1985, the year that I arrived in the US, was a banner year
for Chicago. The Bears had won the
Superbowl, Chicago Shuffle was soaring up the charts, and Mike Ditka—the blue
collar man’s blue collar coach was the toast of the town when he wasn't
fighting his defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan. Enoute to the US, I had met a man at Bangkok airport, a Chicago
metallurgist, and we spoke about Debye-Scherrer cameras and his city. He had told me it was called the Windy
City and I formed images in my mind of a large jetliner landing in Chicago with
its wings buffeted by rousing gusts of wind.
As I stayed on in this country, I came to learn that Chicago
was one of four cities in the US with a distinct personality. That it was one of two cities in the US
where you did not need to own a car.
That this was the place that became the commercial hub for the Blues in
the early part of the 20th. Century. Over the years I learned about Al Capone, about Leonard Chess,
I learned about the city’s history of corrupt politicians; I spent 3 years in
the Midwest--within a day’s drive to Chicago--but it took me 27 more years to
actually visit the city.
Entering a new city, particularly an American one where the
obsession with streamlining makes every city look and feel like the next one,
one often starts the trip not really noticing anything new, till a sudden
defining characteristic unloads a hammer strike of cognition. For me it was the exit sign for Racine
Boulevard on the the freeway, that brought to mind the address scrawled on the
inside flap of a matchbook—1634 Racine—viewed by an assassin under a dim 1920s
Chicago streetlamp, as he plotted the demise of one of the “Untouchables” in
the movie by the same name.
We stroll around around Michigan Avenue as the wind flirts
with us. It is late March and the
weather still manages to land a few harsh, incisive licks like a boxer slipping
in jabs at the end of a round. Heavy stone holds the soul of this city’s
downtown. Enormous stone and concrete buildings dominate, spaced by wide
pavements and streets. Not quite
Tokyo in sheer size, it is however more massive than New York. The wide
boulevards lined with upscale stores are periodically short circuited by narrow
alleyways with dim lights and raw brickwork reminiscent of an earlier time. The next day we would see similar heavy
set stone work in the gothic architecture of the
University of Chicago. Those buildings, which probably looked like ponderous
caricatures of European universities when they were built in the 1890s, look
distinguished today with vines crisscrossing the exterior walls of buildings.
Chicago is more down to earth than Manhattan, and folks seem
better dressed, in an intellectual way, compared to Manhattan. There is also a slightly older sense of
style—I saw several men in suit, cravat, and a hat, of the kind you would see in
American photographs from the earlier twentieth century. It is a more homogeneous and
less cosmopolitan population compared to New York or Los Angeles.
We took a long ride north along Lake Shore Drive, a road
that curves along Lake Michigan, with green spaces and bike paths
inbetween the road and the lake.
Chicago has the midwest’s defining characteristic—a mind boggling
flatness, and this flatness just runs straight into the Lake. A tinted haziness prevented us from
looking far out, but the scenery looked dismal and forlorn going out to the water.
Large, 70s style buildings in dull concrete and glass line the sea sized Lake
Michigan, and everywhere in March there is a post winter tentativeness in the
air as joggers experiment with varied apparel in response to the changing
weather. Driving out about 20
minutes, the downtown lapses into suburbia full of high rise apartment
buildings that looked about 3-4 decades old, with orderly bus stops and
convenience stores, not unlike the residential suburbs of Seoul or Tokyo.
I visit my college friend
P, who moved to Chicago from Delhi in 2000 and, improbably, plays as a blues
guitarist in Chicago’s bars.
He takes me to his basement and we handle some of his “investments”--expensive
guitars arrayed on the floor in pricey felt lined cases amidst a maze of cables
and amplifiers. The intervening years and the city have been kind to his musical
skills--he sounds much improved from yesteryear. Like the mythical Delhi restaurateur who opened a pizza shop
in Rome, my friend has the cojones, as well as the talent to play as a serious
amateur blues guitarist in Chicago. But then this is the age of the
transplanted specialist—M this evening is cooking a Bengali specialty, Murgi
Posto (chicken with poppy seeds), after getting culinary advise from a Bengali
speaking Sardarji chef on Youtube.
Check it out, it is a nice dish (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgJZhMtZb7I).
