The town and the gown

     A walk down the road that goes inside Vijaynagar leads you to narrow alleys clogged with immobile traffic, cows, push-carts and pedestrians. Families are separated by a single wall . The old men of the neighborhood would stretch out on charpoys pulled outside their door on the street and talk their way throughout the day. I never understood what they talked about when sometimes as I walked past them I could pick up snatches of their gruffly conversation. They usually revolved around politics  and new tenants. Most of them had a string bed outside their door. That, and a couple of chairs and a coffee table formed a makeshift lounge in the public street. They expanded their family space outside the slight confines of their home by projecting beds, clothes-line, chairs and vehicles onto the road. The road that had been built as a two-way had thus been eaten into by protruding families. Even a single truck congested and jammed the road. And our grandpas would sit on their thrones and croak at the driver asking him to reverse gear.

    These were the thoughts that generally filled my find when I started living in Vijaynagar. I spent the first two months at a friend’s pigeon-infested room that overlooked a large ditch and a dairy whose owner kept a dozen milch cows. The cows were tethered near the half-concrete, half-dung road and fed on dry oats. Though generally quiet these beasts standing almost four and a half feet at the shoulder and a pair of ringed horns was a nuisance to passersby. Sometimes a cow would break loose and spread panic among the people on the street. Once I saw an urchin pelt stones at a huge cow and the animal nearly gored an unsuspecting young woman who was keeping to the right side of the street. A grocer chased away the animal that not knowing where to go ran bulldozed into a pack of street dogs. The dogs yelled and tore at the ground. A commotion followed. The woman screamed at everyone that stood near her while the shopkeepers and the local men screamed at the dogs now and then at the cow and her owner.

    But once I also saw a lad who washed dishes at a food-outlet taking a chapatti to the cow that was tied to an electricity post. I noticed that this was an everyday routine, perhaps a rule that the owner of the hotel had imposed on his employees. The first chapatti of the day was sent to the cow tethered at the turn of the road so that the day’s business would flourish.

    The two-month stay at my friend’s rooms was dominated by the figure of the landlord-a cantankerous man past fifty who filled his time selling grocery and recharge vouchers out of the iron bars that formed the front wall of his shop that also doubled up as his house. His parents, wife and children lived in the three-room house that was fitted with all modern gadgetry. In the morning the family scattered away for the day. The children were sent to school in a school van while the old couple went on their regular visits to neighbors and sometimes sank all day long on the sofa in front of the TV. The landlord began his day by shouting at his wife who would then slide away to the room at the back to dress and water the flower pots near the kitchen. A deeply sonorous clanking sound was followed by a serrated noise as the landlord opened his shop. Metal clanking against steel produced a singularly disturbing noise that woke me up many times in the morning. I was left helpless in the middle of my sleep. The landlord grunted and projected his anger onto the metal clippings that locked his grocery. The array of noises would reach me in my half conscious state till a particularly irksome sound would completely jolt me out of my sleep. I cursed my friend for renting that pigeon hole that did not even allow one to sleep peacefully. When I peered down through the window I saw the landlord attending to his first customers. He grunted in a friendly way and laughed through his missing front teeth, lit a bidi and started a conversation that contrasted sharply with his angry flare-up against his wife. He rolled up his sleeves, took a deep breath and gestured at me to come down. I did not trust that man for some reason that I found difficult to articulate. His piercing, business-like gaze caught me again. I removed my head from the window and hastily came down. He shot a paternal glance at me and surveyed me from head to toe before introducing me to his customer, an old man from the neighborhood who had come to buy milk. I was introduced as a stoodent who was staying at his rooms for a month due to the scarcity of alternate dwellings. He was dressed in a threadbare white kurta and the lining of his trousers was frayed. His blood-shot eyes, coarse hands and boorish features bespoke a man who had lived an active life away from home.

    Then he almost sized me up with his unfeeling stare. After making himself comfortable in a cot placed at a right angle to the iron grills of the shop, he decided to open up with me. It was hard to say he was speaking; he grunted. He exposed his teeth stained after years of chewing pan masala and with a weak smile started revealing his family history and whereabouts. He spoke proudly about his daughter-in-law who was also a salaried office-goer. Then he asked me about myself. When I told him I was studying for an MA degree he let out a short grunt and mumbled something. In short he looked dissatisfied. There should be something other than that A, he said. I must have looked lost then and for the first time our eyes locked. He intended to explain things better, moved closer to me and shooed away a dog that had comfortably curled up under the cot. After declaring that the Arts stream had no value these days, he undertook a vicious diatribe against a nephew of his who had failed his hard-working parents by flunking his science exams and then choosing to study an arts subject that he could not even remember. He added that his working daughter-in-law had studied commerce. Then he made a dismissive gesture with a swing of his thick-set shoulders, clicked his fingers and called for the landlord who emerged with a packet of milk.

