Another trip to India. Seems like this is about the only time I get to pen
thoughts on to paper. I don't know if it is because it feels like homecoming
because as an immigrant, I often wonder what home is. Is it the place, is it the self or the
place in between or is it the feeling of being slightly misplaced everywhere, so
every sojourn, or return, seems like a trip back home. Like the
hordes packed to return to
their ancestral homes in trains for chhath, perhaps home is defined by the
occassion than the place.
I booked the tickets for this trip on something of a whim, during one of those
troughs of spirit when your world seems slightly muffled and you begin to suspect
that solitude isn’t the same thing as peace. It was a trip to visit my parents borne out of feeling away from them.
My father, in his mid-eighties,
remains remarkably well, but you start to notice how even small medical
symptoms - his aching knees, the slowness of gait and the surgeon’s suggestion of
a replacement - carry an invisible weight. It’s as if the body’s slow weakening
has turned into a quiet metronome in the background of every family
conversation. When your internal decision tree starts including “age” as a
nontrivial variable you find yourself running anxious regressions that no one
has explicitly assigned you to calculate. During my last stay in Pune, I
remember noticing the quiet physics of aging - the way recovery from everything,
even small things, now takes longer, the way homeostenosis becomes not just a
medical term but a witnessed metaphor for daily events . I promised myself I’d visit every year, pretending as
if annual pilgrimages could outpace entropy. Some sort of prophylaxis against
regret. I’ve since realized these trips might need to be solo, though I keep
imagining bringing Meera along. She’s at that ripe age when the mind is
still elastic, and I want her to see a world that isn’t
sterilized by predictability of the western life - the chaos, the un-air-conditioned texture
of things, the way India refuses to be curated.
There’s this odd craving I’ve
acquired lately - to revisit a phase of life when I could occupy the simpler role
of “child,” rather than the middle-aged adult performing competence for a
younger audience, who now look to him for direction as if he knew the map. I
want to taste my mother’s cooking again, sodium and tamarind and spice and all,
to allow the memories of that taste overwhelm the metabolic arithmetic. I want
to listen to my father dispense his confidently non-peer-reviewed wisdom, to
indulge the peculiar logic of WhatsApp theology, to care - ingenuinely perhaps - for
the ongoing sagas of distant relatives whose names I barely remember over filter
coffee which cools too quickly, in the way time itself seems to expand. Like
slowing an old VHS tape to 0.5x: the sound warped, the
feeling almost physical. Perhaps it’s selfish, this desire to hold on. Or
perhaps it’s the most core thing we do - reaching back toward what built us,
before time keeps us from returning. It’s not altruism for my parents who have
long passed the empty nesting phase; it’s the selfish desire to preserve a
vanishing present.
What I do see is that as the urban landscape keeps evolving, it seems increasingly
built for the young- in urban India, youth is not merely an age statistic, it is in the
atmosphere. It is in what is piped into LED screens into houses, sold at street
vendors in graphic short shirts and ripped jeans and blasted on speakers for
Ganesh chaturthi miravnuks or through smartphone reels. The median age in India
is now under thirty, which feels less a statistic and more a design
principle. Everything caters to speed, novelty, disposability: is lighter,
faster and designed for the transient connoisseur :use and throw, digitize or disappear,
swim or sink. The things my parents still hold on to- bank passbooks, handwritten
notes, Rin soap and bucket baths- now feel almost ceremonial, relics of a slower era or grammar. I keep wondering where the floaters go—the ones who can neither sprint
nor surrender. They try to keep up, but the distance- between their era built in memory and the modern—widens quietly each year.
They try to assimilate- to belong- just as they did when they moved to the western India, just as we later would in another country.
This was often imperfect and with an accent that betrayed their origin.
Their Tamil inflected Marathi became both a bridge and a border. “Madarasi,” the
locals called them, sometimes in jest, sometimes not. They often carved out
their own tiny enclaves of safety and community. This became Rasta Peth or
Matunga or Jackson Heights, NY or Edison, NJ. They invented affectionate
monikers- Appabaloonchoke for Appa Balwant Chowk, Grakipet for Grahak Peth- as if
renaming the city could claim a small corner of it. In time they called
themselves Punekars, though no one quite accepted them as such. Like one always
gets the question despite spending >2 decades in the US- " so where are you
really from?". To live where the majority doesn’t speak your mother tongue is to
exist in a constant audition. You’re always proving, always translating, supressing a thought,
never entirely at rest. There’s a kind of low-grade anxiety that is a resulting adjustment output: the fear that what’s visible isn’t quite real, that belonging is
conditional. To be an immigrant—or a Bihari, or a Madrasi, or simply an Indian
out of place- is to live, as Jhumpa Lahiri says, in a state of perpetual
pregnancy: always expecting, never quite delivered.
