exiles and erasures blue is the urban colour of darkness

8/3/2019 Exiles and Erasures Blue is the Urban Colour of Darkness

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Exiles and Erasures Blue is the urban colour of darkness

Cities are strange creatures. They

have lives of their own. The lives

which we love to call ‘spirit’. Bombay

(oh, how much I try to call it Mumbai

and stop when it reminds me of that goon who

loves to beat the poor cabbies from the north!)

has one and so does Delhi. Take the names of

two different cities, and the ensuing images,

impressions and emotions are never the same.

Read media stories and you would know that

Delhi has its rustic, aggressive and all into your

face pomp, Bombay is always on the move, a

city that never sleeps whereas Bangalore

chooses to live a laid-back life of the elderly.

The spirits of the cities have their own pas-

times as well. They love to play strange games

with those who inhabit them. They seduce the

ones with filled pockets and shiny eyes; they

caress the ones peeping inside the windows of

brilliantly lit shops and scoff at the ones wait-

ing for them back in the parking lot. The

descend upon the ones meandering through

the streets bathed in that bluish glow emanat-

ing out of all the neon-light hoardings and

pounce upon the ones who have put up those

signs in the first place. The cities, and their

spirits, are apparently far more important than

those who are erased from its imagery. These

are the people who have been evicted from

their small hamlets stuck in different corners

of India to build these cities.

These ‘people in the parking lot’ have an

image of the cities too. They have always had

their own tales to tell, even if not many cared to

record those gloomy, dark stories. Visit any

part of the Indian countryside and you would

know that Calcutta (Kolakata now) is not mere-

ly the name of a city. It is rather another word

for the painful longings for those who disap-

peared in search of mere survival. Listen to the

songs of women left behind in those villages

and you would know that the trains are not

merely a mode of transport; they are also the

‘other women’ separating them from their hus-

bands, their children and their lives.

No one wanted this separation but the

cities. They needed these people for construct-

ing all the buildings they needed, for laying all

the roads linking those buildings and for all

other jobs that came in between. The only way

the cities could have got these people was by

snatching them from their distant villages. So

they ensured that the villages had nothing to

BY

SAMAR




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offer to the people. Right from the bare mini-

mum necessities of life like food to small joys

of life like entertainment, the cities stole every-

thing from them. Social structure of the vil-

lages, with a feudal lording over the lives of thepeople, came handy for the cities. It provided

the final push for the exodus. The people left in

search of food, freedom, and future.

The villages, however, remained the same.

Darkness descends upon these villages in

much the same way it did before the exodus. It

retains its original colour, the unidentifiable

but easily marked colour of darkness. It is

something close to black but is not beautiful,

however much we want it to be.

The darkness is not the same in the cities.

The hoardings, the street lights, and the shops

all of them challenge the darkness. They get

into action as soon as the sky turns orange in

the evenings and start filling the streets (not

the backyards though) with that ubiquitouscolour. Blue is the colour of darkness in the

cities of today.

This blue darkness then starts enveloping

those who are not fortunate enough to be a

permanent part of this brightly lit darkness. All

the blinding lights of high masts fail to reach

the underneath of the flyovers sheltering hun-

dreds of thousands from those stretches of

darkness in remote India. Their darkness does

not change into that sensuous blue defining

the lives of those they serve.

They are the refugees, the almost ‘illegal’

immigrants to their own city. They are the part

of cities’ underbelly, a space of thriving busi-

nesses and profits even if it is unrecognized.

There, definitely, are extreme risks as well, butthen the clientele for the risks is different from

that of the profits. The profits go the people

with a right to passage to the spaces of the

power while the risks are all a part of the fate

of the poor.

They are not brash, rowdy or the new

‘horny’ (they do not keep honking even on

empty roads) even if they live in Delhi. They

definitely do not sleep but not out of their

choice even if they live in Bombay. I am afraid

that they cannot afford to live a leisurely life of

the retirees Bangalore is known for is a fact

that does not require even a mention.

Not that these people are unimportant or

immaterial to the seductive cities they live in.

