After spending my formative years in a terrorism scarred state, I feel almost invulnerable on the streets of Bangalore. This is a fundamentally gentle city, usually too diffident and polite to give offence. This is the city where I fell asleep during a bus commute in the early nineties and woke up in the middle of nowhere at night to see the conductor and driver peering down at me with helpless empathy. They took me to the nearest police station where a political activist took charge of me and dropped me home on his scooter. And the city where auto drivers have discussed with me, Osho, life lessons, personal tragedies, political angst, their love for the green silences Bangalore once had and their hatred for politicians. The city where after I was beaten and thrown from a bus, an auto driver helped me pick up my broken watch, my bag and took me to the police station without charging a single penny. Where a perfect stranger held an umbrella over my head when I stood at the edge of a crowded road, puking helplessly in the rain. Where the chef of a small restaurant sent my son and me home in his car after I suffered a sudden migraine attack.
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I have been befriended, mentored and sheltered by this city but yes, since 1994, when I first came here, I have also seen sudden, sporadic outbursts of violence. The rioting when it erupts has often very little to do with one specific issue. It hints at deeper, unaddressed anger over social inequality, over the devalued humanity of the disadvantaged in the city, over the calm, green spaces that have been usurped by the grinding, oblivious machinery of ‘progress,’ over lack of opportunity, the distance between aspiration and reality. And that is why when an iconic actor who represented Kannadiga pride passed away, delirious groups vented their grief by pelting stones at glass fronted malls. Today, a friend saw scores of young men storming a cash and carry wholesale store off Kanakpura Road and looting a truck full of Coke bottles. The gesture though hugely symbolic had nothing to do with the Cauvery issue. That said when battle lines are drawn over water, it is time to accept that we as a species have reached a critical moment in our shared history. What happened today on the streets of Bangalore was however also about the purging of anger fanned by politics, TV channels, irresponsible rumours and hate mongering.
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And when today of all days I decided to stir out of my home to finish a few errands and clock in a few hours at the radio and music content station I work for, I had no idea what was about to ensue. After I was done with my errands, it did seem strange that in the middle of the day, autos scurried past me without stopping and the traffic thinned visibly by the minute. After waiting for about 20 minutes, I decided to walk to work. And kept on walking for what seemed like forever, realising once again with a rush of love how much this city has come to mean to me. I bought some peanuts from a young, chatty boy outside a cinema hall and walked past the buzzing Metro station, the refurbished Lakeview Milk Bar on MG Road, the paanwallas, the makeshift stalls selling pirated books, posters and replicas of Eiffel Tower, smart new restaurants advertising lunch menus and more.
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It was only when I reached the office that I was told about the fires that had been lit on the outskirts of Bangalore and were inching towards certain volatile areas. When I left the office in the evening, the roads were eerily deserted save a few vehicles speeding away in obvious panic to get home before it got too dark.
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There were only a few autos and then one stopped. A middle-aged, Muslim driver asked where I wanted to go and then shook his head apologetically, “Bibi petrol nahin hai..har taraf galata hai. Mujhe apni beti ko office se lena hai abhi.” Then he felt sorry for me possibly and waved me in, “Petrol dalwa loon..phir dekhoonga aap ko kahan tak chod sakta hoon..aa jaayie.” We reached St Marks Road but the petrol bunk in the vicinity was closed. He called up his daughter on the phone to tell her that he had run out of petrol and looked at me sheepishly, “Bibi, gaadi reserve mein chala raha hoon. Aap yahin utar jao aur doosra gaadi le lo.” As he drove away, without asking for any money, he could not help adding, “Dekho kya halaat ho gaye hai..government kuch nahin karti Bibi..kuch nahin.”
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I kept walking across St Marks Road which was partially shut down and then another auto appeared. This was a young Kannadiga driver who could not get home because it was in Shantinagar and he did not yet know if it was safe to go that way but he would drop me home. This one did not talk much. He just took the bylanes through neighbourhoods that had no traffic jams or any possibility of brash trouble makers and sped across the unavoidable main roads like the devil was after his soul. On the way, we saw, a group of men guarding a petrol bunk with long sticks, young girls outside office buildings desperately trying to stop autos, families out for festive shopping looking dazed and disoriented and a city interrupted mid-flow, trying to come to grips with an impending sense of danger that has never been accepted as part of its mindscape and always has been treated as an aberration. I don’t want to speculate if that will ever change or if it has changed already.
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I reached home safely and found out that a colleague, a young mother had driven past burning cars on her way home. Another one was escorted home by the police when she almost got caught in the middle of a throng of stone pelters. News reports tell me a protester has died in police firing and vandals and arsonists had a good day looting and damaging public property. I don’t know if the auto driver desperate to reach his daughter found a petrol bunk to fuel his vehicle and made it safely to her office or not. Because in the end it really is not about the Kannadigas or the Tamilians. It is about who is at the wrong place at the wrong time and caught up in a chain of events they had nothing to do with. The images on my TV screen took me back to 2002 when the communal fires raging elsewhere in the country reached a nerve centre in the city. I was watching a terrible film in a single screen hall with my family when a mini riot broke out in the neighbourhood. The show was halted and we came out to see piles of burning tyres and lunging shadows with half broken bottles. The nearby police station was dark and so we ran past it till a speeding car stopped and two strangers let us in and dropped us safely home. That to me defines the character of this city. No matter what goes wrong, there will always be someone somewhere trying to put things right. And to display an incorrigible, bone-deep decency no matter how many raging fires are lit and stoked around them.
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Picture courtesy: oneindia.com
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Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US and is now retailing some of her art at http://paintcollar.com/reema. She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.
