Township tales

 Township tales

Until age 21, I lived in a street that was narrow, dirty, chaotic, and pulsating. I thought this is how the world looked like. A brief stay in Ahemdabad showed how orderly the world beyond my hometown is. Incessant travel did not allow me to enjoy order around me as I was never at home. The home was anyways just me then. 

I got married soon and took up a job in Baroda (now Vadodara). Initially, I stayed with my brother in Sayajiganj, the heart of Baroda. Then the company offered me accommodation in the township, about 8 km from the main city. This is where I came to know how orderly life looks like for the first time in my life.

Townships are what we now called a 'gated community. More so in the government sectors, big companies set up townships to extend better quality of life to their employees. 

The township where we stayed was like a toy set of children, all neat, tidy, and handy. Houses fell under different categories but we were happy with what we got. The lawn was always mawed, roads swept clean twice a day, and transport available to go to work as well as to the town for recreation. 

There was a club, a swimming pool, and a weekly movie on a community garden where you bought your own popcorn and a mat to spread on the ground. 

For my wife and me, life expanded during our township stay. We purchased a scooter first, then a 1980 vintage Ambassador car that our children christened as Herby based on a movie of that name. We booked a house in a nearby society. Both our girls were born in a nursing home in the town, 8 km down the road. 

There was an unwritten but organized social protocol because many levels of company employees lived next to each other or nearby. There were all kinds of gatherings, pujas, birthdays, wedding anniversary and so on. Wives gossiped about the promotion and pay of husbands while husbands enjoyed their tipple. 

The times were easy on us. I came home from work at 5 pm, and took our children, and those of our neighbor's to the swimming pool. It was not uncommon to ride our little scooter to the town late in the evening for dinner or a movie. Baroda was a safe haven for people with almost no crime. 

I often watched my elder daughter with two of her friends walking to a school on the road where there was no traffic, watched them riding bicycles and playing hide and seek with the joy of flying birds.

All good things come to an end as they say. One rainy afternoon in July, we said farewell to this safe haven and moved eastward to Calcutta. 

Middleton street was waiting for us with charm and chaos.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Diary of an insomniac

Diary of an insomniac     It is 1 am in the night. Most FM radio stations are off the air. My eyes are tired of reading. Watching TV is not recommended for insomnia. I am debating in my mind the options of midnight snacks. As of yet, there are no signs of sleep.   I open the window of my bedroom. Sea breeze floods my lungs with the salty air. I watch a long raw of ships anchored on the horizon i n the moonlit white night,  They are lighted like the Christmas trees. Our building is shrouded in silence that pervades the world around us after 1 a.m. A faint laughter waffles in from the railway colony across the street, a family enjoying the late-night movie perhaps.   I step out of my bedroom and stare silently at the turret of the St. Anne’s church in our backyard. The relentlessly punctual chime of the church wakes me up every day at 5.30 am. It’s only a few hours from now.   On impulse, I step out of the flat and take the elevator down. One of the two, nigh...
Read more

Wanderlust 2021

Wanderlust 2021  I am blessed with wanderlust from my boyhood. An elderly aunt of mine took me on my first train journey to Mumbai was when I was 11. We arrived on a gloomy, rainy day in 1962. A war was simmering with China. Shammi Kapoor’s all-time hit film ‘Professor’ was running to a packed house at Novelty in Grant road where we stayed.  As we disembarked from Saurashtra Mail, I had no way of knowing that this travel will turn into a lifelong wanderlust for me, that an old aunt with whom I came I would soon lose to cancer.  Life restricted my boyhood wanderlust to places around my small hometown, a cycle trip to a dam nearby, a family picnic by camel cart to a distant park or temple. The farthest travel from home in my memory was to Rajkot, mere 50 miles in 1965 when Pakistan tried bombing our hometown and failed miserably.  These outings had sown seeds to see more, dream more, travel more, choose a path of unending journey. At 18, I traveled to Mumbai with two ...
Read more

Weekend woes

  Weekend woes Friday   Mumbai weekends bear the character of its own, like everything else. Friday morning is when it begins. Everyone at work drifts in a bit slower than normal. Their gait announces whiff of freedom from the tyranny of the week. The coffee machine whirs slowly and bears witness of the gossip that gets louder.   Friday dressing transforms lobby and corridors into riots of colors as opposed to mournful whites and blacks. Menus of new eateries fly thick and fast over the intranet. By 12 pm, hoards of office goers exit for a liquid lunch that ends at 3 pm.   Bars in and around offices fill up by 6 pm and are three layers thick. Drinks are consumed in rapid-fire rounds as if to drown all trials and tribulations of the week. Married members of the gang have their eyes on the clock to catch 7.30 pm Borivali fast. Home beacons to them. Those adventurous enough to stay back begin to order paneer or chicken tikka masala and cheese naan.  Saturday Saturd...
Read more