But no sooner had I done so than an elderly lady came up to protest in chaste Bengali that this was no place to park. So many old people used the pathway, she said. But they don't need the width of a car, I almost muttered but held back, realising that convenience was not the issue. It was a territorial thing. The space in front of a house, leaving aside the main carriageway, was the jagir of its residents.
I should have remembered my early taste of assertive middle-class Delhi in respectable Nizamuddin. Late in the evening, the space in front of our house was taken, but that in front of our neighbours' was not. I parked happily - and regretted it immediately thereafter. The old lady was promptly out on her balcony, testily asserting that I was being so inconsiderate and whether I could not go elsewhere and leave the front of her house clear. I quickly realised there was no point explaining that it was public space, after all, and there was no "No Parking" sign to warn transgressors. My car and I beat a quick retreat before I could be accused of being rude and argumentative with an elderly person.
The oddest argument I have heard from a possessive householder, seeking to protect a bit of space that was not his, is that the car would make it difficult for him to open the window that stood right by the wayside. Again, no point in pointing out that the old-fashioned small window easily cleared the top of the car. As the window was north-facing, there was not even any breeze to be let in; south-facing windows did and made such a difference in hot summer evenings. The logic running through all these situations was: this public space is mine and you will have to pay the price of an unpleasant exchange in order to use it.
Not that all householders are alike. The politest neighbour I have known was also in Nizamuddin. Once, late at night, when I was happy to have got home safe without damaging the car, I didn't know the boundary wall from the gate and parked across the road with just enough clarity left to negotiate the stairs to the doorbell. I was mortified to find a little slip of paper underneath the windscreen wiper the next morning, saying: please avoid parking in front of the gate. It was the same with the doctor two houses away from ours in Bangalore's Indiranagar, who was once the author of the politest put-down on the smallest scrap of paper, requesting that the driveway be kept clear.
The boot was on the other foot when a small boutique software firm took the bungalow-type house right in front of ours in Bangalore and immediately created a crisis in parking space. The firm's car count was more than its headcount, and those nocturnal creatures - who followed the US clock - made parking before home at the end of a tiring day at the office a headache. The wife was up in arms. How can they park before our house, she demanded, coolly forgetting the obnoxious old lady in Delhi.
The grabbing nature of the middle class is as old as the class itself. Those who grab the space between the road and the home boundary wall and build on it are straightforward lawbreakers who harbour no pretensions of being overly law-abiding. Jagmohan put them in their place in the period he was urban development minister, wreaking mayhem on encroachers in Delhi. Of course, he did not last.
I have long tried to figure out how to respond to those who do not mind being unfriendly neighbours for no good reason, laying claim to roadside land even though they have no use for it. In Delhi the old lady's grandson used their own driveway for his car and in Kolkata the old lady's family obviously didn't own a car. You can't have a law against being a dog in a manger, if for no other reason than the fact that dogs never behave like that. Humans do.
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