    The sun was brilliant in the late-October morning and columns of sunlight fell and faltered on the broken pavement half-laid with bricks where the old man now stood. I was dazed from the half-sleep, the bright morning light and the pompous authority with which that old man standing in front of me generalized, classified and swept everything clean. He finished saying his byes to the landlord, barked a namaste to his wife deep inside the house and again addressed me but in a friendlier way. He wanted to know my home state. When I said I came from Assam, he peered at me and actually smiled. He declared that he had stayed in Assam for a decade on a posting when he was a CRPF jawan. I replied categorically that there was no CRPF presence in Assam. The narrow smile between his teeth immediately vanished. He might have considered it rude on my part to rebuff him. Instead of correcting himself he suggested between deep grunts that he had spent years in the villages of Dimapur in Assam. He sounded his words with a native force that desisted me from correcting him. A nerve in my most sensitive part was touched and itched and desired me to correct the man’s blatant geographical error but I was cut short by the barrage of words that followed. The man seemed in no hurry to return home with his milk and seemed to be gaining in aggression. He continued, piling blatant geographical errors on the rubbish heap of his depraved perception. There, I spent ten years, he repeated, before avowing that there you either shot or get shot yourself.

     My de facto landlord was all the time kind to me. He extended his circle of kindness to all students and for some reason deemed it a privilege to talk to them. This man happened to have a small outlet near his shop where he sold bags. The outlet was so small that an adult person could hardly stand inside and move his arms but the landlord made up for the paucity of space by displaying his bags out on the street. Once as I returned to the rooms and was passing by the shop to climb the staircase, he greeted me and asked me to look at his bags. Then he launched an encomium for his stoodent customers. Only stoodents buy my bags, he declared with pride. He snatched one from the stand, turned it upside down, crumpled it with his fingers and said that its durability was guaranteed. Stoodents who come here once always return, he declared, spat and puffed hard at his bidi.

     A walk around Vijaynagar was all that was needed to understand the landlord’s enthusiasm for student-customers. The two main entry gates to Vijaynagar from the arterial road that links it to the university was flanked with eateries, tea stalls and shops with glass windows that displayed items that ranged from teddy bears to rust-coated nails and hammers. A walk down one of these roads leads you to the heart of Vijaynagar where roads intersect and go four different ways. The shops that line the streets thrive on out station students who have come to study at the university and rent rooms at exorbitant rates. The student crowd presents an authentic thali: a body of young people that strings together cultures, tastes and languages of different parts of the country. In the morning, it is a familiar sight to see young men and women from Manipur and Nagaland in bright dresses and capes walking briskly for work or to the university. Some of them dress up in their brilliant, dainty sarongs and when you come across a group of them at a street-corner you could be very easily take yourself to be in Imphal rather than in Delhi. As a native of Assam, I have never come across women so free-spirited and independent back home since many of the societies of north east India are still overwhelmingly conservative. But the women I see on the streets of Vijaynagar do not remind you of the violence-ridden states they have left behind; they are on the contrary constant reminders that they belong to a generation that have tried and succeeded in coming out of the trapdoor of violence and counter-violence that still define the social and political configuration of many states in the north east.

    Four months back I finally made up my mind to leave my friend alone and look for rooms myself. My friend discouraged me because sharing a room indeed saves a lot of money but I decided to move on. My friend was on a state government scholarship which allowed one to survive in a metro city only by doing violence to one’s health. It is very hard for the tribe of landlords and their predatory agents to understand students like my friend. The local people naively assume that young people who have left their families behind to study in Delhi always happen to be well-off economically. Little do they understand that there are students who also come from remote provinces who fund their expenses by selling ancestral property whose industrious fathers think that sending their children to a good public university is more important than preserving their familial heritage and patrilinial inheritance.

    Here the proverbial conflict between the town and the gown is palpable. The locals are locked in a relationship of love and hate with the ‘outsiders.’ It is not very difficult to understand why the local population prefers student tenants. Once while I was looking for rooms with a friend, we were led on by an old broker. After showing us a precarious top-floor room, he smiled and told us that the room had been occupied before by a person who cracked some really tough exam to join the top echelons of the government. In another case, a landlady made no qualms to hide her admiration for her two tenants. She told me that both are well-to-do lawyers who have been staying in her house since they were students. Based on her tenants’ ‘performance’ she made a strong case for staying at her house. In another instance, I saw an old lady screaming at two boys, tenants at her neighbor’s house. She ended her tirade with ‘Don’t you think about your parents back home? How will they feel when two men from outside comes and blares music till two in the night near her bed?’ That was a moment when I immediately empathized with the lady.

     Finally I got a room in a three-storey building at the end of an alley near a gurudwara. The room was big enough to accommodate only a person at a time. There was no place for extra furniture. But what motivated me to rent that room was the fact that the landlord did not live on the ground floor or even nearby. He was a landlord in absentia and therefore I could live like a free man, I thought. I would not be subject to the owner’s patronizing gaze every time I go out or come back. On the very first night, a man (the next door neighbor) came and tried to warm up to me. He said that my room had been occupied by a student for five long years who attended coaching classes for government services. His tone was very patronizing. He seemed proud to have a student living next door. He admitted that his circumstances had prevented him from continuing his studies when he was young. Before he left, he asked to tell him if I had any problems. The next morning, I discovered that one of my water tanks atop the terrace was leaking. (I did not know for how long the room had been lying vacant.) I heard a hoarse cry the next moment. My neighbor was back. He seemed agitated. “Yeh Dilli shahar hain. If anyone even complains, the police will come and you will be in trouble. Climb the terrace immediately and fix the leak. See, your landlord does not live here.”