A Walk In The Night
The night is getting inkier and windier, a light drizzle is in the offing. Must take that walk before it's too late. With the stent implanted in the clogged artery had come the surgeon's life-or-death injunction - daily 40 min brisk walk wherever I be.
Willy nilly I mosey out of the tower block to the promenade skirting the housing sprawl- a gated community housed in twenty three high rise tower blocs , 18×8×23 households , a microcosm of an upbeat, bustling, cosmopolitan India.
The bracing wind sends a shiver rippling down my spine. All thoughts of looming ‘May-Day’s are pushed further into a corner. Paradoxically, in May this itty-bitty south Indian soupcon is a cool haven very unlike my sweltering, steaming, scorching north Indian abode. Unavoidably my sojourn in this haven ends soon. The searing north will reclaim, repossess me.
For now, my mood is cheery. The promenade is really wide, at places exceeding twenty feet. Few roads in towns I lived in fifty years ago were as wide-bodied. It is now astir with walkers- the elderly ambling along ; the not so young strolling, walking the talk to iron out creases in their pacy lives, away from the confines of home, in the relative obscurity of the walkway; the fitness freaks cantering feverishly ; many walking their dogs or pushing their kiddies in perambulators. Some walks seem atonements for sins of past or continuing gourmandizing , many others in dread of a like fate .
A boy whooshes by in a 'Lance Armstrong' bike. Looking around I see many like him furiously peddling away. I get sucked into a whirl of nostalgia about my youthful days. Back then the bicycle and its three-wheeler variant, the rickshaw, were the ubiquitous and most utilitarian mode of 'aam aadmi’ transport. I had got my only bicycle on admission to a post graduate college in Patna. It served me well. I half rode, oft waded with it through the flooded city in 1975 just for the heck of it. Ignoring parental admonitions not to enter the contaminated floodwaters my recce of submerged areas lasted several days. The floods, I remember, had stayed long. I had nothing much to do. And I was young and immune and impervious to elderly dictats. Luckily, nuts and bolts of the bike and its rider suffered no damage. After I got a job the bicycle in full working condition was gifted away to our domestic help. I couldn't remain loyal to it. The present is built on ruins of the past, it is said. How true ! Bicycles and rickshaws have all but disappeared, becoming instruments of physical exercise rather than of conveyance.
A voice snaps me out of my sterile reverie.
‘Aren’t both their children in New Jersey ?’, a not so elderly couple pose to each other within my earshot. Something clicks within me. Fifty years ago when my maternal uncle found a US bound groom for his daughter his family instantly rose a notch higher in social esteem. A son-in-law in US , what a catch ! Another fifty years behind , not accolade but social opprobrium was heaped upon anyone daring to cross the ‘seven seas’. Even the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore was not spared, excommunicated and ostracized from the brahmin fold for stepping beyond the Indian shores. How things have changed ! Were all our expatriates to return home and the same penalty inflicted , the cast outs would far outnumber the scheduled outcasts. Almost every fourth household in my own neighbourhood has a close relative living abroad. India has spread wide its tentacles in the global village.
Outdated taboos have become do-dos. And there are many more Jersey cows in India than Indians in New Jersey. Global ‘trafficking’ is multi-dimensional.
I plod along, a slow-footed parody of the brisk walk advisory. Only when a young lady in leggie, slim-fit shirt and Adidas looking sports shoes strides past me in a jiffy do I become aware of my medical transgression. I speed up a bit, little hope though of ever catching up with her. Time honours trots not plods.
But the sureness, the spring in her strides, and ,above all, the confidence with which she carries herself fascinates me. My gaze stalks her. There she is, rounding a tower. Involuntarily I raise my head, the tower seems to be in a surreal blaze, its coruscating brilliance streaming out of windows and passageways. Little of it lights the walkways. The lamp posts on ground looking like stunted children glow vainly. Its light is easily devoured by the ambient greens. So while the towers are dazzingly aglow , the promenade is dim-lit in stark contrast. The lady in the leggie has melted into its unrelieved darkness.
I have some more minutes of my walkathon to get through. The sky is now pitch dark, the moon having chosen to shed its reflected glory in other parts of the earth. Promenaders are still rounding the curves and a drizzle seems unlikely. I ease up in my walk.
A young couple animatedly swaying heads and jerking arms saunters past. I hear the female plainly , unmistakably saying, ‘chutia hai sala....’ and more in the same vein. Quite inexplicably I feel a surge of inscrutable reassurance. Deep underneath the encrustation of opulence, social atomization and sophistication man's survival instinct is as intense, as crude ,and as cut-throat as in his hunter-gatherer, nomadic days.
Men will ever be men. It's comforting to know they will never be automatons.
