to be good. Family type values. Extended-family type values. Stable group of friends (who must be family folks too). They keep you grounded (chained, I think). Tethered. Like a farm animal. With a defined grazing radius. Lest you graze too far, run amok, snitch other’s people’s stuff, cause destruction. (In Jaipur, the State Women’s Commission is housed along with the Livestock Development Board. Such coincidences are not without reason).

To me, this city represents confinement. An oppressive pinkness. An unnecessary gaiety of the bazaars. Arches, pillars and havelis stifle you wherever you go. An old worldliness like a veiled threat 'Stay old and conventional'. It represents the suffocating safety of long marriages (not to be confused with security, physical or emotional). The elevation of virtuous women (the ubiquitous bhabhis) that cover their heads and spend their lives tending to families, birthing (and rebirthing, till they hit the right chromosomal combination). A city of 40 lakhs, confined by anchors - peace, joint family type values, stability, safety. None of the virtues I could ever hold dear. So what do I do? I spend my days foreboding about my de-tethering, if and when it happens. 


"We brought you to Richmond to give you peace," says Leonard Woolf in The Hours, when his crazy wife tries to run back to London.

Virginia Woolf responds, "I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the capital. That is my choice."

The Fallen Woman

I am a banana peel thrower’s delight. You know the kind that intentionally throws a banana peel in the middle of the road and hides behind a tree to watch? 'Be careful', I warn others. And then I forget, walk unsuspectingly, head in the clouds, slip and fall; face first. 

Apart from this type of general carelessness, I have two left feet. Acutely aware of this disability, in unknown places I walk gingerly like I am stepping on ice. However, since normal surfaces are not made of ice, my ice-walk doesn't work. I trip and fall disgracefully. On such occasions I casually smile and say 'I'm trippin', but my wit is usually lost on the better half who says I am an embarrassment to go out with. Then I analyze my problem on google. I troll through pages and I don’t know why, but I am given tips about walking on ice. It says I should try walking like a penguin, since they have mastered the walk. With this effort, I fall even more. 

In known places, I am more at ease. I don’t fall really but I keep banging into tables and bed corners, walk into doors or any other furniture lying in its destined place. You would think this loss of motor-control is because I’m an octogenarian or thereabouts; but actually I am a young, dashing, easily excitable woman, in my early thirties for many years now. 

With the above being the state of how I walk, you can imagine my plight when I have had to take jumps of any kind. Of course I don’t mean the – ‘Go, take a jump’ kind of thing that the husband tells me each time I ask him for anything. I mean the sudden jumps that one has to undertake in life, faced with an eventuality. So here is a wild jump, I remember having taken. 

When I was 15, I had to attend an extra class in school. Leading a typically sheltered life of a school-girl, I was used to traveling by the school bus. On the ill-fated day, the arch enemy of my childhood (my elder brother) offered to take me along on public transport. I should have known his intentions. Anyway, we got into a rusty Delhi Transport Corporation bus that contained a few thousand people. The moment, the sibling pushed me on to the bus, we were separated like in the movies by a sea of fat, sweaty people. I was overwhelmed. I had never seen anything like that in my tender years. Being pushed by all sides, I stood right in the middle, squeezed into half of my usual size (which is not very much). Sweaty armpits loomed large on my face. I fell against soft cushiony bums and a few people purposefully stood on my feet. 

As luck would have it, the place where we had to get off came unannounced and suddenly I glimpsed the elder sibling standing on the street gesticulating. As I pushed through the crowd with all my might, resembling a mini bulldozer, the bus started moving. By now, I could hear my mother's first born yelling frantically – 'Jump Jummmp JUUMMPPP.' 

In the cacophony, I froze for a few seconds staring at the stretch of moving tar in front me, glistening in the sun. No one had prepared me for this day. I didn’t even know whether to jump in the direction of the moving bus or the opposite. I chose the opposite, where the betrayer stood, wildly flailing his arms. My life of a few years flashed in front of my eyes. I would see my enemy for the last time, I thought satisfactorily. And then I took the leap into the unknown.

While this event of great significance was taking place, an hour or half prior to my tragedy, a childless couple had decided to appease the gods of reproduction by feeding a cow (Indian cows enjoy demi-God status, hence the expression 'Holy Cow!'). That morning, the couple scouting for a hungry cow couldn’t locate any, to their dismay. All they spotted was this healthy and disinterested cow meandering on the main road. They parked their car in front of it and began force-feeding the reluctant animal. 

'I will ruminate on it later’, said the mammal to itself and gulped halfheartedly whatever they were stuffing into its face. So while I was preparing for the great fall, this very cow decided to take a hearty dump, to lighten itself of this unusual breakfast. Having done its deed, it ambled away slowly. It was this fresh, bright yellow mound of shit that I landed on when the bus full of people ejected me. 

‘BULL SHIT’!  exclaimed the sibling in a volume that the city of over 14 million heard. He deserted me promptly and refused to recognize me in school later. 

Anyway, instinct saved my face from getting smeared. The left arm and school bag were not spared. They landed in the center of the manure. After endless minutes of pondering over my fate, I limped slowly to the school smelling like a Delhi municipal toilet at 6 in the morning, without water supply. 

While at school, I cleaned whatever could be cleaned. The teacher, a secret practitioner of Chinese torture didn't give me the day off despite the enormity of my tragedy. Smelly, abhorred, ostracized and shame faced, the day passed somehow. At home later the mother (another practitioner of the said torture) threw away the school bag. She was making up her mind to throw me away too when a pang or two of motherhood struck her and I was retained. 

Needless to say, I was variously referred to as 'shit-face', 'potty-face' and what not, for years to come.