'Improved' Roads

I have been observing the changes in the roads along my daily commute during the past couple of years. These changes are instituted by the civic authority under the misguided impression that it improves a fairly painful state of affairs. No change can make a desired-for difference to the choked traffic that’s a perennial sore in Bangalore city. However, a little courtesy and willingness to follow basic traffic rules would make all the difference in the world.

If the drivers were asked to follow lane discipline or pay up say 10k in fines, I am sure people would see reason. After all a large percentage of these very drivers or their employers seem to follow rules with alacrity while living abroad. Apparently white men’s rules are sort of easier to digest while in India, we automatically become annoying and ill-behaved and couldn’t care a fig for rules. Another case for consideration is that of drunken drivers – those special people who believe that drink makes them invincible and why bother about the poor souls that are hit? If you get caught, slip the cop five hundred rupees and you are free to go your way. If instead of patting these imbeciles on the head, the police actually penalize them as well as confiscate their licenses, potential drunks can simply arrange for cabs and leave the other road-traversing populace well alone.

Without taking such basic steps, it seems to me to be an utter time-wasting exercise to widen roads, build flyovers or plug in the nasty curses known as magic boxes. Widened roads make no difference if cars are jammed door to door since everyone wants to get to places fast and no one sticks to the lanes. Thus a two lane road metamorphoses into a 6 lane disaster during peak hours. No one can go anywhere and no one will get anywhere on time. Flyovers seem to be a matter of personal taste. Depending on which short-sighted idiot is the head-honcho, flyovers are either built or left half done. The ones that do get built are mostly a hastily thrown together mix of pillars and slabs and are so uneven that anyone going beyond 10kms an hour had better watch out unless of course you drive a world-war 2 issue tank.

I need a whole new section to discuss those monstrosities of Bangalore roads – the (black) magic boxes. As I understand it, these things which look like boxes with two open faces for vehicles to pass, were first developed to function as drains and are primarily pre-fabricated and touted as instant underpasses. Our wonderful authorities spend taxpayers’ money to fly to various countries to ‘study’ road development technologies and come back with bulging shopping bags and obsolete drain technology. Thus my commute was made inordinately long and even more painful by the introduction of these crappy boxes at major junctions. Consequently where cars once shoved each other but managed to turn, now cars shove each other and not manage to move an inch. These boxes themselves are designed only for small cars and if you have the misfortune to own anything larger than a snuffbox, you need to find alternative routes.

The best example I have to prove my premise that whoever decides how roads should be improved is basically either drunk or stoned is the infamous Cauvery Junction just before the Mekhri circle underpass on the way to the international airport. I have no way of avoiding it except a route that adds an hour to my commute which I simply cannot endure. So every day as I go along merrily, this is what happens at that very special junction -I go due north (the route is straight as an arrow) and lo and behold I am asked to do a yogic asana like u-turn to continue along the same direction. Why should I turn left and then right and then left again and get back to the same road instead of going forward ten feet? Nobody knows – certainly not the drug-infused architect.

After that its pretty much go up(hold your breath folks) and come down (wheeeee!) over three magic boxes before I hit the sanity of the Hebbal flyover and thence to a magic-box free stretch all the way home. Formerly all of it was just a straight stretch of road but how boring was that! So my commute along this apparently signal-free corridor (which has only 8 signals!) has gone up by at least forty-five minutes in peak time and the only consolation I have is that I am told constantly by the media and the asinine politicians that this is an improvement if I only make myself accept it! Jai Ho!

The girl at the window

The breeze smelled salty and so very fresh. She inhaled deeply and happily. The sun felt warm and comforting on her face and arms as she leaned on the window-sill on a bright summer day. It was the place they always came to in the summer – away from the noise and bustle of their town residence. Her heart always leapt in glee when the first sounds of the waves reached her ears on the approach to the seaside. The sound embodied peace as well as a promise of hours of relaxation or sport as one chose. She loved soaking in the sun and could usually be found leaning on this particular sill for it was her favourite part of the cottage.
Her enjoyment of the sea was in no way diminished by the fact that she was blind. In fact it made her even more sensitive to the nuances in the sounds of the waves crashing on or embracing the shore depending on the tides high and low. She could hear all the children at play around her. She could feel the gritty sand beneath her feet and the delicious coolness of the water playfully splashing at her. Her laughter would ring out joyously when she felt the waves sucking the sand out from under her feet so that she lost her balance just a little. Her mother always fretted and worried but for her who had never known sight, the lack of it seemed a part of her existence and something to be accepted and not obsessed over.
Her mind painted vivid images of the blue seas and the bright sunshine till she felt herself lost in that cheerful world within. How she longed for the cottage and the bay during the months in town! Each time she returned, she would go to her special place and lean contentedly against the sill once again, feeling curiously complete. Each time it was a true homecoming.

