Routes

Much better this week. After suppressing the urge to blog in, I managed to get some work done. And the fact that I travelled out of town last weekend helped, I guess. I'd gone to meet my relatives - aunts, uncles, distant cousins - "back home". In Indian parlance, I'd gone to my "native place". This visit was rather important because I was visiting for the first time after I'd gotten married. The wife wanted to meet all the family, so we finally managed to make time for a quick splash-and-dash.

The drive is rather pleasant once you hit the open highway after the city limits. In fact, I'm not sure if it's a bad idea that Mumbai stops right where it does. Otherwise, you'd be driving through a lunar landscape forever. Outside the jurisdiction of the BMC, it's a smooth, fast drive. The only blots on the landscape are all the roadhogs. We seem to have no shortage of people with money to buy fast cars but not an iota road manners. The radio was doing well, and I caught Go! 92.5 FM well beyond a 100 klicks. Well, when it wasn't interrupting all the arguments my dad and I were having with my mom and wife about what I meant by "blots on the landscape".

Visits to my hometown (in the past) were always a cause of embarrassment for me. All those people - relatives, mostly - flocking around, peering at me like I was some bug. And the comparisons - my son, my nephew, he's older, he's younger, he's fatter, he doesn't eat, - were never ending. They changed as I grew up - how can he graduate, he's younger than my son, he should be married, isn't he too old to be single? - but didn't go away.

I used to cringe at the very thought of going to our village because that is what it is. A village. Small, dusty and very quiet. Nothing to do really, once you've reached and the pleasantries are over. I didn't know my distant cousins, I didn't jell with them, they didn't know English and my Gujarati was worse. So a few hesitant sentences later, we used to settle for Bollywood Hindi. And try to play. I had never learned - not even today - to spin tops, or play marbles, or fly kites. Or even card games. I resented the invasion - however temporary - of my privacy.

And the attendant problems: the water was hard and tasted funny, the food was too rich and sweet, pools of oil and ghee all over your plate. They haven't yet gone away. No, I didn't buy packged drinking water, I just asked for chilled water. Kills the taste somewhat.

They're still there, but either I've learned to ignore them or they're not quite so in-your-face. Or maybe because I slept through most of the time that we were there.

This time around, I saw my ancestral house - really opened my eyes and saw - for the first time. How my great-grandfather built the house from teak logs. They're still there, the house is still standing, people stay in it. My great-grandpa, he was a timber merchant and so he selected the best wood he had with him. Photos of him and my great-grandmother. My grand-uncle, telling me how the whole village had felicitated my grandfather when he graduated. He was the first graduate from the village. How the residents gathered around in front of our house in the light of lanterns while the headman spoke of the honour my grandfather had brought to the village. That, in a time when the only electrical connection in the village fed a radio and a loudspeaker mounted on top of our house so that the village could listen to the news. How my father was the first doctor from the village. That he'd grown up and lived in Bombay all his life was ignored; they were just glad to see us.

All in all, nice visit, but let's not do that for another five years, OK?