The migrant pitches a tent and that is home. My parents found themselves uprooted from their homes in Pakistan in 1947, and I grew up with questions of belongingness — where are you from, which village. But I had no village and my origins were the collateral in a bitter quarrel between nations. In a sense, a novel too has to pitch a tent in a setting. Its characters, even as they steam out of the author’s head, do take some of their hues from the town or country where they materialise. In fact, the setting itself can become a character, as I think it does for me. And just as I made homes, putting down the backpack of my years in one town and then another as life rolled on, so did my novels, though in a slightly jumbled sequence — from Patiala where I grew up, to Ludhiana where I was born and now Chandigarh, which is finally home.

The ambience of The Patiala Quartet is one of a laid-back languor, while Remember to Forget unfolds in Ludhiana, where a persistent tak-a-tak-tak sound of industrial machines in the background charges the atmosphere with survival and endeavour. Chandigarh is marked by a nascent modernity.

In Chandigarh, the contest for belonging does not even begin. It is a city that sprang up from lines drawn on an architect’s drawing board. “The undulating landscape, with sashaying wheat fields, stretched all the way to the Himalayan foothills in the distance and was a clean slate for architects to draw the contours of a city and its skyline. Corbusier, with crayon in hand, had sketched a grid of sectors based on some calculations done in Spain between 1929 and 1949 and a geometry of roads based on the stride of a man, horse or ox and subsequently adapted to mechanical speeds.” (From Thheka Tales – A Novel ). And therefore, in a broad sense, everyone is a migrant in Chandigarh — from the engineers who first came to build the city, to the labourers who worked at the construction sites, from the original settlers who bought land in a place where there were yet no houses, to those others who hesitated and later wished they had not, because it soon became a moment lost.

It is a city that is only three years older to me, a sibling, and I have shared with it my childhood and youth. As a little girl I drove into town with my parents in the late ’50s and experienced the excitement of encountering untrammelled vistas — wide roads and an occasional car, lots of trees and very few buildings, and none of them disturbing the poetry of the mountains in the background. Of course, nostalgia does tend to dress the past in swathes of gossamer but then a new beginning of this magnitude is bound to have an epical quality to it, a grand romance. And it is this yeti footprint that I use as an entry point into my narrative in Thheka Tales – A Novel .

Chandigarh was young once when I was young, even though it was axiomatically referred to as a retired city (City of grey beards and green hedges, the late Khushwant Singh had called it). But there the analogy ends. I acquired grey hair and wrinkles and the odd hair on my chin as time elapsed but, paradoxically enough, Chandigarh became younger as it grew older. The city today bristles with signs of youth, shopping malls, many spenders, speeding motorcars. There are now frayed tempers at traffic lights, harried pedestrians helplessly waiting their turn, lego-like structures pointing fingers at the sky on the fringes of the city. I will have to admit that when the city went from being somnolent and silent to busy and boisterous, when Madhya Marg went from one car in 15 minutes to 15 cars a minute and the numbers ever growing, it felt like an outrage and an intrusion of the kind that first settlers feel when the initial boatload of new migrants arrives. Chandigarh is younger today certainly, but not prettier. And it is not the city that I knew. However, the minute one accepts this as the inevitable signature of time, it becomes easier to absorb the changes.

After the first angry flush of a sense of defiled ownership has worn off, and adjustments are made with a bit of a push and a shove, it becomes possible to go back to that itinerant state of mind, which allows an author to journey into imagined worlds, using the fixity of home as the springboard.

Once the troublesome question of ‘home’ has been settled, it becomes possible to amble along the walkway beside the Sukhna Lake, amidst the many walkers and joggers, to absorb the geometry of the city on one side and the zigzag lines of the mountains on the other, and then to let these contraries reflect in the world that is conjured up as a result of the amalgam.

(In this monthly column, authors chronicle the cities they call home.)

Neel Kamal Puri is the author of The Patiala Quartet and Remember to Forget

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW