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No parking in front of gate
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Most of the gates sport a board these days. The ‘No Parking’ message suddenly has gained a lot of importance!
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— Photo: T. Singaravelou
Universal message: There isn’t a place in a city without this sign these days.
On ordinary nights, we residents in Sri Krishna Apartments “shut the gates for safety of ourselves” as the Mayor says in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, part III. But these days, you may even need some way to ensure the safety of the gates too. Reason: there are predators at the gates in the neighbourhood!
“If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody,” said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. However, this story is about something that happens without knocking, with the result that when we wake up there is one more board on the gate, announcing ‘No parking in front of gate’.
To realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom, said Bertrand Russell. The wisdom of the times appears to be a sudden realisation of the importance of the gate. Thus, months ago, when a kind textile businessman tied the NPIFOG message, we were all happy because that saved the association a few hundred rupees in getting a board painted.
It is not that we had a great menace of people blocking our entrance all the time, as happens in shopping areas such as Brigade Road. When such a thing did happen, usually during the music festival at the nearby Ganesh temple, there was invariably a ready driver to clear the way.
Publicity
Yet a neat, colourful, new board on our old gate didn’t invite any opposition from the residents. We also didn’t mind the publicity that the businessman was getting in the process, because everybody knows that customers don’t normally make purchase decisions on the basis of messages seen on iron gates.
“The key to heaven’s gate cannot be duplicated,” said Doug Horton. It seems that gates of mortals’ residences aren’t that well protected against duplication – of the message in question, though not of keys. Because, we found to our surprise that one fine morning there was an additional board saying NPIFOG, this time from a different source, an optician.
“The iron gate ground its teeth to let me pass!” is a poetic line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. So too, we ground our collective teeth and let the new board pass, but on three considerations: One, because it was aesthetic, as Rao aunty found it to be of pleasant colours to match with the existing board. Two, because it seemed expensive, as Sriram assessed, using his accounting skills. And three, to offer a level-playing field, as Ganesh argued, vis-À-vis the textile businessman. “A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate,” says Emile M. Cioran. We had two at the gate, and the rest were distant! In due course, our street developed a new identity, because every gate on the stretch sported these two boards, reminding one of the Alibaba story, where all the doors sported identical chalk mark to fox the thieves. Our old boards, indicating the name of the premises and so on, were paling into insignificance, and occasionally some of us were often getting foxed ourselves, driving into wrong premises, because of muddled-up pattern recognition.
“What’s done cannot be undone,” says Lady Macbeth. “To bed, to bed! There’s knocking at the gate,” she adds. We too dreamt so. It was no knocking, but some tying, we realised, when the day broke one cold morning, a few days ago, and we found one more board, from an insurance company. Then the boards came in thick and fast. For, the next day, it was a bank, and then came in a rival textile house. One of these even had the temerity to declare, “No parking in front !”
An infuriated Ganesh, our association secretary, blew his conch and we all assembled at the gate, even as the Indian team was trying to contain the South Africans in what was turning out to be a one-sided ODI match, lacking any verve. “What do we do?” I asked. “There is still space on the gate,” said D’Souza, who works in an ad company. That invited everybody’s scorn. “If they pay us for advertising, we shouldn’t mind,” suggested the accountant Sriram. Then the secretary declared, “Enough is enough!” And we nodded, in silent agreement that ads were adding up. He was armed with cutting pliers that he put to good use in peeling out the boards.
Nice boards because they now serve well as writing pads and winnows, and there are not enough of them for all of us. Our ayah has already the booked the next new board for use in trash collecting.
D. MURALI
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