If belonging feels elusive,
so too does clarity itself. On my last visit, I had written about dust- its quiet
omnipresence, its way of lingering and being part of you, being you. This time,
it was the light that felt otherly to the US returning me. Perhaps it was Diwali, perhaps the winter
smog, but as we descended into Mumbai, the city lay hidden beneath a haze so
dense that the ground appeared only seconds before we landed. The sun, still
high, looked like a dimmed and distorted golden orb- eclipsed by something
unseen as though light itself had become particulate and perhaps weary. I looked
up articles on AQI, but wondered, why has it become so bad so fast. Or was it
like this and I just notice this because I come from another ambient air
setting. My search led me to a
study
which showed that over the past three decades, sunshine hours across India have
steadily declined. Data from twenty weather stations between 1988 and 2018 shows
a quiet, almost invisible dimming—a slow loss of direct light, veiled by
aerosols, monsoon clouds, and the detritus of human ambition.The study reads
like a soothsayer's prophecy/elegy. Losing light, losing daytime while the
engine of progress churns on. It reminded me of the wildfire season in Medford,
Oregon, when the skies turned cinematic- almost apocalyptic, in
a way that made you uneasy and claustrophobic. The air had a weird taste and the horizon had a blur. You could still see, but not clearly, like a cataract clouded our
vision. What shields you from the brightness, I thought then, also steals the
distance.
Then, on Diwali day, the rains came. With the wind, the haze
lifted- just slightly, like someone had finally wiped your glasses clean after
weeks of squinting through grime. Faces on the street regained definition; edges
stopped dissolving into air. For a moment, it all felt lucid again. Maybe that’s
why phone cameras in India always seem to have those strange halo effects around
people’s faces- some collective conspiracy between air quality and
megapixels. (No, I’m kidding. Mostly at least) But clarity, came with its own
price. The rains left behind their usual inheritance: puddles, potholes, damp
stairwells, and the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes. Trash lay half-submerged
along the curb because the safai karmacharis took time off; the chikhhal clung
to your shoes if you managed to evade the puddle with your hop, and jump . The
buzzing sound near your ears reminded you of the tiny persistence of life you couldn't see or didn’t want near you, the itch
at your ankles announcing the enemy’s victory morsel. When the rains cleared, the
air seemed rinsed of its heaviness—but clarity, can be an illusion. Inside
something felt smudged, as if the light had turned inward and found anthracite
dust it could not wash away.
 |
By Mali
|
Diwali day, this year, was a blur. It came and went like it another box checked
on the calendar. It used to be ceremonial and incandescent ( without the smoke) . This time the only
person who wore new clothes was Appa. He put on a T-shirt I’d brought him, and
that, somehow, was the gesture that was faithful to the
tradition I had known Diwali to be. There was a time when the morning began with
Ganga snanam and a spoonful of Diwali marundu- bitter, medicinal, but oddly
satisfying.
Pati would warm sesame oil with its seeds still floating, then smear
it on our heads, and if you were endowed with a small enough body surface area
and immodesty of preteen years, on your body. Then there was the brown gritty
sludge of shikakai paste—you rubbed it in until your hair felt like Maggi eaten
with hands. A bucket of warm water followed, never quite washing away the oil
but leaving a thin, stubborn sheen that no amount of soap could defeat. Then
came the new clothes, the
bakshanam, the firecrackers- saap goli, busvaanam,
lakshmi vedi, the sharp scent of sulfur, the heat and dangerously close sparks.
With age this became matappu only and then all this became too blase. This year,
it was a perfunctory dab of oil on the scalp, a modern shikakai shampoo from a
plastic bottle, store-bought murukku and home made rava laddoo. No lamps- because
the kids upstairs had once spilled oil all over the balcony. No kolam- I’m not
sure why. No akash kandil-we forgot to buy one. And no killa, because where
would it even go in this apartment life? Still, mama and mami dropped by; we
exchanged sweets and said “Happy Diwali,” and that was it. You realize these are
events because they occur with family where there are kids, laughter, shared
anticipation. And when they become adults with killjoy work schedules, the ceremonial fun
is viewed with a sceptical why. Childhood, it seems, is the only true festival.
