To Lucknow

I am really sorry for this long hiatus in posting and I hope that all my readers; nearly both of you; would consider my apology in light of the fact that I became slightly busy in the process of coming to India. I understand that I had lamented about rants and reminiscences in only my last post but I hope that you will understand that this trip has the strongest undercurrents of nostalgia running underneath and that obvious comparisons between U.S. and India by a mind as narrow as mine are bound to leave a slightly sour taste in the mouth every now and then; every here and there.

My father has had a recent transfer to Lucknow from Haldwani so Lucknow is the place I have the pleasure of spending my month in. It is the city where I had spent, as they say, the prime of my years. Starting as an immature 12 year old cricketing away on dusty Sunday afternoons and glorious January mornings to an immature 18 year old cricketing away on dusty Sunday afternoons and glorious January mornings, I spent the most unburdened part of my life in this city that, to me, has always had the allure of being slightly more sedated, more laid-back and more sleepy than pretty much any other place I have lived in. It had what the French would call 'je ne se qua'. It quivers with the energy of sloth and trembles with the vitality of snores and wakes up under the full bodied noon-Sun yawning and rubbing its eyes and cursing the heavenly cycle for having invented sunlight. It is a spectacularly inept piece of machinery that provides no respite whatsoever to its dwellers. Things might not be as bad as Kanpur or Bangalore but my city has its moments. And I have realized it time and again every time I had to press on the sides of my miniscule scooty to compress it just that little bit so that I could squeeze it into that small gap between that Rickshaw with the Aunt haggling over 2 rupees and that bicycle whose owner doesn't seem to believe in the philosophy that the right of way in India is directly proportional to the size of the engine between your legs. I have a strong conviction that the city has its parallels in John Cleese's Basil Fawlty. It would do all well if not for its residents. But the residents are the headstrong sorts. They would spot every available inch of space with a brick, at least of equal size, if not bigger and when they have finished building over all the free space and when they have zoomed to heights curtailed by government regulations, bribe budgets, and sorry foundations, they would, furtively, encroach a bit of the public road when no one is looking and then they would take out their Hyundaes and Toyotas and Hondas and double up on the road and basically not go anywhere. And no one seems to mind. Placid, quiet, serene, they all seem to have attained nirvana. They are at peace with a city that, in all its commotion, somehow keeps ticking. Ever so slowly, teetering on the brink, it's alive. And I'm really proud of it. Not because it manages to do what every city in India finally does but because buried just beneath the surface, lying dormant, is the oft repeated notion of a rich cultural past and a sober assimilative history. Lucknow has long had comparable populations of Muslims and Hindus. I feel proud of the fact that the city has never played host to any significant religious fundamentalism.

While in college too, I kept visiting Lucknow every year over the Summer holidays witnessing to my ever increasing muted disapproval the 'thinning' of the old crowd as they dispersed in search of greener pastures. I looked scornfully at every new flyover that botched up the pristinely chaotic landscape, every effort at modernizing any shop that I used to frequent while I was a school kid, and every new statue that that stupid, dumb, trainwreck of a woman, Mayawati erected in her honor. Then my father got transferred to Haldwani and I have not really had a decent stay in the city for 4 years if not 8.

So here I am back again after so many years. Things look about the same. Just more tightly packed together. More half finished flyovers and more road side barbers snipping away at more unshaved faces. More bikes with 25 more CCs dodging more cows and more Indicas. More sweet shops with more people working in them than needed and more rules for buying 250 grams of Jalebi. Coupons and tokens and lines and haggling and ultimately no-lines and more haggling. Huge advertisements rising up into the sky as you traverse a completed freeway. They promise you a better life with beautiful cars and beautiful homes and beautiful locales and beautiful girls. And they hide the sky behind. Then you look down and see a mad sea of ambitions and emotions and dreams heartbreaks all uniformly packed into every square inch of habitable area. Not much seems to have changed really. It's nice to be back.