If you have the money and the inclination, you can have homes in not one but several cities. But when it comes to calling a place home, can you share your loyalties between two cities? Can you partake of the joys, sorrows, pluses, minuses and eccentricities of both and claim dual citizenship? Even if you don’t need to do that formally within the country, is there space under your skin for loyalty to two cities, for that’s where the one you call your own lives?
I have been grappling with this issue ever since I knew that when I would be in no position to travel much, I would stay put in Kolkata. But till then there is no way I can bear to permanently turn my back to Bangalore. This has given rise to the thought — should we all, as a matter of policy, owe allegiance to two parts of the country? Will that not make us more demanding of the way both the places are run by benchmarking one against the other? Critically, will it also not make us better Indians? Imagine a leading Shiv Sena-type leader having a secret girlfriend tucked away somewhere in eastern India! Would that not make him as much of a Bharatiya Manab as a Marathi Manus?
I first became conscious of the tug of the place where you have learnt to live and breathe when I came back from the West, giving up a chance to stay put there indefinitely, and slept again in the bed I had used ever since I had grown up. A walk to the nearby bus stand the next day brought forth greetings of recognition from the roadside cobbler and the paanwala who had not just known me as a kid but said salaam to the judge sahib, my father, when he was around. Then when on a visit from Bangalore I took around Kolkata our by then grownup son, he expressed surprise that I knew the lanes and bylanes so well. Of course I did, that’s where I had grown up and I could move among them almost blindfolded. It requires somebody to point it out for you to realise how you know almost instinctively the place you have grown up in.
You can rationally pick the place you want to adopt up to a point but ultimately it is subjective, like falling in love at first sight. There is something I liked about Bangalore from the moment I set foot in it nearly a decade ago. It retained a bit of the old Kolkata that was now lost — cosmopolitan, easy in welcoming outsiders, a liking for some of the better things the British were known for and, of course, hearty lovers of non-vegetarian food.
That was not all. There were other pluses too. Nearly all neighbourhoods had a pleasant well-maintained park. There was also a large contingent of civil society types who knew what it was to be a good citizen and who had concerns and interests that you could relate to. I have come across this critical mass at gatherings of the fledgling Bangalore International Centre. Old friends and colleagues, Darryl and Praful from Mumbai, and TCA from Delhi, have come lecturing there, telling you that the right kind of Indians are all there, dispersed no doubt but easily networked and met in the age of affordable air travel. And firmly placing the city in the mainstream of India, its quality of life is declining as in all other urban spaces.
The contrasting sight, sound and smell of the two cities, Kolkata and Bangalore, hit me when I came back to the latter after an over two-month stay in the former. The landscaping around the new Bangalore airport is getting better as the plants and shrubs take root. And the taxi driver had a surprise for me. “Sir, why not try the newly done up road to the east of the city, turning left at the BSF station and joining the Outer Ring Road via Hennuru Road.” It was a dream, newly done up, mostly dual carriageway and hardly any traffic. I know traffic will clog it in two years but it will be great till then.
My mind went back to Kolkata and the discoveries I had recently made near our new home. The doctor who had retired from a firm that sported an old British name now sat in a corner of a pharmacy and was pleased to check my blood pressure for Rs 10. The air-conditioned hair-cutting salon was staffed with pleasant people who did an expert job for Rs 30. The cheap journeys you could make, hopping from shared auto rickshaw to metro rail and back to shared auto rickshaw. What an affordable place, I thought. And some of the old openness still lives. So many of the taxi drivers spoke with a Bihari accent and seemed peacefully settled.
There should be a law. Everybody must learn to love a place other than the one of her birth. Not only will this raise demands for both to adopt the better practices of the other, it will cure the country of parochialism. Somebody please find cross-country girlfriends for the Shiv Sena types.