1.
They say, thinking for sure of the colonnades and promenades of other cities, that this is not a great city. They say, missing the grand squares and glittering fountains, that this city has no centre. They say, envying clock towers that have for two hundred years marked the hours, that this city has no pictures worthy of postcards. They say, reminding us of the profound reverberations of ruins, that this city has lost its past. They forget that you and I—walking down some main street, holding hands on a particular crossing—fell in love in this city. They forget that in thinking of love in the city one can start to love the city even if all one remembers, when asked to say something about this love that the city so secretly enshrines, is an image of a lone man in a mall on Valentine’s Day, shyly picking out a pink bra.
2.
I get off at the City station, having fallen asleep on the upper berth and then woken to join the queue in the narrow aisle. Through that drowsy haze all the clamour on the platform is as shocking as a dream. A sprawling woman falls on the crowded steps going up and in the bright new restaurant people are polishing off full south Indian meals. They seem like actors eating in a play; it’s impossible to imagine that in their mouths, at this late hour, sambar and rice will taste like rice and sambar. Dodging the murmurs of the unshaven ones whose ‘Taxi’ hovers between question, promise and plea, trying not to lean on the walls of the prepaid auto-rickshaw stand which is crawling with cockroaches, I am finally out on the big road home.
Just before the enormous flyover with its green-and-white municipal signs promising much more city, a small group of people stands around a pushcart, eating bread and omelettes with their bags around their feet, indifferent to the traffic. Kumara Krupa Road is empty and the golf course silent as the sea. The Palace Grounds’ five gates announce five ongoing weddings, the names of couples spelt out in giant confetti letters; tomorrow night the names will be different, the weddings the same. On the winding road home there is a gap of bare earth where something was but however hard I try, I can’t remember what. And then, when I’m almost there, I stop. My neighbours have sealed up their door and made a new one at the other end of the wall. That’s all I remember falling asleep on the same bed, in a different season.
3.
There is the past and then there is how we think about the past.
One man tells me: In the old days we’d see snakes here.
The other man tells me: When I was a child, out early on my way to school, I’d go past fields of sunflowers where the shops are now. In the mud between the flowers, I’d spot tracks left by cobras.
One man tells me: There were hardly any people living here and just two buses a day.
The other man tells me: There was the village of Geddalahalli and then nothing. The next settlement was Nagashettyhalli. On a summer day, if you saw clouds of dust in the far distance, you knew it was the bus.
One man tells me: I came here to work and in fifty years I moved from clerk to deputy chief.
The other man says: To improve my English I used to cycle furiously after school to Blue Diamond to catch the 3.30 show of a Charles Bronson or Mel Brooks film. But I couldn’t understand the accents; I didn’t know why people were laughing. The next day, I’d watch the same film again and this time make sure to laugh at the right scenes before anyone else could.
The past could be a frayed sheet of paper whose fading words you read out again and again even though you and everyone else already knows them by heart. The past could be a sail that you fill with the wind of your lungs so that it moves you forward into freedom.
4.
You think everyone lives unique lives and the mystery of the human heart can never be fully penetrated but listen again.
I wake up and someone’s going on in the lane in a northern accent: ‘Phifteen thousand ... Phifteen thousand.’ When I step out my mobile phone neighbour who always talks in the percentages is leaning on his gate and talking in percentages. When I get on the bus, a girl keeps shifting around her baby under a big fleece jacket to disguise the fact that she’s got her fingers in my handbag. I try to overtake three rapid women in burkas before me and all I hear are the figures. Nineteen lakhs, sixteen lakhs, three lakhs. It all adds up. Someone calls me. Tax saving platinum card credit insurance valued customer offer and I hang up. It rings again. It says six hundred rupees will cover a day’s meals for fifty orphans. I make my way down Cunningham Road and a student-looking girl hands me a form. Something to do with cancer care. ‘It’s up to you, how much you want to give.’ I give her a hundred bucks and feel irrelevant. If I’d given her more or nothing, I’d have felt irrelevant, or at least that’s how I justify it to myself. She tells me their office is just down the road but down the road all I find is a construction site. One uncle gives me this for perspective: when he came to Bangalore in 1957 he paid five rupees a month for a shared room. A taxi-driver informs me, ‘Everything depends on the M factor’ and I ask, foolishly, ‘M Factor?’ A youth called Naresh comes to collect the money for the orphans. Hair dyed russet, dot of kumkum on the forehead, stylishly tied nylon scarf. ‘I’m just a volunteer at the orphanage. The rest of the time I’m a collection agent for a bank.’ It’s Christmas. I go for a walk. A girl holding aloft a cake box enquires suddenly into her phone, ‘Why am I talking to you?’ And the person at the other end whispers loud enough for the city to hear, ‘For money.’
Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head, and the short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures. She has also published a book of poems called Street on the Hill. Her books have been nominated for various awards including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the Hindu Best Fiction Award and the Crossword Fiction Award. She has been Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury and visiting professor of creative writing at Ashoka University.