Quite on the contrary, they are the people who

run them. They make all the leisurely pursuits

possible. They are the people who bring city’s

children back from school, walk dogs, drive

cars, buy the groceries and also deliver them,

clean houses and who cook our foods. These

are the people who stay up all night at the

doors of our gated colonies so that we can

sleep peacefully. In short, they are the people

who are so integral and crucial to the very

basic organization of our lives that we cannot

imagine surviving even a single day of our lives

without them.

They are also the ones who organize our

happiness. They are the ones who are respon-

sible for home-delivery of happiness as a pop-

ular advertisement slogan screams out of the

screens of our LCDs. They are the ones who

carry the ornamental lights on their heads dur-

ing marriage processions and exist in that

proverbial and prophetic state of darkness

under the lamp. They are the people who build

our homes once we are able to buy one. They

are the ones who first inhabit those upcoming

and incomplete structures of concrete till it is

worth moving in, and are then thrown away

unceremoniously even before the first truck

from the thousands of movers and packers

companies honk in front of these ‘houses’. Far

more than all this, they are the people, as a

recent news story pointed out, who form the

bulk of the housekeeping staff even in five star




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hotels of our country. They are the ones who

keep the Malls that are mauling their own life

all glittery and shiny so that India can sustain

its claims of a country on the rise.

They are yet not taken notice of. Their lives,

like their work, do not get celebrated in the

urban imageries. They remain nameless, face-

less and nonexistent appendages to our lives

not worth of finding a space of their own in the

urban imagery.

I would not have minded the cities’ disre-

gard for them as this is what the creatures

born out of extraction of labour of others are

known for. I have seen rich kids of the cities

calling back home in disbelief when they first

encounter the deep interiors of the mofussil

India. I have seen that disbelief getting trans-

formed into stupid exclamations like ‘Dad, this

place is so far removed from reality’!

What bothers me is that sense of resigna-

tion writ large on the faces of these people, the

real heroes and heroines. After all, the mofussil

women did remember Calcutta even while hat-

ing it; they did nurse anger towards the train

that would snatch their families away and the

system that permitted it. Their songs

announced loud and clear that they did never

give up, they kept waiting for the eventual

return of their loved ones. Their tales of sorrow

ensured that the imageries of the times were

not usurped by just one side, that even if quite

feeble there was a resistance. The resistance,

in turn, ensured that there were dreams and

desires that there was hope.

The hope meant the dreams of a house of

their own, a life of dignity and a future for their

children, at least. The hope meant that irre-

pressible longing for the ‘return’ to their vil-

lages sans the miseries. They believed in the

promises made to them. They believed that the

political and administrative process would

reclaim their villages from their near-perennial

state of despair.

They believed that one day their villages

would be like those in the films, lush green

fields connected by the city with a road as

good as it can get. These hopes gave them the

reasons to cling on, to fight and to stay put in

the city. These hopes gave them the courage to

sing their own songs.

They kept on visiting their villages year

after year, staying back for months at a go and

realized that nothing was changing. Everything

was the same, the dilapidated huts, dry fields

and devastated lives. Only thing that showed

some signs of improvement was the life of the

feudal, something not very pleasant for these

hapless poor. They started losing their hopes,

their dream to return.

The things were becoming absolutely clear.

Far from letting them chase their dreams, the

cities were not even ready to accept them and

they were not left with any place to go back to.

Their villages were dying with all the songs cel-

ebrating them. They stopped discussing the

distress that was slowly engulfing their lives.

All that betrayed their feelings was that fateful

state of abandon written on their faces. Their

silence was screaming that they were not left

with much to look forward to.

These are the signs that the darkness they

have dreamt to escape from has returned to

them. It is descending upon their memories,

their psyches and their lives like never before.

That they are not only missing from the neon-

light hoardings, from the bars, from the malls

but from their own imagination too.

This time there remains nothing but anger

that is simmering within and is waiting to

acquire forms. I am afraid that this anger

would be of a decisive kind for getting exiled

from material things is sad and painful, but

getting erased from imagery is something no

community can survive with.

Remember that when they were fighting

with darkness last time, there were well-lit

cities to offer them some hope. Now, they

know that it was not their light. Worse enough,

this darkness is a new darkness. It is blue, it is

seductive.UTS’

exiles and erasures blue is the urban colour of darkness

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