My Ahemdabad trip...

It is 9:40. I am alone in the office. No one has arrived yet. Office is calm and silent. Charles is again not in town. I don’t know where he has gone. I just returned from Ahemdabad yesterday. Since quite long I have been planning to visit Ahemdabad, finally I got the chance.

Earlier these visits were quite frequent and elaborate. Now it has reduced down to one visit of 4 days per year. After Mumbai that is the city which I relate to. It is my mother’s home town. My grandfather in his early teenage migrated here from a very small village in Rajasthan in search of a space with more opportunities and liberty. Today it has been more than six decades of living here and they have created their own little space. According to them it isn’t the space where they belong. The search for this mythic space where they think they belong is very visual in their daily practices and imageries with which they have masked their living space. It is through this medium they have been trying to recreate their imaginary homeland and trying to root them.

But I value this space for very different reasons. It occupies quite a considerable space in my memories. As a child, this is the space where I was sent to enjoy my holidays. A holiday, an official day defined for recreation, a time where one was allowed to escape the mechanical routine and do nothing. I enjoyed being here. There was so much space to play. I was not confined to my house. I hardly spent any time inside our house. The compound wall of the bungalows could be easily jumped. Opposite the row of bungalows was a humongous plot of forest with huge compound wall. A patch of maidan in between the forest and the row of bungalows made the forest plot into a spectacle. It wasn’t a forest, but for a child from Mumbai it was big enough to be a forest. It had a tiny one storied bungalow surrounded by huge Neems and Gulmohurs. No one stayed in that house. One yellow bulb used to be always lit, even in the nights. I thought of it as a house of ghosts. My granny used to scare me of putting me in that house when I didn’t eat on time. During afternoons we used to try very hard to jump the wall where it was dilapidated. But the fear was so much that we never got close enough to the house. When all of us loved to sleep on the terrace gazing at the stars, I hated it when I abruptly got up from the sleep in midnight and that ghost house was just right in front, with that yellow bulb. My granny loved that bungalow and the forest because it seemed to be an ideal backdrop for our family photos, an ideal imagery and illusion with which she wanted to frame herself and her family.

But today, the back drop of our family photos has changed. That bungalow and the forest have been replaced by five six storied apartment buildings, which overlook into our houses. Two series of compound wall have appeared on the maidan which used to be our playground and a spectacular water body which once upon a time completed my granny’s family photo. As a child I enjoyed seeing peacocks and monkeys on those Neems. Today I see façade composed of pigeon holes and drying balconies. My granny’s ideal back drop is lost and is replaced by another, but she is not as sad as I am, because my uncle told her that this was just a beginning of Ahemdabad becoming a mega city like Mumbai.