Leaving Guwahati

I am leaving Guwahati, for some time, perhaps for longer than I know and I am not sure when I will be back. When I first came to Guwahati nearly four years to the exact day, the city I had observed is not the city that I see today. And as I begin to pack my bags and start saying my goodbyes, the city and its newly changing face come back to me in every corner and turn of the road that I take and urge’s me not to leave.

The city that we grow up in is not always the city that we remember and I am sure better people than me, and better pens than mine have rendered the same words and the same judgment in far more eloquent prose and poetry. Yet the city that leaves its mark on you is more often the one you remember than the one you don’t.

I was lucky to grow up in city, which I also remembered again by the fact of working in it. I had finished my studies upto class 12 in Guwahati itself, but then you cannot really know a city as a child and worse, a school going child ensconced with the kindly but firm familial embrace that did not believe in street education’s importance to a child. The first city I perhaps knew was Pune, where I went to college. Though most people today believe it to be the only city that actually started out decadent, it was quite a change from the bucolic existence of mine.

Cities change and so do people, and I had come back after completing my studies and various internships in various metropolises in India and had found to no great surprise that home was the same as it had been the 5 years before I had left it.

Guwahati to me, 4 years ago didn’t look like the Forbidden City, perhaps that’s only because it was not called the Forbidden City. It didn't look inviting. It didn't look as though it sold postcards, though we do get them now. The only souvenir you were likely to get would be, perhaps, your teeth. In a bag. Certain areas were described, in various travelogues and brochures, as being “quaint” and “folkloric” which was a nice euphemism for “you’ve been warned”. There were certain ancient parts of the city, whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never enquired about one another's business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet.

And then we had the smaller towns like Jorhat and Dibrugarh where people think us to be weird and crazy and always worried about the future and think that it comes from eating unnatural foods. Guwahati was supposed to be a wet rainforest jungle till a few hundred years ago, and it has not changed much except that it has got drier and had more carnivores now.

I started working in the city of my birth and growth and found so many things that belied description that even putting the same down in words, on paper is unreal.
Today the youngsters hang out in the trendy new chain coffee stores and drink cappuccinos, when we used to drink “laal saah” by our addas. The new watering holes have names evocative of magic and temptation, our holes were pits like Indraloy Bar where managing three drinks before a fight broke out was magic in itself.

Finding a cyber café was an achievement, though mostly the cafes would be nothing more than an enterprising young fellow with a computer at his home with a tortoise-slow dial-up connection, but we thanked god for small mercies and mailed our pals in Mumbai and Delhi and cribbed and complained about the state of Assam, pun fully intended.

Today, its hard to walk 50 feet in any direction within the city and 100 feet outside the city before seeing the ubiquitous Sify sign board, winking red temptation and speedy DSL cable connections. Guwahati has always been a city which believes in fads, and when we first saw public call offices, or trekkers, or minibuses (canters) or wine shops, it would just take a few weeks before the phenomenon would spawn crazily all over the city and everyone would jump on the bandwagon of the day. In a way, this is truly the ethos of this enchanting and infuriating place.

People who were not indigenous to the region started most of these new businesses and as with most cultures, it’s the exiles, the men and women, tough and strong enough to leave their pasts who can create something new. It is the exiles who own the earth; because they are tough enough to walk without shoes, eat stale crusts and even mate with strange women. For they will survive. Walk any road in the world, they say, and you will find a foreigner making money out of the locals. Look up in the sky and see the wild geese flying across the moon. And, while it was true that a lot of people came to Guwahati because it was a city of opportunity, sometimes it was the opportunity not to be beaten up, hung or dismantled for whatever crimes they had left behind in the villages and in the hills.

A lot of people came to the city in the past years, some for work and some for creating work for others. The latter community was swinging to boom time now, for it was a community all right. A community of students who would come in the search of specific subjects, freedom, better opportunities and the dream of bohemia.

The last few years, students have been accumulating and streaming into the city every year and like most places, they have brought the winds of change and zephyrs of fresh, new ideas and ways. Some good, some interesting, but definitely blowing the winds of change. You can find couples dating and walking about in trendy outfits and in trendier locations. Call me jealous, but I truly hate God at such times, that I was born a few years too early!!

In my salad years of a schoolboy, back in the days of yore, the sight of a girl talking to us boys would be stared at by the rest of us, in the manner of those who have heard of the species 'female' but have never expected to get this close to one. Today, you are more likely to find kids from class 10 and 12 inhabiting the city’s discos, pub’s and coffeehouses. They are young, brash and have hard cash, which is a change all right.

