Outside

by Balaji Iyer

[box] When you have lived in a place that has touched your soul in ways more than one, your writing of that sublime experience will be nothing less than divine. Balaji Iyer celebrates the spirit of Bangalore, a city that has shown him many things magical. The write-up is a tribute to the May 2011 issue themed ‘My Place, My Soul’.[/box] [box type=”info”]MONTH: May 2011

THEME: MY PLACE, MY SOUL

CONCEPT: Here’s a theme that gave us a chance to look at places and travel from a very personal perspective.

FEATURED WRITER OF MAY 2011: Bishwanath Ghosh, Journalist and Author, ‘Chai, Chai:  Travels in Places Where You Stop But Never Get Off ’.

This was one of those interesting themes that brought in a common perspective emerging from all the contributions – the human connection to a place that makes it almost like a relationship rather than a mere destination. It isn’t much about mud and trees and mountains and terrain or anything geographic so to speak, but about feelings, an invisible bond, a certain madness and pure experience. The editorial team was pleasantly surprised by this common feature that emerged because this was rather an outcome of the theme than a notion that led to the theme. [/box]

There is no ‘outside’ in Mumbai, or in Chennai, Boston or San Francisco. But in Bangalore where I live, there is an outside. And it is magnificent, a presence in itself, making the inside seem redundant. Out of my door stretches a sun drenched terrace and a moon soaked roof. Coconut leaves fan the sweating tiles and stray petals of paper flowers flit about, their nonchalance leading them to ugly drain pipes. A wise koel rules from her perch, and sings throatily, lustily in that pre-dawn, when everything is fresh and new. Somehow it is always the same, my terrace. The same cool breeze, just the right amount of sunlight and just the perfect drizzle.

Ask any Indian to speak of Bangalore, and they will sigh “The weather…” .Ask a native Bangalorean however, and they frown “The weather…”. This dichotomy about the weather always confused me; for an outsider it is always cool, always clean and calm, the weather just right – an Englishman’s fantasy. For the native Bangalorean however, it is too hot. Too dusty, too windy and too humid, not cold enough and it isn’t misty yet, even though December has come and is already almost gone. Every city in India professes to a certain amount of urban rhetoric. Mumbai is the stuff dreams are made of. Delhi is brash but moneyed and Kolkata is socialist but cultured. Chennai has its seaside and music – Kutthu to Kalyani. Hyderabad lives in the decayed opulence of the Nizams and rolls in the film industry’s moolah. Even upstarts like Patna and Cochin are building legends for themselves. In this soiree peopled by cities, Bangalore is the dilettante. New, unsure of herself but with a hint of pride,  slowly shedding off her ‘garden city’ and ‘pensioner’s paradise’ tags, she struggles to capture her ‘je ne sais quoi’.

Every tourist guide can blather out a list of blahs to visit in Bangalore, but its true beauty lies in its lanes – with insane trees blooming away out of control, among tidy, staid houses. And the best way to tour Bangalore is to walk, not just because the traffic drives perfectly sane people into committing horrendous acts of murder. Reflected in the glass fronted high rises of Bangalore, is another city in hiding. One that packs enough charm to melt the heart of a traffic-hardened, battle weary Indian. The trick is to find that city, get there and enjoy it before it is ground up to rubble to make space for that new mall. There is that lane with antique, colourful pots, and that one where old Christian ladies bake and bake, and never tire of feeding strangers. There is a street, where the smell of jasmine hits one so strongly, almost like a drug. Then there is that street, the most quintessential of all in Bangalore, which goes nowhere and does nothing, but simply is, in beautiful stasis, frozen in perfection for eternity.

And then there are the malls, overflowing with human detritus in the weekends, smelling of sweet sweet cash. Follow the fendi wearing women (at a distance and at your own risk) and they eventually lead to well kept- houses, with wild gardens, with conifers and coconuts growing side by side. Clearly this is a city that still believes in simple living and high spending.

Certainly a city’s identity owes at least a part of itself to food. The stomach cannot be wrong, I said to myself and set out to sample what the city offered. And did it offer! I ate fluffy flowery idlis under blooming champak trees, ate famous branded idlis after standing in line for forty minutes (almost edged out by sly old women), I ate an idli that was steamed in a banana leaf, its very identity circumspect because of its brown colour, but it tasted divine nevertheless. And then I ate dosas, of which Bangalore has a bewildering variety to offer, even to jaded south Indians who think they’ve eaten it all. In the span of a week, I sampled dosas dripping with ghee, dosas with exotic chutneys, dosas with the crunchiest of skins and delicate insides, dosas which looked one way and tasted quite another, dosas with delightful bites of jaggery within and dosas with crisp chillies sewn into their lattice being. I ate at the chic hard rock café, at the expensive TGIF, I moaned under the weight of Italian brunches with fake bruschetta and ate a pungent bony hilsa under the watchful gaze of a few worried Bengalis. To keep myself alert, lest I miss the best morsel of grub this city has to offer, I drank filter coffee by the barrel, hot and strong, the way Bangalore likes it. I liked it too.

What clinched the deal for me, so to speak, in the end, were its bookstores. Not just the sheer number of Crosswords and Landmarks (with their very wide selections, and hair-straightened celebrity talk-shows) but also the little bookstores. Every Bangalorean who can string together letters knows of that one elusive bookshop, where you could get that last copy of Maugham in the whole world. There are bookshops with tottering piles of books where one can get lost, and emerge only to spot an even older bookshop across the street. There is a shop, tucked into a tiny, leafy lane in Malleshwaram where the shopkeeper watches your picks with his beady eye. And if you pick classics, he will tap you heartily on the back, pour you a cup of the best filter kaapi from his ancient thermos and send you packing without letting you pay. Of course I’m not telling you where it is. It’s my secret, that piece of knowledge that I can parade, to claim to be a true Bangalorean.

Early in April this year, I nearly shocked myself to a stop at the sight of a jacaranda in full bloom. The entire thoroughfare looked transformed, a wild riot of violets raining upon the insane traffic below. A week later, they died and other pink flowers came. It was a riotous celebration of sorts, a magic that suffused the air, beautifully nauseating, sickly sweet and very Bangalore.

In the end, Bangalore achieves perfection not so much from being itself, but from a little borrowing: part aggression, part passivity, part order and part chaos. Much like its weather.

Balaji Iyer loves to read, eat and travel (sometimes doing all together). He also likes music and maps. He blogs at http://idlichutney.wordpress.com

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