We reach Assam to witness the mass exodus of Assamese and
North-Easterners from Bangalore and a couple of other cities—an example of the
hysteria that can be triggered by exponentially propagating text messages. In
retaliation for anti-Muslim violence in parts of Assam, a few North-Eastern
Indians are attacked in Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad. Scared by circulating text messages
forewarning of a large-scale attack, thousands return back to Assam in a matter of
days clogging train stations. The
news makes headlines. Eventually,
Pakistan is blamed.
Guwahati is a dense city, yet the jungle is not far. There is a wildlife sanctuary less than
50 kms away. Some months back a leopard entered a busy section of the city,
injuring and killing one person.
Inspite of this, it was then sedated and safely repatriated to the
forests. Such refinement and
respect for animal life is unheard of in the United States. Yet Guwahati was also the infamous site
for a viral video (the 2nd most viewed on Yotube for a week) documenting
the shocking molestation of a young girl in a public bar in front of a number
of onlookers. A friend of my mother’s, a newspaper editor who was passing by
stopped his car to investigate, and eventually rescued her. “Save me uncle,” screamed the girl,
running towards him.
The city is a concrete mess wholly out of plumb. Houses that are beautiful inside, have
bare unpainted concrete on the outside that soon starts succumbing to the
elements. There is no wall of a house that runs straight or lies unmolested--they
have been added onto, subtracted from, without harmony with the previous
design. The native Assamese aesthetic of design and proportion has been overrun.
There is an innate beauty to a house in a roadside Assamese town: a small front
yard: a 1 storey wood frame and thatch wall construction with a slanted
corrugated roof, a wide, cool concrete veranda facing the street, a cowshed by
the side, some hay, a little motorcycle a hundred feet away from the litchi
trees. Aside from an occasional building, this is now almost all gone.
Wifi spots are mushrooming in Guwahati. Sitting at my parent’s home, I start
picking up multiple locations on my laptop.
One of them is named “waheguru”.
Fingers crossed, I venture “sat sri akal” as the password. No such luck.
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| Guwahati |
Dripping rain in Assam is mesmerizing, and seemingly from an
endless reservoir. The rain
bounces off leaves and walls and cornices, sounding like a mild drumroll all
around. The humidity and the warmth provide an enormous driving force for
organic growth, and surfaces precipitate to a blackish green slickness made of
moss and algae. Little puddles of
water agglomerate on the streets.
Pedestrians navigate around them and each other on tippy toes, their raised
umbrellas making love to one another like entwined serpents as they cross. An empty cigarette packet that would
otherwise have hidden amidst the dry grass now glistens and opens up to the
foreground beneath the rain. Inside the house, the bedsheets have a damp feel,
and there is steaming cup after steaming cup of tea to while away the morning
reading newspapers that don't crackle anymore when they are opened. Inspite of the randomness of this
shamble of a city, there is a deep poetry to Guwahati that the rain and the
surrounding hills bring about.
We are back in Kolkata, headed to the blouse maker’s
establishment with a motor mouth of a cab driver. He gives us a running commentary on the city, and speaks
with instant authority. Educated, and as a professor, he would have made a
successful fund raiser. He even recommends a blouse maker from CE market. Our destination is on Chakraberia Lane,
but he takes us to Chakraberia Road.
When I point out the discrepancy, he shrugs it off with “unish bish”,
i.e. “19/20”: a small difference, something with an error bar well within
the general scope of things. Fear
not, he says—I know this place like the palm of my hand. When we are lost and find ourselves
situated by a rectangular pond perimetered by four roads, he decides to call
the blouse maker.
“I am by the side of the pond.”
”Excellent—keep going, take the second right and we are located
right there”.
With this brief exchange our cabbie meaningfully drives off. I feel like I am missing something
about the mathematics of the situation.
We get lost again.
Jayesh the designer sits at his desk like a maverick
mathematics professor at “Miss Chief”, his small fashion establishment tucked
into a quiet upper middle class neighborhood in Poddopukur. Children have interrupted a street soccer
game near the entrance to let us through.
A large man with an unruly shock of hair, Jayesh’s desk is piled with
textiles and design notes, and M has come here to get a few blouses tailored. He shows us some examples and I am
impressed at the both the designs and the technology. He sits there like a sculptor with a 90 cm length of cloth
and cuts and slices at it, till the finished piece is a fine tension between
elegant design and an intricate support system worthy of its own finite element
analysis. Some textiles are gauzy
and the weave is weak—they need an underlying fabric support; some have backs that
plunge precipitously and require intricate halters and strings. M has settled
for a more conservative design. While
she is in the trial room, I chat with him. He comes from a 4th generation Marwari family in
Kolkata and is comfortable with both cultures. He has his own workshop for cutting, stitching and finishing
and has dedicated groups of people who specialize on different pieces. Mostly focused on salwar kameez’es and
blouses, he is planning to introduce a line of designer sarees. He talks about the trend in Kolkata
today to use traditional weaving and printing methods, but with new designs and
colors that veer away from the traditional combinations like “beige and
maroon”.
One morning we drive to IIT Kharagpur. A journey that used to be almost
exclusively made by train is now comfortably short due to a new 4 lane national
highway. The drive down is smooth except
for the occasional unsettling experience of steering past vehicles that drive
in the wrong direction along short stretches. The cars on the roads today are modern, but most of the
trucks are of 70s/80s vintage and woefully unsafe. There are smart, multi-lane tollbooths and stuck behind a
line of trucks at one of them we find a group of men with stout wooden sticks
banging hard against the sides of the trucks, while at the same time engaging
in amicable banter with the truck drivers, the banging seemingly just a
physical response entirely disconnected from the conversation. There appears no action sought on the
part of the truck driver and as the line inches through the toll booths, the truck driver
eventually moves on. Our driver
explains the situation—some of the lanes are exclusively reserved for cars, but
the truck drivers willfully ignore this as a matter of procedure. There is a team of baton wielding
employees who are supposed to rectify this situation and the banging
constitutes their token response to their duties.
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| Nivedita Bridge on way to Kharagpur |
The road to Kharagpur runs parallel to the train lines. Halfway through, around Mecheda, the ground
starts taking on the reddish hue characteristic to this area. There is mile after mile of paddy
fields, mostly worked on by women sitting or squatting in the standing
water. There is very little
mechanization, and I only saw one
tractor. The rest were a mix between hand steered contraptions with on-board
engines, and oxen driven ploughs for tilling the land. Primitive thatch huts dot the land, and
clusters of one and two storey simple brick houses form occasional idyllic
villages with ponds ringed by palm trees.
Men stand lazily by the shades of scraggly trees herding goats, children
walk by to and from school on sun scorched red earth lanes. Twenty to thirty years ago, one would
not have seen so many school children.
I am back at IIT Kharagpur, my alma mater, after 24
years. The feelings are that of a
stranger after so many years.
While the place has dramatically changed, there remain obvious places of
immense geographic familiarity—the dorms, the passageways in the main building,
the amphitheater. But I have a
hard time connecting—too many years have passed by and the nostalgia is
absent. I meet some of my older
professors that have remained, and some current professors who were my
contemporaries as students. I am
received with great warmth. In the
afternoon, I sit in the lobby of the women’s dorm while M walks in to take a
look. It is just after 1 pm and
the students walk out of the lobby after lunch headed back to class. They leave briskly and individually without interacting with
one another. A little later I see
the same phenomenon in the men’s dorm where I used to live. They looked like
salarymen going to work, shoulders heaving with responsibility, a lot on their
minds. This is an entirely
different mindset from the mid eighties.
