The city around me

When you’ve lived in the same city for a large part of your life, you start noticing what visitors often don’t see. In cricket-crazy India who even knows that there’s a football stadium and a dedicated football subculture (only very few of whom buy jerseys from the ManU shop next to the Hard Rock Cafe). And not many visitors may come by to see the vistas of the city painted on the walls outside the football stadium.

You notice the constant small crowd outside this ice-cream shop which has been selling ice-cream sandwich for three generations. The crowds formed ever since the shop lost its battle in court to stay in the place where people like me found it as they wandered out of one of the city’s major local train stations. Every day there are people as old as me coming with youngsters to memorialize one of the city’s old landmarks before it passes. We have been among them, bringing a niece here with her boyfriend.

You pass an unremarkable restaurant where you’ve had a couple of nice lunches maybe fifteen years ago, and stoop to take a photo of street cats hanging at the entrance. You tell them, “Yes, the fish is quite good here,” as you walk away. That’s what you’d come here for, and remember years later.

Or you are caught in a traffic jam next to a blank wall whose texture you’ve admired for years. You’ve always hoped to get a photo here, but nothing really happens against that wonderful wall. Now, as your car idles, you see a (possibly) interesting intersection of shadows, and you take a photo. Does it work? Somewhat. Perhaps. But you’ll still be on the lookout for a better photo to take against this empty wall by a busy road.

Maybe along a cluttered lane which you have not taken for forty years, you see a clean white-washed house. An entrance door stands open as well-dressed women pass in and out. A widow’s home! Curious. You take a photo, meaning to find out later what kind of endowment runs a charity like that. And who they help. There are always single mothers in need of help in this city.

One weekend you walk out of a convenient coffee shop, on your way to buying a growler of your favourite craft beer, when you see the Yacht Club looking nice in the sunlight. You juggle the cup and your phone to take a photo, and realize that you’ve caught Mitter Bedi’s studio in the corner of the photo. It’s not a great shot, but it is a homage to the first industrial photographer in India, one whose photos are a foundation of the visual language you know.

Or you pass one of those dead end alleys which has better potential for discarded garbage than the tourist trade. The sunlight makes you pause. You take a photo of a green metal gate, rusting quietly and unremarked. Remarkably, the gate fronts a tiny shop where someone repairs swivel chairs! I wouldn’t have paid it any attention if the shop was open.

Sometimes you notice how a little temple has grown over the years. In the middle of the business district what once was a little stone idol on the pavement has grown into an idol-encrusted south Indian-style temple. And some time in the last two years it has fenced off the corner of the sidewalk. It seems clear to me that the temple will grow in coming years. It is one of the constant changes in a living and litigious city.