There is an ancient Chinese curse, it goes "May you live in interesting times"... I guess, we must have got on the bad side of some of the Chinese generals during the Indo-Chinese war and the curse was a delayed-reaction one. I am definitely living in interesting times.

The new generation has perhaps its own defence and its own bohemian ideals that they espouse. I remember the trouble I had explaining to my parents and Assorted Aunts Inc. the possibility of girls who can just be platonic friends with me, much to my secret disgust, and not mean any harm. So, I guess, its just another change, another day…

Poets have tried to describe Guwahati. They have failed. Perhaps it's the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it's just that a city with a million inhabitants and no working sewers during the monsoons is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder.

There was a certain something about the air in the city. ... You couldn't help noting with each breath that thousands of other people were very close to you and nearly all of them had armpits. This part of Guwahati was known as Paltan Bazaar and Phasi Bazaar, an inner-city area sorely in need either of governmental help or, for preference, a flamethrower. It couldn't be called squalid because that would be stretching the word to breaking point. But with the advent of the new brand stores, I am wondering how long will these bastions of consumer durables last out.
In the past, I would remember myself being dragged to these areas, by my mom and my Assorted Aunts Inc. (Its easier to term them thus, they are not countable and I would get lost even trying) These fearless women would go out in droves to sack, pillage, plunder with others of their kind and never was such an invasion by an assortment of valkyrie’s welcomed with such heartfelt joy perhaps. The narrow streets and the stifling shops smelling of new clothes and the invisible assistants up in the attics, who were shouted weird incomprehensible codes and lo, behold, the exact colour, size and shape would appear in the product demanded. It was a weird and incomprehensible world and fun to get lost in, especially with the advantages of being inundated with cold drinks everywhere we went.

Today, when my sisters and their friends, the new generation of Assorted Aunts Inc. perhaps, drag me to cool, air-conditioned swanky malls, I still get lost in the smell of new clothes, only there is no mystique and its all very quiet and organized and no fun. People would browse in silence and there is no uproar of weird meaningless phrases and the sales assistants are behind the counters. There are also no free cold drinks, sadly.

The only thing that is still constant is that I am still being dragged, will-nilly, against my will to be shopped for, to shop, or basically just to stand as porter cum driver cum sounding board for Assorted Sisters and Aunts Inc.

Something’s never change, such as the merchants of Fancy Bazaar. The shopkeepers of Fancy Bazaar knew about old money, which was somehow hallowed by the fact that people had hung on to it for years, and they knew about new money, which seemed to be being made by all these upstarts that were flooding into the city these days. But under their powdered armpits they were of business families, and knew that the best kind of money was the sort that was in their hands and not someone else's. The best kind of money was mine, not yours, as always.

As I write this, I am informed that yet another one of us has got his visa and is leaving in a day or two. I am waiting for mine and to pass the time, my remaining friends, rather their wives, which is somehow worse, are going to take me out to watch the latest release.

The movie halls are yet to be changed, but I hear underground swells about multiplexes and such. I love the old movie halls in Guwahati like Apsara, Anuradha or Vandana. They were halls of character and fading, grubby and grimy of interiors or exteriors. And we sure never noticed them as generations of school boys playing hooky and couples lost to all else but each other found comfort and security and sanctity within the dark pavilions of big screen dreams. When I had come back four years ago, the tickets cost the same as they did when I had left, a nice twelve rupees fifty paise, to my great happiness. The blacker would sell scalped balcony tickets at twenty rupees, when the same tickets in Delhi or Mumbai would cost a hundred and fifty rupees at regular prices. The tickets grew costlier, but the upholstery didn’t get cleaner or the air-conditioners start working. The floor was still slimy and slippery with the debris of previous shows, but people still remember and still come to form huge queues for new releases. I wonder, if any of these will be around when I next see this city?

There is so much else to say, but so little time or space to say it in. A lot of us are leaving the shores of the home country, some with secret hopes of never returning, others with hopes of returning which might not get realised. Most of us are leaving, chasing dreams and grabbing reality, materialism and, of course, success. And as we all pack our bags, apply to foreign universities and rave and rant about visa problems, I wonder how many of us are thinking about this city of ours which has nurtured us and which perhaps has need of us in these changing times.

Perhaps, we need to think of our returns as much as we think of our departures, from this city of ours, Guwahati.