Light in August

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I had been in the streets for few hours, alone and wandering. The street cut through posh localities, premium neighbourhoods, tall gates, taller trees, with an upper-class air. The street, like hundreds of other in this city, was a narrow, bituminous, ota-sealed with poor drainage, extremely vulnerable to notorious rain and shuddery cold. No wonder those roads needed frequent repairs. Repairs would come once in a year, or rather a total revamp, somewhere just before the beginning of monsoon, and within months incessant rain would play its part and the road returned to its pre-repair stage. That was a stupid thing to do, policy ineptitude, which meant a rough year of broken road to its commuters. But since there was money to be made in that, nobody, who mattered, bothered, and the status-quo has been a pampered child. Saturday is quite a scene in this part of the city. People dressed in best of their clothes, men in branded wear, ladies clad with hallmarked jewelleries, designer wear, with high heels and flaunting backs, going for the classiest restaurants, hottest eateries and latest cafes before it got cool. The city looks absolutely at ease.

I passed wonderfully-crafted modern houses, with a garage, cars parked in narrow driveways at the front. Those houses could easily pass out as a manor in this third world country. Spacious, bright, green. Most of them belonged to aristocrats, traditional rich and oligarchs. Few under construction houses belonged to nouveau riche, someone eager for a space with their new found riches, space to claim their own, to claim their arrival, to claim the attention their wealth asks. This is what the city does best, brings unsolicited standard with the wealth, all of a sudden, so sudden that you don’t even have time to get along with the culture of owning money and having to spend it. Money, like every other possession, asks for an art of possession, which, ironically, doesn’t come with the wealth, at least in this part of the world. City has a lot of premium space for riches. People with modest means, people who deserved much more, people who worked to make a difference, contributories to arts, literature, history, music, culture, civilization, for its own sake, still have to struggle for every inch of space or attention, or privilege in that regard. The preposterous sense of prerogatives of this city, reluctant to share the edifices of its square, is truly a distinct attribution.

I passed properly numbered houses, so rare in the city that you get a sense of order, a system designed to work, and working, surprisingly. Houses that served as offices to countless number of NGO/INGOs the city accommodated, most of which I had never even heard of. Those were the houses where most cherished dreams of a blue number-plated Toyota or land-rover ended. I passed posh cafes, filled with cheerful couples, separated from the horrible honking traffic of the street with a crystal clear glass pane. Perhaps, this is what they call window-seeing. Happiness inside, please come in.

Some years ago, I arrived to the city as one of a thousand of strangers. A kid just out of his teen, as miserable as it gets, confused, deluded, angry and hopeless, with high ambition for something, not quite aware of what, aspiring for whatever opportunities there were. And as a young boy would, I never made plans to the city, how to face a real city like I had seen in the movies. I thought I could just drift, move with the flow. I had never been as wrong.

Within days of arrival, darker sides appeared. Roads were unsafe, conspicuously littered, air was unbearable, dust and smog ruled the city. There were no open spaces. Trees, of whatever remained from what once was green belt, were being cut down to make way for new houses. Streets were dark and dangerous. Roads were broken, muddy, awaiting repairs, not even a trace of bitumen in sight, and very unsafe. Traffic was depressing. There were no rules. No discipline. Nothing whatsoever. The ownership of roads is directly proportional to the size of the motor vehicle. This was the unwritten hierarchy. Motorbikes raged the streets. The bicyclers and on foot traffic were treated like what they call a cattle class. Most depressing was the indifference, sheer indifference of the city to its immediate surroundings. I used that road for almost two years. Never once I saw potholes and puddles in front of a house being attended by its owner, never once I saw the garbage littered in front of the house be collected and disposed, never once I saw people attending to the overgrown trees or bushes. The city always expects someone else to do its job.

The city had grown exponentially in past few years. People migrated from all over the territory to this tiny land of mere some hundred square kilometers. Now I realize the city had never wanted to grow, or welcome the outsiders, unwilling to share its bit of knowledge and the wealth it accumulated. City folks blamed outsiders for their miseries. The populace from the hinterlands ravaged by war and fighting and killing, thronged to the city in search of security, opportunity, some solace. They were the uninvited guests, who came so suddenly and in so large numbers that no one knew what to make of them.

With people, came ambitions. Visitors cut off the city’s share of basic public utilities, its share of resources, and its share of the economic pie. Blaming was easy. City blamed outsiders for the mess. Outsiders blamed city authorities. City authorities blamed stubbornness of the city folks and outsiders alike. Then the city blamed the authorities again. Authorities blamed the funding agencies. Funding agencies blamed policing agencies. The infinite blaming game. Shit just got Meta.

