The city I call home...

It was after nearly a gap of two decades that I took a ‘leisure drive’ around the city I call ‘home’. As I meandered past the riverside road in Uzanbazar, the surroundings looked unfamiliar, and the city revealed itself like a person unfolding his varying personalities to a traveller...

There was a new eatery, there were benches where people sat and chatted, or just gazed at the sunset sky. The road looked freshly paved, and the trees were bathed clean by the showes from the previous night...A few hundred metres ahead, as the road snaked upwards towards Raj Bhavan, there appeared a sight which was a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century – the same old rusty gate lay untouched and unattended, opening to a mossy lane to a dilapidated structure (which must be some ‘protected area’, I always wondered). .

Mine is a city of doers and dreamers; its cobbles, pavers and concrete were once trod by invading armies, learned men and golems.. Serene Assam-type houses glowed pristine and fresh, with silver or carmine tin roofs that housed simple minds with small dreams...The front yards had ‘jopona’, with the bamboo cut to perfection by the neighbourhood daily wager... The wind carried the memory of evening prayers, of a revolution of passion to protect the mother-tongue, of violins and sitars, of the bard and the rockstar, and the same cobbled lanes meandered outside, like a sentinel standing witness to the rhapsody that is my city.

The sun still sets in the Brahmaputra.. Sitting on the concrete blocks on the sides of the “Bellevue” road, and feeling my own insignificance in front of the mighty river, I watched the water turn golden ...The “har ek maal dui toka” (which is “dus toka” now) loitered on street corners, and wet clothes hung in windows of the houses, making the whole city seem like a cine-screen with unseen puppeteers crouched behind ruffling curtains. I looked around, my tired aging eyes striving greedily to take in as much light and love and colour and detail as they could....

Now, we have evolved to live in lonely apartments where we bump into strangers in the corridors, we are threatened by them in dark streets, we sit next to them in the bus, and we give them the finger in traffic jams. We spend more time with our smart phones than we do with our close ones. We have thousands of virtual friends, but not a single one to unwind with on a lazy weekend over a dinner of home cooked food...I racked my brains to remember the last time I watched the stars (‘watched’, not ‘seen’), or had a cup of ordinary coffee over an extraordinary conversation with someone who cared to listen. It seems my city has more hidden spaces now, where more hidden lives live with hidden emptinesses, and I can see more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight.

It was after nearly a gap of two decades that I took a ‘leisure drive’ around the city I call ‘home’. As I meandered past the riverside road in Uzanbazar, the surroundings looked unfamiliar, and the city revealed itself like a person unfolding his varying personalities to a traveller...

There was a new eatery, there were benches where people sat and chatted, or just gazed at the sunset sky. The road looked freshly paved, and the trees were bathed clean by the showes from the previous night...A few hundred metres ahead, as the road snaked upwards towards Raj Bhavan, there appeared a sight which was a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century – the same old rusty gate lay untouched and unattended, opening to a mossy lane to a dilapidated structure (which must be some ‘protected area’, I always wondered). .

Mine is a city of doers and dreamers; its cobbles, pavers and concrete were once trod by invading armies, learned men and golems.. Serene Assam-type houses glowed pristine and fresh, with silver or carmine tin roofs that housed simple minds with small dreams...The front yards had ‘jopona’, with the bamboo cut to perfection by the neighbourhood daily wager... The wind carried the memory of evening prayers, of a revolution of passion to protect the mother-tongue, of violins and sitars, of the bard and the rockstar, and the same cobbled lanes meandered outside, like a sentinel standing witness to the rhapsody that is my city.

The sun still sets in the Brahmaputra.. Sitting on the concrete blocks on the sides of the “Bellevue” road, and feeling my own insignificance in front of the mighty river, I watched the water turn golden ...The “har ek maal dui toka” (which is “dus toka” now) loitered on street corners, and wet clothes hung in windows of the houses, making the whole city seem like a cine-screen with unseen puppeteers crouched behind ruffling curtains. I looked around, my tired aging eyes striving greedily to take in as much light and love and colour and detail as they could....

Now, we have evolved to live in lonely apartments where we bump into strangers in the corridors, we are threatened by them in dark streets, we sit next to them in the bus, and we give them the finger in traffic jams. We spend more time with our smart phones than we do with our close ones. We have thousands of virtual friends, but not a single one to unwind with on a lazy weekend over a dinner of home cooked food...I racked my brains to remember the last time I watched the stars (‘watched’, not ‘seen’), or had a cup of ordinary coffee over an extraordinary conversation with someone who cared to listen. It seems my city has more hidden spaces now, where more hidden lives live with hidden emptinesses, and I can see more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight.

Perhaps I am proprietary towards my city. I love its harlequinesque panorama.  In the green hills that guard my home, the world is a coaxing whisper when the wind kisses the trees, when the omnipresent river touches the bank, when a curfew is announced and when my people look up at the sympathetic sky. The world is an admonishing roar here when the angry ‘bordoisila’ gales in March chase the  rainclouds over the naked plains and whip up floods and tears, when people crowd into the green forests in the picnic season, or intrude into dazzling jungles to bring up a new apartment complex....

Just like me, my city’s past changes according to the route it has followed...

“ Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. “Perhaps I am proprietary towards my city. I love its harlequinesque panorama.  In the green hills that guard my home, the world is a coaxing whisper when the wind kisses the trees, when the omnipresent river touches the bank, when a curfew is announced and when my people look up at the sympathetic sky. The world is an admonishing roar here when the angry ‘bordoisila’ gales in March chase the  rainclouds over the naked plains and whip up floods and tears, when people crowd into the green forests in the picnic season, or intrude into dazzling jungles to bring up a new apartment complex....

Just like me, my city’s past changes according to the route it has followed...

“ Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. “