I guess my parents indulged us as kids because they vicariously lived our
childhood.
Later that afternoon, I met a few friends from BJMC. The
conversation, predictably, was adult- billing codes, patient complaints,
malpractice insurance. It felt like the perfect postscript to the day: the slow,
polite erosion of magic under fluorescent light.
I didn’t have a vehicle for
transportation, so my movement around the city was mostly on foot or by metro.
The Pune Metro is, to its credit, clean, punctual, and almost unnervingly
efficient—an artery of modernity coursing through the city’s older,
slower pulse. From its elevated tracks you get an panoramic, uncomfortable view
of what the maps still label as the Mutha River. What actually glides beneath is
an open vein of sludge, a slow-moving serpent of black water (Nagzari V2) sheened with oil
and plastic. Trash lines the banks in polychrome decay- plastic,
styrofoam, half-eaten food, nirmalya from last week’s rituals. Carbon in all its
incarnations: polymerized, oxidized, fluroinated, hybridized. Carbons flirting with
negative non-stray anions, looping together into amorous rings and chains, weaving a
synthetic epidermis over the earth, inseparable now from the soil where it exists in the simplest form. Bound by my recently US acquired (and somewhat performative) sense of
civic hygiene, I found myself one morning wandering with an empty coffee cup,
scanning for a public trash can. There are none. Just tiny Adar Poonawalla clean cities bins that seem more cosmetic than utilitarian. The city seems to operate on a
shared understanding that the world itself is the trash can. Discarded things
simply rejoin the landscape-an act of absorption. According
to the Environmental Status Report, Pune now produces roughly 0.4 to 0.5
kilograms of waste per person per day—around two thousand tons in all. Scale
alone becomes abstract. In the rains, the trash ferments; the air thickens
with the anaerobic musk of rot, a smell that is everywhere and therefore
nowhere. You expect the sweetness of petrichor, but instead the stench hangs low and heavy, the way smog does.
It struck me then that smell and haze isn’t only in
the air; it settles in the mind too. You stop noticing what once appalled you.
The smell dulls, the eyes adjust, and the city- its grime, its quiet
moral entropy-reconfigures itself into a new norm. This is how the light dims or the day shortens, not
suddenly but by degrees, and the sense of fatigue and indifference that does not
mind the slow accumulation of the unberable seems to be the real pollution, the
soot that colors us.
There was always a faint smell in the mornings, thought to be the time to smell the clean crisp air over tea, — drifting
through the window like a city's exhalation. I tried to understand what is
beyond the sphere of my existence, my own Truman show, by buying the newspapers
to read on most mornings. I grew up reading the newspaper. Not
doomscrolling, reading. The Times of India was, back then, more a newspaper ,
more substance than cellulose. You could smell the ink and feel slightly better
about the state of things before breakfast. I loved going to the center page to
savor Jug Suraiya’s dry wit, Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar’s tidy arithmetic of
policy, Bachi Karkaria dissecting urban absurdities, Coomi Kapoor's takes on
Lutyens' Delhi. Sunday was ritual. The Sunday Times, I’d stretch across the
floor along with a steel plate with roti, water masala like a feast with
accompaniments. The arrival of both TOI and Indian Express on the same morning
was its own small high—a dopamine surge wrapped in newsprint. A sense that the
world, even in its chaos, came in folded, knowable sections. Then, somewhere in
the early 1990s Malavika Sanghvi's populist cravings and Bennett & Coleman’s
quarterly targets devolved the paper into the toilet paper it lives on as now.
They began to chase the eyeballs and amygdala instead of the prefrontal cortex.
Headlines stopped informing and started performing. The front page, is now a full page ad or a trailer reel: fifteen headlines, zero closure- a lure to open the paper to the pages where the story continues. “Tailor
to pay ₹7K for blouse delay,” one headline screams.
Buried in the middle somewhere is the
headline to a 2 paragraph piece “37 die in Chhath mishaps in Bihar, Jharkhand.”
