Karnataka   

Coming home, going home Home thoughts, from home

But what is home? For the first 17 years of my life, home was what my father had built in Kolar. For the last 45 years, with two breaks of eight years each, it has been Guwahati; for the last five years a flat of my own. During the last seven and a half months, I have been caretaking a flat in Bangalore, a city where long ago I lived for just six years, as a student and a teacher, in rented premises.

That city where I sowed my wild oats, going through the secular rites of passage into adulthood, is still there though virtually invisible unless one seeks it. On the outer fringes of that city, mostly to the south and the east touching Anekal and Kolar, lived the rather amorphously interlinked extended kinspersons, amiably indifferent or positively hostile. Most of them were routinely identified with a particular village where they lived in homesteads, or with areas in the inner city where they lived in pokey little places.

Chikkapete, Balepete, Mamulpete and Dandu, Sarjapura, Varthur and Anekal, Banaswadi and Koramangala, Kadugodi and Adugodi, Yelahanka and Devanahalli and many other locations in between were not merely place-names; they were seminally linked to this or that kinsperson or family. Their very mention even now evokes memories of uncles and aunts and cousins several times removed, sisters and brothers-in-law. Most of them are dead.

Fifty years on, most of these areas too have disappeared, swallowed up by the big city, surviving only as names that sound odd when they are pronounced in brashly alien accents.

While there is little to celebrate in these changes, there is even less to regret. The city and the society of my adolescence and early youth were oppressive and bigoted beyond imagination. Being seen having a glass of beer with some friends led to abusive wall writings near the place where I was teaching and indeed persuaded me to leave Bangalore. Fellow female students in college used to nervously walk out of the classroom every hour, along with the teacher, and returned only when the next teacher came in.

Even in the English Honours School in Central College, a friend of mine used to talk, quite earnestly and for long about literature, to a fellow female student, sheepishly standing across the doorstep of the girls’ common room. It was inconceivable for both of them to sit comfortably together in the college canteen and talk. The scandalous behaviour of a friend and classmate, who personally invited her fellow students in the same Honours School for her wedding, was excused only because she was an Anglo Indian.

It is now the done thing to blackguard Bangalore. As an old man, a paltry thing that is but a tattered coat upon a stick, I know that this city is no country for old men. When confronted with the all too real problems that one faces every moment when one is out on the streets or, increasingly, even within one’s homes, many like me legitimately ask: Why should not old men be mad? The point is that these perils and the rages they provoke are not unique to Bangalore. Crossing the street near the bus station is perilous whether in Bangalore or Guwahati, or even in Kolar.

With these personal reflections, this column, ‘mere words that are but wind’, takes a bow. I go home with joy, and hope to return in good spirits because I will be again going home.

M. S. Prabhakara kamaroopi@gmail.com

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