Occidentally Yours
Guwahati: As my small town of memories grows bigger and bigger…
By Somnath Batabyal
I look across the table at my cousin. We haven’t seen each other in almost fifteen years. Time, depending on how one looks at it, has been generous to her. Her house is enormous, her practice is flourishing and she looks successful. An ENT specialist in Guwahati, she tells me business is booming.
“Lots of pollution, no? More and more tumors and cancers.”
The small town I grew up in had vanished. In its place today stands a chaotic screaming mess of unimaginative blocks of concrete, unfinished flyovers, potholed roads and endless traffic jams. Diesel fumes override every other smell on the roads, even that of the open sewers and stagnant drains.
Guwahati is perhaps symbolic of every small town in India, caught in the stranglehold of sudden money and directionless “development”. The Brahmaputra floods and yet the water reservoirs run dry. A small family will own three cars, pushed through by relentless advertisement campaigns championing freedom through acquisition. Infrastructure fails to keep up. When roads do get built, carbon dioxide breathing trees disappear, and the hellish cycle of ill health continues.
I left Guwahati to pursue my studies in Delhi, around the same time my parents retired to Kolkata. For a decade and a half, there has been almost no connection. And then one day, like everyone else who moves away, I wanted to rediscover my childhood.
I overshoot the lane where my house used to stand; the place where I played hide and seek is now camouflaged by two towering blocks. But the two room tenement has survived; shabbier than before, the collapsible gate rusty with time, hungry for attention.
After the greetings, the surprised shrieks of the few surviving aunts and uncles, the endless relating of the same stories and exchange of news: marriages, births and deaths, the inevitability of seeing once strong elders grow old and mild, I make my way back to my guesthouse, feeling a good twenty pounds overweight from the mishtis, peras and pithas.
In the evening, I resolve to understand what happened to my town and seek out a classmate. No, Riku was more than that. He was a kindred spirit, my comrade in every mischief. We sat together for six years and were inseparable. When we hug now, I feel the pistol stuck in his waistcoat.
“I sold your city for my fun,” he says looking at me over his whisky glass. “I have built twenty apartments in the last three years.” He has got a personal security officer; a symbol of a man’s status here, he tells me. “I should have at least three. The police are asking for more.”
A day later, I meet Amit. We played badminton together for nearly twelve years and he was one of our most promising shuttlers, competing at the national level with the top stars of his time. Today, he has a vacant stare, stammers and loses the thread of a conversation. Two hours later, he finally tells me he is a heroin addict, needing around five “sneezes” a day. “I don’t inject. Never. And don’t worry. I consume drugs, but drugs is not consuming me.”
He was shot twice by the police in a case of mistaken identity. His sporting days, I heard from mutual friends, ended abruptly.
Stuck between these two extremes, of thwarted ambition and ruthless profiteering, is Rupam. He was my next door neighbour, his parents gently middle class and content. Today he works for a life insurance company, is overweight and has high blood pressure. “Impossible targets. They want us to lie to people. My managers can get away with it, they don’t live here. Where will I run?” He takes another sip of Blender’s Pride.
In terms of GDP or whatever monetary graphs economists use to measure well being, Guwahati would be a model city. Land prices are astronomical, construction is unbounded, there are cars, malls and Dominos Pizza. And yet, I leave the city thinking of a vacant stare, of life insurance targets and a gun. The price we pay.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Somnath Batabyal is Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. A former journalist, he is interested in news production practices in Indian media. His book, Making News: Behind the Scenes at Star News and Star Ananda, published by Routledge is scheduled for publication later this year. When not following such lofty pursuits, he dabbles in fiction and is experimenting with graphic novels.