Tag: Samprati Pani

Windows to the city

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I’ve been thinking about windows. Since I moved cities, I’ve been thinking about windows. And looking at and through them. Through this looking, I move forward with time, sometimes attempt to hold it still, and at other times, let it take me elsewhere, to a time that has passed or is perhaps waiting for me. Some windows and their views remind me of other windows in other places, including windows that live in books and films, all real because of the feelings they evoke and the meanings they reveal or don’t. I write this piece as live in a new city, with curiosity and hesitation, looking at it through its windows and through the other windows these open up.

The Years

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I know it is weird to divide my almost three decades in the city into before, during, not-quite-over, and after the pandemic, but I find myself increasingly slicing and muddling my life into these time frames. Conversations, memories, friendships, the logbook of losses, mood swings, even dreams, appear to be structured by these frames. This piece reflects on my years in the city and grapples with the relationship between longing and loss, forgetting and remembering, even as I know well that this relationship is unstable and contradictory and can never be resolved. This relationship does not dwell in the realm of my imagination. I live and feel it, and I will forever draw and redraw its contours and trajectories, mourning the impossibility of returning to that which is lost, and often not knowing what it is that I long for. There is no cure for this affliction.

Beyond flânerie: expanding the horizons of walking, part I

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I have a certain discomfort with the realization that the literature on walking, whether in the form of narratives, fiction, histories, or manifestos, is overwhelming from a Western context. Moreover, this body of literature often conceptualizes walking as intrinsically subversive, desirable, special, and/or worthy of emulation. This discomfort has led me to seek out books on walking in non-Western contexts, especially South Asian. The idea behind this is not to uncover more ‘authentic’ modes of walking but rather to understand the situatedness of walking in particular kinds of places, people, and practices. It is instead to draw attention to and learn from ways of walking that don’t neatly fall into the categories most overrepresented in the literature on walking: flâneuring, loitering, leisure, an art form, an experiment. This listicle of six books, written in two parts, is a tiny fragment from my archive of books on walking in various Indian contexts. 

Meeting place

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Is love and concern for writing and for cities enough to continuously create, manage, steer, and run something? And what is this ‘something’? The blog is just the form, but what is it that I am, we are, making? Is it an archive that holds together a scatter of words woven into stories connecting space–times? Is it a process of collaborative thinking and doing? Is it a ‘meeting place’, much like the street corner, where ideas, people, and relationships intersect, partly by intentionality and partly by chance?

Walk economy

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Far from disappearing, pedlars have a pervasive presence in cities—around busy intersections such as traffic signals, metro stations, tourist spots, bus terminals, railway stations, religious places, public parks and monuments; within residential localities, neighbourhood markets and industrial areas; outside office complexes, educational institutions, hospitals, shopping centres and even malls and supermarkets. They ply an entire gamut of trades from knife-sharpening, shoe polishing, miracle cures and ear-cleaning to providing chai and snacks, as also a wide range of commodities. This essay is a response to the images captured by Gopal in his city Mumbai, from the location of my interest as an anthropologist in forms of walking in the city as well as the associational life of streets around the locus of economic activities.

The city, in love

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The two pieces included in this post are part of a book in progress that Sailen is writing, comprising a series of Odia short stories set in Bhubaneswar. The stories are around the theme of ephemeral and routine encounters of love, or its possibility, located in places that serve as public and private landmarks of everyday life in the city.

Talking places

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Can the new be experienced in all its dizzying and excessive newness, or do we continuously fall back on the crutches of familiarity, no matter how inept or even obsolete? Is it inevitable that we carry the burdens—of our familiar selves, homes and not-quite-homes, cities and lives—when we walk the path that can lead anywhere because we haven’t walked it ever before?

A view from across the river 

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On the face of it, Patparganj’s apartments appear to be small islands, each holding together a set of people with a shared social background. And there are apartment dwellers, who manage to unlook and avoid the sea of life the islands are surrounded by, through the blinkers of their class and aspirations, shopping for vegetables and eating street food from the evasive confines of their cars or seeking the ‘happening city’ elsewhere. Yet, life here, as I have come to experience over the years, does not inevitably have to be one of isolated living confined to the apartments. 

Hunny ka chuha

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If it is indeed the same chuha, it is back with a vengeance. Its earlier avatar was well behaved. It would stealthily come out at night after Hunny went to sleep and would rarely leave telltale signs of its dinner, except sometimes half-eaten bananas. This one does acrobatics through all times of the day, leaping over masala jars and knocking them off, smashing Rooafza bottles, scurrying over the bookshelves, chomping on electricity bills and doing cartwheels on the sofa. It eats everything … potatoes, lids of Tupperware boxes, newspapers, phone chargers, books and unopened biscuit packets—you name it! It prefers to shit on the bed or on freshly laundered clothes. And it is BIG.

Smell and the City III

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What is it about the olfactory sense that seems to hint at absences as much as presences? Why does one recollect so many peripheral details about ‘that particular smell’ but not quite the odour itself? Perhaps smell forms the base, the foundation, for our sensory memories, sending out tentacles into visions, hearings, giving then nourishment, yet ultimately laying hidden, subterranean. It is only when, for some reason, one does not use a particular sense organ that one gains faculties related to the others. This seems especially true for the sense of smell.

Maya’s Curse

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‘So you want to know who Maya is?’ he breaks the awkward silence. Trying not to look frightened, she clears her throat and manages to mumble a ‘Yes’. ‘The problem with you youngsters is that you don’t know the stories that rule this city. Never mind … you’re probably the only one of these people dying to meet me who’s not interested in some quick-fix solution for health, prosperity or love. You may not be aware, but you’ve come searching for a story … and I’d love to tell it … it’s been such a long while since I've told a story. But I have a condition.’ ‘What?’ she asks. ‘You cannot interrupt my storytelling and you cannot ask any questions after I’m done.’