This city is so ordinary that people have no regard for the ordinariness. You’re just another technical graduate to the city, or and undergrad or a college education seeker, a salary man, a practitioner of your trade. Just that. An ordinary. Hardly anything else. And yes, you are the outsider, you are the target. You have degraded the city values. You have made the city a terrible place to live in. You have crowded their streets, you have occupied their institutions, you have polluted their rivers, you have claimed their open spaces, and you have made a mess of what once used to be an urban paradise. You don’t know city manners, you don’t know how to mend ways, either you are too simple and so unnecessary, or you are too cunning and so a threat, you can’t uphold city values, you make fun of yourself. Look at yourself. 

Outsiders never hit back because they were used to being outsiders and when they did, they were brushed aside with the tag of whiners. Wealth built this city and it still is wealth that it keeps measuring a standard against. Sadly, the wealth never has been a human capital.

I grew silent, hostile inside and moderate outside. I was in conflict, and then I did what I do best at times like those. I took long walks. I started making more observations. I took more long walks and I found what I was looking for, maybe.

You stay long enough in a city, you develop four stages – you hate it, then you love it, then you hate it again and then you grow used to it, and grow indifference to things that made you hate it, like it never existed. Then you belong to the city. You become the city, if not in the coterie of core city insiders, then in the attitude of the city. And you become increasingly adamant that is where your rightful position is. And you like to assert that authority. Then the cycle repeats. Now they are the outsiders and you are the city. You now treat outsiders condescendingly, the same way once the city did to you. Welcome to the city.

The power to say no is a privilege to the city folks. The power to say no, to refuse, to make a decision for someone else, and to do them a favour. That is something no city would ever give up. And when someone says no to you, because they don’t like the look of your face, the magnitude of your expressions, or your geo-political orientation, that’s when it hurts the most. And you grow resilient, and at the impulse of the moment you decide to make the city pay for its misdemeanors. Sadly that vigor fades away as quickly as it was formed, because you know you have nowhere else to go. Fight or submit. Submit now, fight later. Fight now, submit later. All the same. Then and now. Here and now, if there is any point of time like now. As soon as it’s now, it’s already over, it becomes then and you wait for another now, and it becomes another then. An infinite loop.

I wasn’t aware about the existence of word schadenfreude then, the bearing would have been a lot easier. That realization was to come to me years later when I moved to another city and started being a part of it. Meanwhile there were miseries. A kid just out of high school, with no social experiences or any cultural understanding of the perspectives, I thought the world functioned like the city did. I became more miserable. What does a boy straight out of his teen has to be a man? He has to be in a wrong city at the right time. Later on the idea of a city was to change. The values, a geographical location, its inhabitants, spirit of the city were to change. That enlightenment was still years away. I tried visiting the city centers and public spaces, cultural and social confluence, hoping for assimilation into the city. That was my brief sisyphean moment. Then I grew used to the plight of the city, like thousands of others. But even then I found out we weren’t much different from the city folks. We were on the same boat, we shared the same plight. Maybe because we were on the same boat, maybe we knew too much of each other, we grew too suspicious of each other, maybe we didn’t know each other well enough and grew too hostile to each other. The city has too many well known secrets, too vulnerable, which makes it increasingly protective towards the vulnerability it exuded. Going radical for protection of its interests, doing nothing about the vulnerability itself but wasting more and more energy for its protection.  The more I learned about the city and more we grew closer, the distant the city felt, like a  completely unknown sphere, a place of imagination, where I had the maps embedded within my mind, but still felt completely lost, in its maze, its desolation.

Years later, I now realize, the city is as miserable as me, but not gifted enough to put it into words. As if it were screaming on the top of its voice, asking someone, anyone, to liberate it from the chains its establishment had put on, to set it free, to save it from its owners. But that is only as far as I feel. Impressions could be no more than a portrayal of how ruthless animosity could be.

It was the month of August, with monsoon in its full swing. Dark clouds reined the sky deep into the horizon. Intermittent drizzles were common. And with a gloomy heart I left the city. I couldn’t decide then if it was too early or too late. I didn't feel happy to finally have left. When the bus was cruising through that wonderfully constructed but poorly maintained hilly highway, making its steep steering through the blind-spotted winds and hairpin bends, I then realized what I wanted. I never wanted to be ordinary again.

The city, at least, gave me that.

(The title Light In August is taken from the 1932 novel of same name by the American Southern author William Faulkner)