Two paragraphs. Thirty-seven people. The tone is perhaps unintentionally flat, the placement also accidental. The tragedy seems anesthetized by adjacency to gossip and corporate litigation- Tata vs
Mistry, dunki ordeals and Trump's dance in Malaysia. You pause, maybe, out of guilt. You
imagine dirty water, a crowd, the heat. But the next headline has already ambushed
you and you move on.
This, I think, is the hidden arithmetic of a populous nation: it is almost as if living in a populated nation carries an inherent mortality risk. When the
denominator is 1.3 billion, the numerator—thirty-seven—barely registers. It’s
not cruelty, exactly. It’s scale. The paper has 24 pages. The day has 30 minutes
of attention. The brain has limited RAM space. So you read, wince, turn the page, and
move on, which is to say, you forget.
Pause...
In a country where numbers blur into
anonymity, recognition is sought in the divine.
A place where the one is seen, counted, remembered. Temples were part of my life
as far back as I can remember. Perhaps it was my parents’ and grandparents’
faith, or simply geography. There was a temple in every narrow galli, small
shrines folded into the map of daily life.
 |
| Bhajana Madam |
 |
| Chinna Hanuman koil |
 |
| Periya Hanuman koil |
Our home stood beside a
Sivan Koil, which we often treated as an extension of
our own yard. We climbed the water tank, edged along the stone wall, and slipped
into the temple grounds as if returning home. We played hide and seek in the
circumferential corridor, swung from the aerial roots of the banyan tree that
grew within, and plucked ber fruit from the branches of the tree that leaned over the back
wall. There was also a
chinna Hanuman temple under a tree that rose straight
from the middle of the road. Or perhaps the road was built around the tree and
the temple that followed it. We played cricket on that street, the one that ran
from our house to the shrine, and on Saturdays beggars lined up near its
entrance, palms open, patient. Farther away stood the South Indian Ganesh
temple, the
Bhajana Madam, the heart of the small Tamil/Telugu community in
Rasta Peth. My mother still visits it every Saturday when she is in Pune, though
she no longer lives nearby. In Maargazhi, the cold month of devotion, mornings
began before sunrise. I would wake to join the prayer group, play the jalra as
they sang hymns and chants, moving from temple to temple—first the
Periya
Hanuman Koil, then the
Ayyappa and
Ramar temples—before ending at the
Bhajana
Madam. As the youngest, I was given the honor of waving the fan before the deity
and receiving the first taste of prasadam—ghee-laden ven pongal, fragrant and
warm in the palm or a small leaf donnai. Many of these temples still stand. The same bells ring; the
same banyan roots breathe. Theism, somehow, survives in India. The Gods persist because
people need them to—human, visible, close enough to visit, to bathe in milk, to
submerge in water during a
visarjan, to speak to as one might to a friend.
There’s a lot more I
could list. A trip along the Mumbai Pune expressway-though the express part of
it is a facile title; a day in Mumbai, a city that, despite everything, still
feels slightly saner; a
trip along Marine Drive in the rain with my friend Dhiraj, wipers keeping time
with the sea. The strange, practical mercy of apps—Blinkit, Swiggy—that now
serve as prosthetic tools for aging parents, sparing them the small mini-tumults of
running errands. And yet, for all this convenience, there’s the unmistakable
social isolation of the urban landscape in a city of
7.5 million people. That’s more than the population of Maryland, though that comparison
is, admittedly, useless except to show how absurdly dense our togetherness has
become.
On my last trip I reread Maximum City on the flight home. Mumbai, that
supposedly saner city, is still struggling with its own sprawl—the bustle of
hyperurbanism, the inherent prejudices and tribalism, the exhaustion of
ambition, the relentless restlessness, the absence of thehraav, that stillness of being. Pune, my city, has grown into a rougher, more impatient
version of the same—similar temperament, smaller room to breathe. I come seeking the quiet
breeze that blows against your face on evening bike rides, for a corner on Z
Bridge or Worli Seaface where I can sit and contemplate purpose without someone
coming and telling me "sarak ki". Even time has become municipal property now.
So I try to hold on to the small things—the pieces of joy that flash and fade
but manage, for a second, to lift the fog. You cannot reason your way through
the chaos; there is no logic to it. The whys have long since stopped being
answerable. You just live, count the moments that glow, and let the rest drift
past like traffic.
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