Note :Written as part of an exercise for my book club

Woman by the roadside

The two children were playing outside in the dust. They were plump and looked healthy though a little dirt-encrusted. They were also bottomless and seemed inordinately pleased about that state of affairs. The mother stood nearby in the outfit that seems to have emerged as the symbol of today’s Indian womanhood – the nightie. One would think that a nightdress was something one had to wear at night. But this particular manifestation of nightwear is most often seen in daytime as well and is a shapeless tent like attire commonly made of synthetic fabric – cotton being more expensive. The women of the lower classes liked theirs frilly and about ankle length to allow for the showing of decrepit and frayed petticoats. The middle-class women wore longer ones which were neatly ironed and possibly classified into day-wear and night-wear.
So the little kids were playing in the dirt in and around a prone and rusted bicycle with bottoms bared for the world to see while their mother fed them some sort of mash out of a dabba which she further mashed in her fingers and pasted onto their tongues. The boys were perhaps a year and a half old and were twins. They seemed to be mesmerised by the rusty cycle and parked their rear ends on dangerously pointed and variously dented parts. I cringed when I saw one tiny bottom settling on one of the toothed wheel s on which the cycle chain rested. The mother seemed oblivious, standing by the roadside and watching the cars go on the road with a vacant expression, moving on a hidden timer to paste more mush into one of her offspring. She was the shopkeeper’s wife and they were rather decently off. He owned the small shop and the property around it and also rented out four or five small sets of rooms to make a comfortable living.
I wondered what the lady was thinking while she watched the cars and the people pass by. Did she yearn for a lifestyle different from hers? Did she display a sense of superiority over her neighbours whose shacks did not even boast of a tin roof? Did she wallow in a sense of achievement for having produced two male offspring in a land where daughters-in-law were likely to be abused or abandoned for giving birth to girls? Did she merely stare in order to watch men strut around knowing that she watched? Perhaps she was catching a break and failed to see her sons almost impaling themselves. Or perhaps she didn’t care – it was one more chore on her list and she would do it and that was it. Meanwhile, she could always dream.

Smiling Hippos

Mornings are always hectic in my house. Breakfast has to be made, lunch has to be packed, and assorted characters have to be woken up. I am frequently business like and curt in the mornings since that is my mindset at the time. Who has time to stop and enjoy the fragrance of freshly-brewed tea? Who has the time to glance at the newspapers in anything more than the most cursory fashion? Who has the time to berate tardy maids? This then is how I greet each day. Every morning I resolve to be cool and pleasant-tongued only to wake up late and screech “Oh, no!” before diving headlong into a fury of work.
My children have, over the years, learnt not to respond verbally to my frequent admonitions to hurry and brush, hurry and bathe, hurry and eat. This does not mean that they wake up on time or brush their teeth without squeezing half the contents of the paste tube into the sink. This just means that they drag their feet and irritate me and my husband wordlessly! As soon as we are all in the car, I relax and so can everyone else.
So this morning while I was furiously towelling my daughter dry, she grinned and asked me if I knew why the hippo was happy. I raised my eyebrows and continued with my work of slathering on lotion on her arms and legs and replied that I had no clue why any hippo should be happy. She said that the hippo in the zoo was smiling mightily just like the chimpanzee. “So why was the chimpanzee smiling?” I asked. “Don’t you remember that someone gave it some biscuits, Amma?” she piped up. It was true – some nut had thrown biscuits at the chimpanzee in the zoo completely disregarding the sign that said “Please don’t feed the animals”. “He was so happy to eat it and that’s why the chimpanzee was smiling”. I agreed and started helping her with her clothes. “So why was the hippo smiling then?” I continued. “I think he liked me because I waved at him and said softly “Have a nice day, hippo!””. I smiled at her and said she was right. She skipped merrily away downstairs to eat her breakfast.
So I found my morning was easier when I allowed myself a moment to smile instead of running around like a headless chicken. I marvelled at a child who could go to sleep full of dreams and wake up thinking of smiling hippos. How lovely it would be if all of us could care enough to make at least one person smile in one day! Even if it happened to be a hippo ;-)